As our Market Dominance Guys continue this road trip book signing tour with Helen Fanucci, Chris emphasizes the significance of practicing sales conversations in order to become a high-performance salesperson, with the script being the key to unleashing creativity in sales. Helen tells the story of her experience cold-calling using ConnectAndSell, a script, and how it affected her Fitbit. Additionally, Chris talks about the energy transfer that takes place in a sales conversation, and how BDRs need to provide energy but also listen carefully to the emotional response of the prospect. Helen shares her experience of working with a coach and learning from the best in the world to improve her sales skills, and the importance of being objective about oneself to become a great salesperson. This episode provides valuable insights on how to engage customers effectively to build lasting relationships. As Chris says, “You are a performance athlete with your voice. That’s what you are. That’s what you have to work with.” Join us for this episode, “What Do a Fitbit and Surfboard Have in Common with Cold Calling?”

About Our Guest

Helen Fanucci, Transformational Sales Leader at Microsoft is the author of Love Your Team: A Survival Guide for Sales Managers in a Hybrid World.

Helen’s book is available on Amazon:

LOVE YOUR TEAM A SURVIVAL GUIDE for Sales Managers in a Hybrid World
Helen Fanucci on LinkedIn

Corey and Chris’ book is also available on Amazon:

Market Dominance: A Conversation With ChatGPT

Corey Frank on LinkedIn
Chris Beall on LinkedIn
ConnectAndSell
Branch49

 

 

Full episode transcript below:

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Helen Fanucci (00:01):

So that’s what I got. Any questions or Corey? Anything that, 

Corey Frank(00:05):

Well, I want to go back to the cold call. 

Helen Fanucci (00:07):

Alrighty, let’s go for it. 

Chris Beall (00:09):

Me too. Me too. I like that. 

Corey Frank(00:11):

Chris, since you and Helen originally met, there was no, I think you met at a conference where it was very clear that this person was the ConnectAndSell.

Helen Fanucci (00:22):

Yeah. 

Corey Frank(00:22):

And that was what, four years 

Helen Fanucci (00:24):

Ago almost? Yeah. 

Corey Frank(00:25):

So from a sales cycle, Chris, what I’m looking for is like the forecast. Did you keep that? You’re married now and you’re most of the time in the same household when you’re not traveling. But it took until last week to close the deal for her to actually use ConnectAndSell. 

Chris Beall (00:43):

Well, I’ve prioritized which deal I was trying to close. Oh see. And I did a pretty good job on the first deal. I believe I was two days into the sales cycle and did okay on what she calls the proposition and I call it proposal. I see. So that one I prioritized. It brings up a good point though, and b2b. So this isn’t a B2B sale, although it kind of is. I mean in a way because she was calling us as Microsoft, right? And Microsoft’s not the easiest company in the world to get to do business with you. I went to Fargo, North Dakota and a December day a few years ago thinking we were going to get a test drive, a free test, drive up Microsoft. After seven hours there we walked out and had a nice dinner after the weirdest, coldest, slipperiest, Uber ride I’ve ever been on. 

Chris Beall (01:31):

And a truck that we had to climb up into and no test drive. So here we are. You want to see a long sales cycle. That was quite a while ago. Yeah, that’s the Microsoft sales cycle. But when b2b, the replacement cycle for pretty much everything is three years. That’s kind of like if you bought one, whatever it is, you’re not going to buy another one of those for three years. Think about it. You’re in a company, you’re the one who wants X, Y, or Z to help the company do its thing better. Are you going to come back the next quarter to your board, to the committee and say, oh, just kidding, that thing that we just bought X that out. Let’s get a different one. Right? Doesn’t go like that. You might do that as a consumer on occasion, but think of it more like buying a car as a consumer. 

Chris Beall (02:18):

You’re probably going to keep the car for three years, four years, or in my case 24 years with my big red Ford excursion, which Helen thinks is a bit of an eyesore and dangerous. Other than that, it’s all right. So think of it as a three year cycle. Now, the consideration cycle for a product, a category of product is about a quarter. So the products that give you intent, like Bombora 6 cents, and I guess LinkedIn’s doing it now and ZoomInfo is doing it, they actually have their intent window generally set at seven days. That is if you learn that a company is spiking in looking at a particular category, you got seven days to get in there according to experts who sell that stuff. So think about that, how tough that would be. So you start calling on day one, how long is it going to take before you actually have a conversation with somebody and at some point they’re out of cycle. 

Chris Beall (03:13):

So when you look at how much of your market, your ideal customer profile, your total addressable market, how much of it in the perfect case is in market this quarter? It’s math, one quarter out of three years, which is 12 quarters. So one 12 of your market, say you have the perfect list, awesome list. Every single person on that list is working for a company that needs your product eventually. A hundred percent. So what percentage of them need it this quarter and are going to even engage? Well, one 12. Can anybody do that math? So we got mathematicians in the group. They go far. So they are, yeah, exactly. Yeah, they came from somewhere. So that’s your actual addressable convertible engageable market. And you’ve got to engage early. So there’s this whole intent thing, by the way. Sounds great. But what you’re basically saying is, I want to be late. 

Chris Beall (04:10):

I want to be late with no relationship instead of early with a relationship. That’s what you’re actually saying. And yeah, if you can close deals in two days like I did, then you can maybe afford to be late. But this is what really modern B2B is all about, is forming trust relationships over time that can turn into stuff. So Helen had a conversation with somebody, a pretty big company, and this somebody is a modestly big somebody and it’s conversation she had on Monday using connect and sell. And that conversation may or may not lead anywhere for Microsoft in the next quarter, but that relationship is durable and the trust within that relationship’s durable and the digital channel she opened to be able to send that email that they’ll actually answer is durable. And the opportunity to reach out LinkedIn and actually have it not treated as modern spam, which LinkedIn as invites have just become another form of mechanized spam as the bots take over. I mean Corey and I use bots to write books because books frankly are ethically harmless, but LinkedIn invites maybe not so much. So that’s fascinating to me. And when you think about somebody of first stature pushing that butt and having that conversation, she might have been, were you a little nervous? 

Helen Fanucci (05:28):

Oh my gosh, I think it is the best diet program around. Cause there going my Fitbits zones are going, yeah, I was 

Corey Frank(05:37):

Microsoft, you’re an executive at Microsoft Macon Cole call. All you had to say is this is Helen Fucci with Microsoft. And they’ve probably said, well how much time can I have with you? Wonderful. Right? I imagine because that’s, it’s what how you cold call as an executive with Microsoft is probably completely different than what we experience us mere mordo cool 

Chris Beall (06:00):

College. Correct. Okay. Okay. I was listening cause I do that and like a little mouse going around the house. Listen, Helen’s having a conversation and I can tell you everything is to what you guys are experiencing when you ambush another human being. They are not prepared to process information about who you are. They’re not. They’re only capable of processing this information. Am I going to learn something in the next half, second to two seconds that will allow me to get off this phone call with my self image intact? That is what they’re processing who you are. That’s why you can’t take it personally because you’re not a person, you’re just an ambusher at that point. Doesn’t matter. You could be Satya Naela, say you got a phone call, Hey, this is Satya Nadela from Microsoft. Oh yeah, right. Saja, how’s hanging, right? I don’t think so. That’s not what’s going to happen. So it’s a very interesting world that you guys live in. It’s the most human part of sales where you’re right at the edge of somebody being just an animal, a scared animal and an actual human being that you can speak with. And so 

Sean Snyder (07:13):

I have a two part question. So on your last podcast, obviously you have a very unique voice and so to you, Helen question for you as well, but it said there was a transfer of energy taking place on the call. Yeah. Right. So how would you suggest for people not to be like a second grade, Chris Beal or via third grade, Corey, Frank or Helen on the call. And then the second question was to Helen, what need to corporate at Microsoft? So just important for people to be, 

Chris Beall (07:48):

Wow, I was going to sell the actual package being a second break. Chris, be discount. You wouldn’t believe because I think that’s a hot product Anybody wants to buy that you just shoot me a note, sec sec. Second rate. I can even do second, right? I can do second rate Chris be.com. That’s my new business. It is interesting, the energy transfer thing. I don’t know who here has ever worked with animals. I used to work with horses and yeah, dogs, goats, cattle, whatever. And working with small children is the same kind of thing. B. Yeah, BDRs, it’s like fishing for big fish on very, very light line that can break real easy. So you have to provide the tension, but you can’t overwhelm the fish because you’ll break the blunt and they’ll swim away. So you need to provide energy, but you need to listen really, really carefully for the emotional response. 

Chris Beall (08:46):

You have to feel it. Do I go up a little bit or do I mean up in energy or down a little bit? And you’ll have your natural energy state that you are in which you flow energy to others. And you know what it is by the time you become an adult. Exactly. When I interact with somebody for the first time, do I feel like I’m actually providing the energy in the conversation or do I tend to be riding their way? So when you’re in sales conversations and especially cold calls, but discovery and everything else, you’ve got to primarily number one, pay attention to your responsibility to keep that energy tension there, but not break the line. And that is the essence of sales. If you can do that, it’s actually impossible to fail. You cannot fail in sales if you can do that, but you have to pay attention. 

Chris Beall (09:38):

And that requires being a little bit objective about yourself, which is the essence of becoming a great salesperson is becoming objective types like Helen was having these conversations. Well, we’re a couple of kind of business nerds. We sit around and talk about ’em in the hot tub. It’s like we were sitting in the hot tub last night and we’re talking about the dynamics of these sales conversations and she’s learning learning. What about this? What about that? What about that? She’s taking an objective view of herself even though in the performance we can’t in the moment. We have to be subjective. We have to just be human, we be very reactive. But in the post thinking about it and discussing it, we have to try to raise our objectivity. When you’re doing that, always think of this, when I look at it from an energy transfer perspective, where is the energy going? And was I doing my job of keeping that little bit of tension on the line so that it’s going somewhere but not forcing it and break? And I think that’s actually part of every culture is like, are you participating or are you trying to force things to happen? If you’re trying to force things to happen, they’ll break. 

Helen Fanucci (10:49):

Well, the other thing I would say about the cold call too is that I am, I know I don’t know anything. So I happen to be married to Chris who knows a lot. I have Cheryl Turner, one of the best in the world, who is listening in and coaching me. And so even on my follow up email to the guy I talked to on Monday, I sent him an email and then I sent it to Cheryl and I said, do you have any feedback for me? Because I don’t assume, even though I’ve written zillions of emails in my life, that I’m doing it in a way that’s most impactful. And I know that she and Chris know the science of engagement, particularly with a stranger that I just talked to on the phone. So I’m always asking questions and I don’t assume I know much of anything. Although I would do also give my observations like, well, why about this Chris? I can see why people don’t want to do it. Why don’t you just have the SDRs it because it’s such a long time to wait in between calls. And she goes, well, everyone does their own thing in between calls. I go, well, I’m not an emotional skate that I can do that. Maybe other people can work in between calls while their machine’s going, but I can’t. Not yet. Anyway, 

Chris Beall (12:14):

So well this is a great example. Helen gave you all what I think is the best piece of advice ever, ever, which is, and what you’re doing here, it’s always learned, learn broadly and don’t assume that because something is something you’re supposed to already know how to talk to somebody in a certain circumstance that you actually know of. There’s always somebody to go to. There’s always something to learn from. And having somebody observe, like Cheryl was observing and listening, Helen didn’t know I was listening because I’m just like, if it come right around the edge of the kitchen, I can actually hear through the door there. But having somebody coach you and listen to you helps you become objective and high performance requires objectivity, and then it requires eria and then it requires objectivity and then it requires immersion. Anybody here play any sports? Anybody been coached? 

Chris Beall (13:07):

This is the nature of the coaching relationship. You go out and you perform. And there’s two kinds of coaching was coaching in practice, and then there’s coaching that has to do with being under pressure in the game. And some people can get to a certain level in practice, but nobody can become great unless they can become objective about how they perform in the game under pressure in our game, it’s our voice that breaks down, voice breaks down first, it gets tight, get a little higher. Our dynamic range goes down and we might get a little bit more forceful than we need to be. Some people also get timid out under pressure in our game. Our voice breaks down under pressure. In golf, your putting stroke breaks down. It gets weird and tight. That’s what happens. We get weird and tight under pressure. So having your coach listen to that and then go back over a recording and then this is the real key. 

Chris Beall (14:06):

And then repeat that exact thing you are trying to say until the muscles get used to it. In sales, we have to wrap the musculature of our tongues, of our throats, of our breathing around this art that we are engaging in. So if I have an example, I probably used it on a podcast once, I’ll use it again here. Years and years ago, 1973 in February, I decided with a friend after long consideration that involved some beer that we would get on the train in niga and we would go down on Feil del Pacifico and take, you know, go over to Mexico City and get somehow up onto this mountain and climb this mountain. So there’s two mountains that we were going to climb. They’re in a national park. I could say one of them, I could actually say it after the third time. But the other one I kept reading it. 

Chris Beall (15:04):

P O P O C A T P T E P, tl. I couldn’t say it. So I finally said to myself, I will be damped if I am going to climb a 17,882 foot mountain or whatever the Darden thing is with volcanic stuff coming out of it if I can’t say its name. So stood in front of a mirror and then decided I didn’t like how I looked. So I went outside and it stood all alone outside in nature and I repeated the name over and over and over until I could say, P, you have to get there with every single word. This is why we’re scripted. This is why we do screenplays. This is why you practice these. It’s not enough to read ’em. You have to practice them to the point where it’s like, okay, I’m a tennis player, I’m at the net, the ball’s going over here. 

Chris Beall (15:58):

I don’t think, right? I’ve got to be able to go over it and hit that backhand ball. I have to be able to do it because I’ve done it hundreds of times in practice. I think a lot of people in sales don’t get that. You are a performance athlete with your voice. That’s what you are. That’s what you have to work with. And you need to practice not at the big level. You need to practice at the little level and be okay with learning how to say something you say over and over in a way that keeps that energy flow and that allows you to relax frankly. Because otherwise you’re going to be tight and it comes out in your voice. So that’s what scripts are for. We have an entire episode on it, but that’s what they’re for. And that’s why scripting is the key to unleashing creativity in sales because the creativity is around the energy flow. 

Chris Beall (16:50):

The energy flow lives within the boundaries of script. Without a script, we don’t even know what we’re doing. Some people think I’m a very natural speaker, I can stand up in front of any group and talk about any topic. Trust me, every single thing I say has been practiced a lot. People wonder why a micro pr so I can trot around in the morning for two hours. Good things going on in my, yeah, everybody by the way, anybody in the audience, you want to learn something special, learn micro printing. Just send me a note. Two, 

Sean Snyder (17:22):

The performance athlete thinking the podcast, you a really good surfing analogy. You remember what it 

Chris Beall (17:31):

Was? Well, the script is the surfboard. Imagine you’re going to learn to surf, right? Oh, Corey did this once, right? He left Wisconsin and went to California and became a world-class surfer. That’s right. And you can tell he is got the body of a world-class surfer inside the body that he has now. It’s hiding in there. It’s all 

Corey Frank(17:55):

Funnies. Like you said, everything has been practiced over. 

Chris Beall (18:05):

So think about it. You’re going to go surf, right? You’re going to make your own surfboard. You’re out of your mind. That’s a hundred years of trial and error have gone into shaping surfboards. It is a non-trivial matter. Almost nothing works as a surfboard except an actual surfboard. And they have to be made correctly. So there are people who are called shapers and they shape surfboards. You as the salesperson and you’re going to make your own script. Are you out of your mind? There’s a hundred years of learning that has gone into what the next word might be and how you might say it in a way that works in this situation. You’re trying to help another human being. You’re trying to help them get to the point where they can start to listen at some point to the possibility of value. And you’ve got to kind of go through this path. 

Chris Beall (18:53):

And the path is like, well, you got to pop up on the surfboard. That’s your opener. You’ve got to get your balance and actually get the right part of it to be cutting into the wave. That’s the whatever that part is. We call it the 27 seconds. You got to kind of get into it. You’ve got to get the curiosity going. That’s when you’re actually moving on the wave and you’re feeling like, yeah, I kind of got this. I’m getting what’s going on in this particular ride. And then you’ve got to get off alive because I mean, what if it’s a big wave? It doesn’t want you to live. It kind of wants to pound you into the bottom and sort of see if you can still breathe. So you got to get off alive and ask for the meeting. So it’s very much like that. 

Chris Beall (19:33):

And the two features are, well, one is I got to have the surfboard. So who’s the surfer? It’s your voice. It’s your voice. That’s all you got. This is why cold calling is so much better as a thing to learn in sales than anything else because you put your voice under pressure. You put yourself under time pressure. You’ve normalized the beginning of the opening situation, which they’re afraid of you. So you are always starting from the same place. You know what to do. I call it compressing the diving board. It’s like you’re diving, you’re now, you’ve jumped, you’re the bottom of that compression. All that energy’s there from their fear. What are you going to do with their fear? It’s a gift to you. And you’re trying to give a gift to them, which is the gift of learning about something that might change their life. 

Chris Beall (20:19):

That’s your job is to hope, try do things that might let somebody overcome the situation you’ve put them in, which is ambushing them so that they could learn about something that could change their life. That’s the entirety of sales. There is nothing more to sales than trying to do that in the innovation economy. That’s why it’s everything’s almost, nobody wants to embrace innovations, but they don’t. So that’s your job is to help them go the state of reluctance, fear about something new to the possibility of learning. Not even the learning yet, just the possibility of learning. And the instrument that you do that with is the voice. The script is the thing you’re going to stand on that will reliably, it won’t ride the wave for you, but if you learn to ride it, you can make beautiful things happen. I think that analogy holds, we came up with it when we were in Australia and on January, February, 2020, I remember, cause I was rotting around Sydney, we were talking about this dark thing. And I still think it’s the best of the market. Dominant skies, analogies, script is the surfboard. Your voice is the surfer, and you’re not just going to stand up on the board. You’re going to have to learn to use your voice and stay in balance. 

Corey Frank(21:39):

So with that, when you were cold calling then Helen, how were Ed? Chris, we’re listening in one ear tied, but how was the latter calls versus the first calls? What did you notice is the difference from that? The muscle tension and the breathing and the quality of the calls. Fuck takes on a little bit of your journey? 

Helen Fanucci (22:02):

Yeah, so well, for one thing, I switched lists. So the first list were the more senior executives. I started there and I was more nervous that, and here I’m doing something new, but I also knew they were more senior and a lot of them, I got voicemail. I didn’t get voicemail, the system got voicemail that, so it was actually fewer conversations than I wanted to have. One of the guys I talked to was confused a little bit because I think he was afraid of hanging up on me because I sounded coherent and okay, but then it’s a cold call, so I gave him an out. But anyway, so I kind of navigated that in a okay way where I said, Hey, let me send something to you. I’ll follow up, blah, blah, blah. I think my voice was better on the second list, the second day, the second hour. Because one, I knew they were lower level people, even though they’re vice presidents and senior directors. They’re not chief HR person. So also I know that I need to practice the opener. I know I’m an interruption. 

Chris Beall (23:22):

You should hear her walking around the house doing this, by the way. It’s pretty funny. 

Helen Fanucci (23:25):

Yeah, I 

Chris Beall (23:25):

Know, 

Helen Fanucci (23:27):

I 

Chris Beall (23:27):

Know. I’m an interruption. 

Helen Fanucci (23:28):

And the other thing though that I will tell you I have great confidence in myself is navigating a call kind of on the spot because I have deep background, like a woman I talked to at one of our large accounts. She’s like, well, I’m not really the right person for this. You do this. I go, well, are you finding this? I was in a meeting with your c I o and I understand this to be true. Are you seeing that? And blah, blah, blah. And then she ended up by the end of the call offering to refer me to the right people that I should be speaking to. So then I said to Chris, I go, maybe it’s actually better to call lower level people and then have them help you get higher. Which is a strategy I learned as a sales rep early in my career for large account selling, was to do research at lower levels, find out the business issues and use that to navigate higher up. So that’s what one of the hot tub conversations was. What did you think about that idea, Chris? Oh yeah, that’s an effective strategy. So it was a different list and just that a little bit more confidence. But it does make me think it might be smarter call lower level people that you could actually speak to and navigate up. 

Chris Beall (24:51):

It gave me a new idea, which is funny. I’ve been at this now at Connect itself for a little while, right? Almost 12 years. And it hadn’t really occurred to me before that probably the best people to do follow ups are actually the account executives rather than the SDRs. And the reason is you have these three advantages that you’d be bringing in. One, you’re a new person, but you’re a new person with context, which is interesting. Secondly, you get to actually thank them for something, which is a great way to open a conversation, but it’s for something about someone else. So you’re exhibiting generosity by thanking them for speaking with your colleague who you esteem highly. So that is the next piece. And thirdly, they’re more likely to show up at the meeting because when they do agree to the meeting, they’re more likely to take it, but more likely to show up because they’ve agreed to the meeting with a peer. 

Chris Beall (25:43):

And it’s always a little bit tricky to know that you have an agreement with somebody that you haven’t established status alignment with. Oren talks about status alignment as one of the important things that you’ve got to get in a sales relationship, sales conversation. So we’re from Helen’s conversation and our post conversation, we’re actually going to try something at connect and sell. And all we have to do is just take one of the follow up lists and instead of having it called by the person who originally had the conversation, just have it called by one of our AEs. And it’s, it’s pretty simple, right? See what happens now we measure everything at connect and sell. I mean, it’s frightening when you, it’s, I’m an old physicist myself, so it’s even worse than mechanical engineers when it comes to measuring everything. And so we will just do that and then measure the results, get statistical significance, and see whether this hot tub idea turns into a new practice that then we can help our customers.

 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

In this episode of Market Dominance Guys, author Helen Fanucci joins Chrisand Corey. Helen suggests that when thinking about the first job, you should consider the industry you want to work in, as it can set you up for future success. For instance, sales tech is a great industry for those passionate about sales and technology, while cybersecurity is growing rapidly due to the increasing sophistication of hackers.

The importance of building your network is another crucial aspect of a successful career, as it can provide exposure to others’ work and broaden your horizons. Helen emphasizes the need to develop a point of view and post original content on LinkedIn to distinguish yourself.

Helen also stresses the need for continuous learning and growth in our role. By intentionally meeting people in other parts of the business and getting exposure to their work, one can learn and grow.

Join us for this episode, “Intentional Choices: Mapping Out Your Sales Career.”

About Our Guest

Helen Fanucci, Transformational Sales Leader at Microsoft is the author of Love Your Team: A Survival Guide for Sales Managers in a Hybrid World.

Links for this episode:

Helen Fanucci on LinkedIn

Corey Frank on LinkedIn

Chris Beall on LinkedIn

ConnectAndSell

Branch49

 

Full episode transcript below:

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(00:43):

The importance of building your network is another crucial aspect of a successful career because it can provide exposure to others’ work and broaden your horizons. Helen emphasizes the need to develop a point of view and post original content on LinkedIn to distinguish yourself. Helen also stresses the need for continuous learning and growth in our roles. By intentionally meeting people in other parts of the business and getting exposure to their work, we can all learn and grow. Join us for this episode, Intentional Choices; Mapping Out Your Sales Career.

Corey Frank (01:19):

Welcome to another episode of The Market Dominance Guys on tour, the roadshow episode with Corey Frank and of course, the sage of sales, prosperous prosperer, the Hawking of Hawking and the prophet of profit.

Chris Beall (01:34):

That’s it.

Corey Frank (01:35):

Right? Here we are at the HQ and the home base mothership of Branch 49 with our Branch 49 team on Taco Friday, not Taco Tuesday. We do not like alliteration. We’re against all kinds of alliteration here at Branch 49, so it’s Taco Friday and we are here with Miss Helen Fanucci and of course, the fetching spouse of the also famously fetching Tom Cruise of sales, I forgot that one that we talk about too, Chris Beall. Helen, of course as most folks know from our previous episode, is a Microsoft leader with 15 years of experience at Microsoft. Runs the customer success team 10 years over at Sun Microsystems and went to a little college called Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the degree in mechanical engineering. We’re pleased to have Ms. Fanucci here talk certainly about her most recent bestselling book, Love Your Team, and to impart her wisdom with some snide commentary from Chris Beall and of course myself here along the way. So with that, Helen, welcome to the roadshow edition of Market Dominance Guys.

Helen Fanucci (02:38):

Great. Thanks, Corey. I appreciate it. Hi everybody. Nice to see you again. So as Corey said, I am at Microsoft. I’ve been at Microsoft almost 15 years, and mostly in the sales capacity, the in sales teams. I’ve hit quotas of over a billion dollars, well over a billion dollars, in excess of actually, one year, over 30 billion, but that’s a whole nother story. As Corey said, I recently completed and launched this book, Love Your Team: A Survival Guide for Sales Managers in a Hybrid World, and it’s been super successful and well received, and in fact, there’s some CEOs who are making it required reading for their whole management team, not just sales management as well as venture capitalists, so that’s been super exciting. But how did I get here? So I graduated from MIT with a degree in mechanical engineering in 1982, and back then, frankly, there weren’t many women graduating with any engineering degree.

(03:48):

When I was graduating, I had job offers from like nine companies in different industries; oil and gas, consumer goods, companies like Chevron, Procter & Gamble, Boeing Aircraft Company, and I decided to take a job… I was drawn to high tech, so I made a deliberate decision to go with an industry that I thought had a future, and as it turned out, high tech’s been pretty good to me. I got a job working for IBM in Silicon Valley as a mechanical engineer, manufacturing engineer in thin-film heads, which are the heads that read really big disc drives that attached to mainframes that used to be the state-of-the-art in tech at that time. I was in that job for a year or so, and I really decided that so much was happening in Silicon Valley that I wanted to make a transition from engineering into marketing or sales because I wanted to be out in front of customers helping them use technology for business value and benefit rather than in the back room making the technology.

(04:59):

My boss in the manufacturing facility had no idea how to help me, and so actually, it was through my personal network that I was able to meet somebody who was an IBM manager in marketing, and I ended up getting a job in Los Angeles in CAD/CAM marketing, computer-aided design, computer-aided manufacturing marketing. I still wanted to be a seller though. At that time, IBM had an 18-month sales training program, and so, I was part of that program. Now, in those days, if you can believe it, the philosophy at IBM was a job for life, and they meant it. They invested in you, they trained you up. I had great training, not unlike the training that you’re getting here from Corey. World-class sales training, practices, skills coaching. That doesn’t happen in industry today. Companies don’t make that investment.

(06:04):

It’s just amazing what you guys are doing here. I was able to get a sales territory, and then again, the prescribed IBM career path was to do a stint on the East Coast near their headquarters and then come back with a more senior level job and things like that. Well, I didn’t want that. So I left IBM and went to some startups, and then one of the companies I worked for was called Metaphor Computer Systems, and they were building decision support software product. We call it a SaaS product today. They were porting it to IBM’s operating system called OS/2. What’s important about that is if you look back at history, IBM originally used Microsoft’s operating system, so this was a big deal. IBM, the big computing company, was moving off of Microsoft into OS/2.

(07:02):

So sometimes people ask me, “Have you ever met Bill Gates?” Well, I did. Here I am now, 26, 28 years old, and I go to an IBM executive conference because I am the marketing person for IBM for this program, and my boss is a guy named David Liddle, who’s chairman of the board of Metaphor. We’re at this IBM executive conference in Florida, and Bill says to my boss, “Hey, can I have a demo?” He says to me, “Helen, give Bill a demo.” So here I am at 28 years old or 26, whatever I was, giving Bill a demo. That’s how I met him, and then a couple of months later, there is a launch of this product at IBM in New York City, a big launch event. I’m on the airplane going back from New York to San Francisco because I live in Silicon Valley and I decide to upgrade myself to first class.

(08:00):

It was like $60 to upgrade myself to first class, so I get on the airplane, and mind you, because I worked for IBM and then IBM was my customer, I knew by visual face the senior executives at IBM. I am getting to my seat and I notice that the president of IBM is one row in front of me in the seat over, and he has a empty seat next to him, so I sit down in the seat next to him as if that’s my assigned seat. What’s the worst thing that can happen? I get kicked out or I get to spend five hours on the airplane talking to or sitting next to the president of IBM, which is what happened. He had heard about our company and he knew that that product had just gotten launched by IBM.

(08:55):

He says, “Oh, I love talking to engineers and developers,” so I went back and told my boss, “Hey, I just sat next to Jack Kuehler, the president of IBM, and he loves talking to developers. Why don’t you invite him to come out to visit us?” He says, “Okay, great, Helen. Write the letter and I’ll send it.” That’s what happened. Anyway, fast-forward, I go work as a seller after that launch, work as a seller in London for the same company. I end up going on maternity leave, having a baby, and my company got purchased by IBM at that point. I like to think that I had something to do with the purchase of Metaphor because I took the opportunity to sit next to the president. Anyway, that’s a long story, but in my career, I worked for Apple Computer, I worked for Sun Microsystems and now Microsoft.

(09:49):

So mostly always leadership, sales management jobs. As it turns out, I have managed hybrid teams, so in the office and remote, both internationally, worldwide teams, nationally, what have you. I decided to write this book really in July of 2021 because at that point in time, about 4 million people a month were leaving their jobs. I was doing a keynote at a conference for sales leaders about retaining top talent because I’m not sure if you’re aware, it’s super expensive for a manager if their top talent leaves. Here’s the math real quick. First of all, let’s say that seller has a quota of a million dollars. It takes them three months to replace, so that’s $250,000 that you’re out, and then maybe six months to get up to full strength. That’s another 500 K, so you’re $750,000 out of that million dollar quota that you are out as a manager if you lose your top talent. That’s only if the seller works out, which they don’t always work out.

Announcer (11:05):

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 8 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. We’re back with Corey and Chris.

Helen Fanucci (11:48):

It was about retaining top talent, and anyway, so I said, “Okay, what are the keys to retaining top talent?” I thought supporting your team, caring for your team. What was authentic to me was to use the word love your team. So loving your team matters, and that means supporting your team. Like all of you guys are sellers. Supporting you to be your best, and that could look like, gee, my seller says, “I’m really having a hard time getting a meeting with a chief financial officer,” so maybe I can get that meeting because I’m a more senior executive than my seller is, or maybe we know somebody who knows that person or our CFO perhaps will go meet with that person, so helping the seller, remove friction, use your positional power. Here’s something else that I do that I don’t know of any other managers that do.

(12:47):

I really empower my team to do the whole job. That means that if they are presenting to a customer executive in a big, really important meeting, or maybe they’re doing a pitch to get a discount or an investment of services that the customer’s looking for as part of an negotiation. What I do is I turn off my video because it’s all about my seller doing their job, and I take notes in the background. I want to make sure that they can be present for the conversation, not have to worry about action items, and then it also gives me the opportunity to coach them, debrief, talk about what went well, do we make our objectives or not. That’s another example of supporting the team. Couple things about the book and the feedback that I’ve received.

(13:45):

One is feedback from early in career people. I never intended or thought about that audience, but here’s two things. One is, “Gosh, I have a new job. I have a manager. I’m not sure what managers are really supposed to do. What does good look like?” The book gives them a framework to think about what good management looks like. Secondly, they may be aspiring managers. What skills… Abilities do I need to be promoted to manager? Having a point of view of why you as a manager, and this could provide a framework for helping you as you grow your career. That’s also been super effective and surprising. As I said earlier, the fact that VCs and CEOs are making it required reading more broader than just sales, that was super surprising to me as well. The book, really, the big idea is about supporting your team because a manager’s success is directly related to the success of the team.

(14:58):

While this is common sense for me, it’s not commonly done. Some people have been surprised by that orientation. The other thing that I learned is that many sellers feel they have an adversarial relationship with their manager because the manager’s pressuring them to make quota. They are afraid to say, “This deal might not come through even though I forecasted it,” and so, they’re robbing or the manager is robbing themselves of the opportunity to have that seller say, “Look, this deal is going off track and I need your help,” because they have that tension. People don’t do their best work if they’re afraid. They’re just going to leave and people leave their manager, not their company typically. This book is really designed to be a handbook for managers to help them be successful, whether it’s a remote environment or frankly, whether it’s a in-person environment. It works both ways.

Corey Frank (16:07):

Hey Helen, quick question. Do you find most folks, particularly in the tech world, because you’re hiring folks from all walks, like right out of school, maybe all the way to mature, is the default mode to operate under a sense of fear or is it the default mode because it’s not prevalent to have these safe, secure, collaborative environments like you had just described about putting all the distractions away and really listening? What do you find the mindset of most folks that you hire today coming from their other environments?

Helen Fanucci (16:39):

Well, people come to Microsoft because of the culture. I don’t have any statistical data on that. I’ve heard horror stories, so for sure, they’re out there, but I don’t know how to think about how prevalent it is versus Microsoft. Also, there’s different pockets of culture within Microsoft. I think it comes down to the individual and their philosophy and point of view. I think it’s very, very common that managers do not help their sellers succeed. They hire people, they put them in the territory, they give them rudimentary training, maybe product training, and then tell them to go make quota. In fact, a lot of people use LinkedIn and email thinking that’s the best way, particularly at Microsoft, to connect with people. As I told Corey earlier, I used ConnectAndSell this week for two hours. It’s the first time I’d ever used it.

(17:42):

My team was having difficulty reaching HR executives, and I thought, “Well, let me give it a go,” and I had some conversations. I had hangups. One guy go through my little intro and say, “Can I get a moment to speak with you? Do you have a moment? Can I have a moment?” “No.” He hangs up. I said, “Yeah, I get it,” but why the quick no. He didn’t say anything and hung up on me. So then Chris said, “Oh, that’s perfect. You talked to him. Send him a follow-up email, then he’ll get who you are, and you can call him again,” and what have you, but yeah, so it’s exciting. Anyway, what I want to do is I want to leave you with advice, three pieces of advice. Okay. The first one is, when you think about where you might go for your first job, think about what industry you want to work in, and what I mean by that is like cybersecurity, that is a big one. It’s going to grow.

(18:49):

The bad guys are getting more sophisticated. You guys are all in sales tech. Sales tech would be a great industry for everybody because you’re doing it. You’re using the technology. You’re all in sales tech. I’m partial to high-tech. If your passion is education, education tech, great, rock on, but I would say be intentional because that can set you up for your next step in your next career. As I said, I was intentional about high-tech. You can always pivot, but it’s nice if you think about and know where you want to go. Number two, build your network. As I mentioned, it was through my network that I was able to navigate from engineering into marketing and then sales. Let me ask all of you.

(19:38):

So how many of you are on LinkedIn today? Everybody. How many of you have posted original content in the last months? Like your own thoughts. So a few of you. Yeah, that’s trickier. It’s easier to repost, but to have a point of view and be known. So think about that. How are you going to distinguish yourself? Think about that. The third piece of advice is, and this might sound obvious, but it’s not always done, is learn and grow, particularly in your new role. I have early in-career individuals on my team that don’t work directly for me, but they work for managers that work for me, and so some of them will put time on my calendar, ask me if it’s okay, and once a quarter, every two months, something like that. It gives me exposure to their work, but then they’re also really thoughtful about looking for my input or how I see a situation.

(20:45):

Also, they’re very intentional about getting to know others in other parts of our business. You can be tunnel vision on your day job, but to begin to learn pieces of the business that might be adjacent, like a customer success team helping customers be successful, but what about the folks that are straight-up account managers, or what about the people who do the licensing negotiation? Or I have one guy on my team who wanted to meet with some of the product engineering people to understand what they do. Thinking about it’s a way of building the network. It helps you as you think about pivoting to more jobs. Also, you’re able to bring more to your day job by having a bigger-picture view.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

In this episode, Gerhard Gschwandtner compares ChatGPT to a painter’s palette with an infinite amount of colors, and salespeople are the artists who must decide how many colors to use and when the painting is finished. The hosts discuss the role of technology in sales and how salespeople can use ChatGPT to harness its intelligence to make more informed decisions. Chris describes a practical example of how he used ChatGPT for list creation for a company called Partner Tap. He was able to ask it about the specific job titles used in senior roles in companies and generate a table of titles for each company. Gerhard suggests that salespeople can tap into their internal ChatGPT to discover great ideas and pursue meaningful work. Chris mentions how they are exploring the use of ChatGPT in developing a new data product and using it to summarize the best conversations that set a meeting with different types of executives. Key points from this portion of the episode include the power of ChatGPT in harnessing technology to make more informed decisions in sales, the importance of pursuing meaningful work, and the potential for ChatGPT to be used in various aspects of sales, from list creation to conversation summaries. Corey reminds us, “You have to be willing to put in that work, do your research and know that it’s going to take time. It’s not going to happen overnight. It’s really about understanding who your customer is and what they care about.”

Key points from this episode:

  1. ChatGPT can be used in various aspects of sales, such as list creation and conversation summaries.
  2. Salespeople can use ChatGPT to harness its intelligence and make more informed decisions.
  3. Pursuing meaningful work can lead to greater happiness and success in sales.
  4. The better the “why” behind what you are doing in sales, the easier the “how” will be.
  5. Prompt engineering is a method for developing ChatGPT responses that require careful consideration of the language and wording used in prompts.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Chris Beall and Corey Frank welcome Gerhard Gschwandtner, the CEO of Selling Power and an advocate for non-verbal sales communication. Gerhard emphasizes the importance of being aware of one’s own energy, as sales is a transfer of energy. They talk about the challenge of losing cultural underpinnings when not being on-site with customers and how finding the right connections that can help you learn and grow is important in gathering energy.

Chris, Corey, and Gerhard’s experiences and insights provide valuable lessons for salespeople and individuals looking to improve their energy and become their authentic selves. They emphasize the importance of being aware of one’s energy, using technology as a natural extension of oneself, finding the right connections to learn and grow, taking action and engaging with the world to build self-discovery, and accepting mortality to improve energy and focus in this episode of Market Dominance Guys, “Sales energy: The Importance of being an omnichannel salesperson.”

 

Full episode transcript below:

—-more—-

(00:23):

Chris and Corey welcome Gerhard Gschwandtner, the CEO of Selling Power and an advocate for nonverbal sales communication. Gerhard emphasizes the importance of being of one’s own energy, as sales is a transfer of energy. They talk about the challenge of losing cultural underpinnings when not being on site with customers and how finding the right connections that can help you learn and grow is important in gathering energy.

(00:47):

Chris, Corey, and Gerhard’s experiences and insights provide valuable lessons for salespeople and individuals looking to improve their energy and become their authentic selves. They emphasize the importance of using technology as a natural extension of yourself, finding the right connections to learn and grow, taking action and engaging with the world to build self-discovery, and accepting mortality to improve energy and focus. In this episode of Market Dominance Guys, sales energy, the importance of being an omnichannel salesperson.

Corey Frank (01:25):

And we are off once again. Welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with the sage of sales, the prophet of profit, the hawking of hawking, Chris Beall, and of course yours truly, Corey Frank. We’ve had a lot of guests. Not going to embarrass a Gerhard a little bit, but I don’t think there’s many guests that we’ve had in 170+ episodes, Chris, where I actually had pictures on my wall as a young aspiring sales rep of the product of Gerhard’s here. So we’ll welcome Gerhard Gschwandtner, the CEO, founder, sales thought leader extraordinaire for, gosh, a lot of years, probably back since, what, 1980 or so, I think, Selling Power has been around, right, Gerhard?

(02:09):

So welcome to the Market Dominance Guys, thrilled to have you. Of course, Gerhard, not only Selling Power and thought leader, one of the original members, the OGs of the Sales Enablement Society, and I think the founder of probably the most timely conference in our profession today, Sales 3.0 up in Vegas, usually it’s where it’s, right? So welcome, Gerhard. Chris, what did you have to bribe, promise, cajole Mr. Gschwandtner here to get him to come back again? Once wasn’t enough, back again to our humble little podcast here.

Chris Beall (02:43):

Well, I promised him I would actually burn a copy of the rules of golf on the first tee the next time we play so that there is no evidence of the existence of the rules of golf. Because he placed by his own rules that involve enjoyment, and I just don’t want to get in the way. So that was my bribe.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (02:59):

I second that, because I will not allow official PGA rules to interfere with my natural excellence.

Corey Frank (03:10):

Well, those are live rules, I think, right? You prefer the live rule book, I think is, it’s a whole new addendum to the old PGA stodgy rules. So how did a physicist and a sales thought leader here, how did you guys even stumble across each other? Is it pre-Connect and Sell? Is it during Connect and Sell? Let’s talk a little bit about that.

Chris Beall (03:28):

Oh gosh, Gerhard, do you recall how we met? Because I do. You probably don’t.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (03:33):

I probably don’t.

Chris Beall (03:35):

Boston, I think 2011, very, very early on in my career at Connect and Sell, and it was a Sales 2.0 …

Gerhard Gschwandtner (03:43):

Sales 2.0 conference.

Chris Beall (03:44):

And we were sponsoring, Connect and Sell was sponsoring. We had met and chatted a little bit, but the shocking thing was, I was about to present in a breakout. And back then breakouts would have some people in them. I think I remember counting something like 87 people in this breakout, and I always count the people in a breakout. Whether I’ve ever told you this or not, I’m a former card counter. So I have this thing about counting things. So I count these 87 people, and I’m about to go up on stage, or in front of them, it wasn’t an actual stage. And Gerhard walks in, sits down in front of the audience, and says the following. He says, “There are X products in the world of sales technology or sales enablement, something like that right now.” It was a big number, it was like 637 or whatever. And he said, “And there’s only one of them that works, Connect and Sell. Listen carefully to what Chris Beall has to say.” And he walked out. And I tell you what, Gerhard, I have owed you ever since that day.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (04:48):

Wow. I remember that session. And people stayed in your session and they walked out impressed.

Chris Beall (04:55):

Well, I yelled at them. It helped.

Corey Frank (04:57):

That’s right.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (04:59):

You are offering a solution that really pays for itself. I call it a no-brainer. Half an hour before this conversation here I was on Connect and Sell and connected with people. I use it all the time.

Chris Beall (05:13):

That warms the cockles of my extremely black heart.

Corey Frank (05:19):

There you go. We expect Crisp Beal on the cover of Selling Power, the virtual magazine, here in the coming months, the coming quarters, I’m sure. So we’ve got a couple things to talk about now that we have Gerhard and then Chris fresh off the pre-release of the Market Dominance Guys book, which we can talk about. It’s advancing technologies in sales. And Gerhard, you were an early proponent, advocate, shedder of light in the non-verbal sales communication methodologies. The NLPs has always been a big piece at a lot of your conference sessions, we talk about that. And it’d be interesting with Zoom, and Chris, I know you have some opinions on this too. When the old school, “I’m going to sell Gerhard something, I’m going to show up at his office and I have my wares and you’re behind your desk or you’re in the conference room and I’m standing up.” You could read a lot about non-verbal communication there.

(06:12):

And then we moved to the past two years or so, 2+ years or so with COVID and Zoom. So let’s start with there before we get into the advanced ChatGPT and how that’s affecting sales, but what did you see that maybe was lost from the traditional non-verbal communications that us sales folks have that maybe we missed moving to COVID, and how do you get back to that after COVID now that people are actually seeing people face to face again?

Gerhard Gschwandtner (06:42):

Well, I think that salespeople need to be aware of two things. One is their own energy, because selling is a transfer of energy. And the energy can come in person, but also the energy can also travel digitally. So when I send you a little video with me shaking hands with a cat in a caption, “Deal closed?”, then it gives you a jolt and you smile. So I think that what we need in the future is proficient omnichannel salespeople that need to use technology as an extension, as a natural extension of their own personality.

Corey Frank (07:27):

Mm-hmm. Chris, you saw certainly your team went to the face-to-face test drives, where you would fly in, parachute into these larger organizations, do one-day test drives, shake everybody up, and then hit the button and then everybody would leave. And you had to transfer a lot of your business to do that virtually. What do you say with what Gerhard is saying as far as that transfer of energy? Because you have the vehicle that is creating this, it’s this kinetic energy machine, and then you have the dynamics of your entire team going up and down the aisles and watching the ticker go up. How did that change for your business and what do you have to say to that?

Chris Beall (08:06):

Well, it’s kind of funny, because we made that transition on essentially the 1st of April 2020 to 100% virtual. And we did it on the same day that, I wasn’t even paying attention to it, because it was the same day that our entire team in India went home. And that was much scarier, because the infrastructure in India in people’s homes and apartments for doing their jobs was much iffier, much more varied. Pretty much all we do in business is variety management, right? If there were no variety, we wouldn’t have to do any management. So the more variety there is, and then the closer it is to the beating heart of what you do, the more attention you pay. And if you’re not capable of doing anything about it, the more freaked out you are. So I paid no attention during that entire first week to anything other than, “Are we up and running?”

(08:55):

And the answer turned out to be, miraculously, yes. I have no idea how it happened. It’s just really good people. They prepped for it, they had no time, they got it done. Then I looked at the results from the test drives, and we did that week, if I recall correctly, I think we did nine test drives. So nine virtual test drives. Test drives are, I don’t know if we’ve talked about them here on the show, but it’s a full production experience of Connect and Sell. Connect and Sell is like, once Gerhard provided me with the opportunity to jump in the driver’s seat of a Ferrari 455, that’s the car I chose, and take seven laps around a sort of simulated Formula 1 course. And I can tell you that that’s a special experience. It’s not just that it flattens your eyeballs, but there’s somebody yelling at you, “Brake, brake, brake hard, brake hard,” and then you’re supposed to hit this thing called an apex and God knows what’s going to happen.

(09:47):

And after about three laps you start to settle in, and by lap seven it’s like, “Can we just keep doing this for a long time?” And the answer is, “No, we only paid for seven laps.” So our test drives are like that. You hop in, you’re nervous, flattens your eyeballs, you go crazy, lots of things happen, and then everybody settles in. What was so interesting to me is, the action of talking to other people instead of us simply took over anyway. So it turned out that there’s never been a difference in close rates or anything else. All that’s happened was we saved $55,000 a month in travel, and we lost one of the cultural underpinnings of our company, which was not being on site with the customers but being on site with each other. And so we worked very hard afterwards to keep the energy up in the company that was lost because we weren’t hanging with each other the night before and we weren’t postmorteming at the bar afterwards.

(10:47):

And that cultural disconnect was much, much more challenging than the change in the sales process itself, whether we interacted with the prospects locally or remotely. And we had to do something about that. Because we were already virtual. We were virtual in 2014, when I became CEO I sent everybody home. And I was very comforted by the fact that customer success and sales would be in the field every day in different mixes because you didn’t get to decide who you went with. And so it was a mix and get to know party. And I was on the road back then 110 to 120 days a year, some conferences, mostly test drives. And so I also had my finger on the pulse. So Gerhard talks about energy. The challenge of energy is, you’ve got to find it somewhere. Some of us wake up with more than others, but you’ve got to gather it around you before you bring it forward.

(11:42):

Gerhard puts on a peak performance mindset, or used to, I don’t know if you still do it, retreat. And really what happens at the retreat is, everybody gathers energy from each other and from special people like John Devore, the world skydiving champion, the captain of the Red Bull skyflying team or whatever, who sadly was terribly injured recently. And Gerhard tells me he’s now walking again. But those connections that you make when you’re on site with people, those are the cultural glue that allows you to bring the energy and transmit the energy. And I think that’s where the big challenge is.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (12:16):

I think that everybody needs to connect with sources of energy. And it is amazing to me, every time I interviewed somebody for a cover of Selling Power, like Corey, you mentioned earlier, Brian Tracy, you get into that mindset of that other person. And spending time with people like Oprah or Bill Clinton or Donald Trump or Malcolm Forbes who was on the cover, it gives you a glimpse of their perspective of the world. And I think we need a more nuanced and differentiated perspective. The way we look at the world is one point of view. And in order to help a client, we need multiple points of view. Larry Wilson once said that your point of view is the point from which you view, therefore you don’t know where you stand ’cause you’re standing there. So to me energy is a question of connections, the right connections that can help you learn and grow, but also exposure to the right amount of ideas. You get a different level of ideas from TikTok than you get from Aristotle when you read it.

Chris Beall (13:37):

Ooh, has anybody done Aristotle as a TikTok? I bet they have.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (13:42):

Well, he was invited and he declined to show up.

Chris Beall (13:45):

Oh God, that guy, so closed minded.

Corey Frank (13:48):

He’s down at the [inaudible 00:13:51], he was down at the sea. Fascinating, Gerhard, about the energy and all the folks, the Mary Kays and the George Foremans and the [inaudible 00:14:00], et cetera. Trying to think, Anthony Robbins, all these over the years. When you did the face to face interviews, did you feel the energy right when you were sitting down? Did you …

Gerhard Gschwandtner (14:12):

Oh, absolutely, absolutely. I remember exactly where I was sitting in Tony Robbins’ castle when he was pounding his chest and energizing himself and talking about making money in his sleep. Or I remember the biceps of George Foreman in New York at a studio. It’s really humbling to shake hands with someone where you think you’re a midget in comparison.

Announcer (14:37):

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

Chris Beall (15:18):

Let me tell the audience something about Gerhard. So I have had opportunity to greet Gerhard very, very many times, dozens. These are always first time at the conference or before the conference. And every time I am shocked by the same thing, which is, I give him a hug and I go, “Oh my God, I’ve never felt anybody’s shoulders and back and all that that are as rock hard as this guy.” It makes me actually jump every time. I flinch at his fitness, which is, the George Foreman effect doesn’t require having massive biceps. You can also simply be looking like, “Yeah, I’m just standing here being a normal guy.” And then you realize, “Oh, oh, no, no, that’s made of marble or something underneath there.”

Gerhard Gschwandtner (16:04):

Since you bring it up, that energy when we get together, I remember at the mindset retreat you came in spite of the fact that your wife had recently passed. And I checked into my hotel room, and it was a Four Seasons, and usually there’s some books in the room. And among the many books, I picked one up and it was a book of poems. And I opened it up and I got to one poem, and it made me instantly think of you and your sorrow. And then I took the book with me and pushed the elevator button, the elevator door opened, and who was in there was Chris Beall, and there were four other people.

(16:54):

And I handed him the book and I said, “Look at this page.” And he was reading the poem, and all four people in the elevator there were totally floored by that experience because it was so spiritual, so moving, because that poem offered a perspective on life and the arc of life in a zen-like way that there was healing. And I had no idea how I thought about doing that, but it felt like the right thing to do. And Chris, how did you feel about that?

Chris Beall (17:33):

Oh, I’m still moved by it, I can barely talk right now. It was the combination of your thoughtfulness, the material itself, and then what would have generally been seen as a coincidence. I’m not a believer in, there’s coincidences that have magic behind them, but I think when you bring the energy of life to your everyday experience, especially in sales when we’re bringing energy to others, many, many interesting things happen that would not have happened otherwise. That is, those who don’t pick up the book like you did or don’t have that thought or don’t take the action, they don’t have any magic coincidences either because they’re not out there. That was one where we got to stick to each other, and it changed everybody in that elevator. They were just there. They were just on board. We were all in the same little room. As one of my Vietnamese friends said, an elevator’s just a little room that goes up and down on a rope.

(18:34):

So we were in that little room going up and down on a rope, and the door opens and there’s a moment of lifetime magic. It wouldn’t have happened without you being who you are. And if we go back further, it wouldn’t happen without us having many times come forward in situations where others might have hung back, with each other or with people that we were around.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (18:57):

Right. I think that opens another dimension. I remember doing an interview with Dr. Wayne Dyer, who wrote the bestselling book Your Erroneous Zones. And he said, “We call ourselves human beings, but we are spiritual beings in a human body.”

Corey Frank (19:15):

Yeah. Well, this turned into the Lenten episode here about our own mortality very, very quickly. I love those stories. Chris, from the times that you meet Gerhard, and Gerhard, you’ve been on stage in front of thousands of thousands of folks and certainly interviewed some of the titans in our space. Can people get better at that energy awareness? Especially in our profession, because part of it, I may have a killer product, I may have a incredible presentation that my marketing team gave, I have the latest Mac, I’ve got the best lumen projector. It’s the perfect day out, it’s a 10:00 meeting, there’s plenty of time left for lunch, but yet I just don’t transfer that energy. Can I get better at that? Have you seen folks that you’ve met over the years turn and tap into that?

Gerhard Gschwandtner (20:04):

See, the energy is always there. What is also present in many people’s minds is a lot of noise, and the noise comes from the past. NIH has a study that shows that I’m experiencing 60,000 thoughts a day, and 80% of those thoughts are automatic but also 80% of those thoughts are negative. And the negative thoughts come from the circumstances of your childhood, where you create a narrative as a child and you tell yourself, “This is the way the world works.” However, the story that you fabricate is actually not true because your brain wasn’t formed completely when you were a child. So you need to go to multiple revisions of the story of who you really are. And most people have what I call a guiding fiction for their lives that’s faulty. And we need to challenge that fiction and rewrite the story of who we really are. So once we become our authentic selves, the energy flows freely. But if we are not, we have that energy interference in form of negative thoughts. And that is a difficult situation to be in, because your best version of you is dampened by your faulty story.

Corey Frank (21:45):

Wow. Yeah. Chris, what about you? Did you see folks get, as Gerhard said earlier about the right connections, the right type of people, the right information, the right books, the confidence? You can build that energy. Do you see that with folks certainly in your world, hiring salespeople over the years and meeting with clients, that they’re different, they exude a different power, energy as you see them over the years?

Chris Beall (22:13):

Yeah, I think there’s so many ways that we go about learning who we are, and one of the ways that we go about learning who we really are is by finding out what we can do and that we might not have thought we could do. So Gerhard’s peak performance mindset retreats, there were people who didn’t know that a thing that they could do is jump out of an airplane. In fact, I was with somebody in an airplane who was pretty convinced she could not jump out of that airplane, and we were up there 10,000 feet in the air above a beautiful, lovely field below. But there were a lot of things in her that said this wasn’t a good idea. And it’s not a big skill, by the way. She wasn’t jumping out of the airplane in a way that required a great deal of skill. It took some, you had to get your feet out. For me that was a little hard because it was a little tight. I’ve got long legs.

(23:04):

But she needed to do that to exercise, that was a skill of courage or a skill of commitment, and she was quite transformed by it. When we got on the ground and we spoke afterwards, she was quite transformed. ‘Cause that was something that let her meet herself through doing, which is I think something that’s really important for us. Because Gerhard says, well, we’re spiritual. We’re also animals and we move, and the animal brain is built for movement. A sentence is pretty much a little more than taking the movement we do in the world and reducing it to sounds that represent different parts of the movement and how we would interact with them. So the idea that these nouns and verbs and all this somehow float free out in the world makes no sense. They have to do with us as animals moving through the world.

(23:53):

That’s the difference between us and plants, right? Plants defend themselves with chemicals, animals defend and offend as we do through motion. We don’t stay in one place and wait for the action to come to us. So that process, I think, is when we do guided action, like flight school is like this, right? Flight school is not a theoretical exercise that we offer. It has a speaking component at the very beginning, which is, just get confident that somebody else knows a good way to talk to somebody that you just ambushed. But it’s in the doing that our flight school students actually find out who they are. And when they find out that they are that person who can do the hardest thing in sales, which is to turn an ambush into a triumph for the other person, that you can be of service to somebody by ambushing them, when they do that and they do it and they do it, it changes them because they then find out who they are.

(24:54):

The narrative now includes, “I can do this. And I can do it and I can enjoy it.” Which is yet another part of what we might learn about ourselves, is something that we can enjoy that we didn’t know that we can enjoy. So I’ve often thought these are very deeply introspective situations, behaviors, action settings in which we engage in self-discovery. I think that’s not generally the case. I think sitting around and introspecting tends to lead you into the same thoughts that you were having beforehand, except more of the negative ones are likely to show up because you don’t have the world helping keep you sane. You might have heard this from me before, Corey. I’m reasonably convinced it’s our interactions with the actual world out there, people, things we’re trying to do, that actually give us sanity.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (25:46):

I cannot emphasize enough the fact that our strivings are fantasies. Our thoughts are really driven by the unconscious. So in the case in point with Chris Beall, when he moved to Arizona from Baltimore as a kid, he discovered something totally new, nature, and he was out there alone. But he found something in his house, that there were books everywhere. And he was curious and he opened the books, and he was reading adult books as a six or seven-year-old. So he tried to understand and explore the world outside and inside, inside the mind. And all those explorations driven by his curiosity, driven by his relocation, moving to another state, created a mindset that is always expansive, that always looks for new wonders like ChatGPT.

Chris Beall (26:55):

Yeah. Well, there’s two things.

Corey Frank (26:59):

[inaudible 00:26:59] to me last night, Gerhard, she said, “Don’t ever stop doing this crazy stuff that you do.”

Gerhard Gschwandtner (27:05):

Yeah.

Corey Frank (27:06):

Because I think the older we get, for me anyway, and I know some people see it differently, I think it’s easier to be curious and to engage and explore things that are new and interesting than when we’re younger. And it’s because we’re on a more solid stance with regard to who we are.

 

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In this episode of Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall, and Susan Finch discuss their experience using ChatGPT to write a book based on their podcast, and the benefits of using AI to create content. They delve into the limitless possibilities of machine learning, natural language processing, and computer vision, and how they are transforming various industries. Chris and Susan also share their insights on the process and the excitement of seeing the AI learn and improve. Chris and Susan talk about how ChatGPT can generate various versions of a prompt, and the different approaches they took to refine their requests for better results. They also reflect on the human-like interactions they had with ChatGPT, and the Eliza effect that makes people treat the AI as if it were a person. Ultimately, they highlight the efficiency and creativity that AI can bring to content creation, and the potential for using ChatGPT to write more books in the future. Tune in to hear their fascinating discussion on the intersection of AI and writing in this episode, “How ChatGPT is Writing a Book: The AI and Human Collaboration.”

 

Full episode transcript below:

—-more—-

(00:24):

In this episode of the Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall and Susan Finch discuss their experience using ChatGPT to write a book based on their podcast, and the benefits of using AI to create content. They delve into the limitless possibilities of machine learning, natural language processing, and computer vision, and how they’re transforming various industries. Chris and Susan also share their insights on the process and the excitement of seeing the AI learn and improve. They talk about how ChatGPT can generate various versions of a prompt and the different approaches they took to refine their request for better results. They also reflect on the human-like interactions they had with ChatGPT, and the ELIZA Effect that makes people treat the AI as if it were a person. Ultimately, they highlight the efficiency and creativity that AI can bring to content creation and the potential for using ChatGPT to write more books in the future. Tune in to hear their fascinating discussion on this intersection of AI and writing.

(01:23):

In this episode of Market Dominance Guys, how ChatGPT is writing a book, the AI and Human Collaboration.

Chris Beall (01:33):

So Susan, you and I did something remarkable that started, I believe, with your own work using ChatGPT in a podcasting setting, right?

Susan Finch (01:47):

Right.

Chris Beall (01:47):

A podcasting setting, about a week, 10 days ago, something like that, you were doing some experimentation. I was getting ChatGPT up by various people, including some very interesting people at my wife’s company where she works, a little company called Microsoft, seems to be very interested in this area. And it occurred to me, based on your work, that we could maybe take the Market Dominance Guys podcast and turn it into a book written by ChatGPT.

(02:19):

But first, how about, how did you get started with this? What stimulated you to go all AI? Didn’t you used to own an art gallery or something like that? People who own art galleries don’t go all AI on us like this. That’s for crazy techy people and guys like Austin and me. So what’s up?

Susan Finch (02:35):

When Austin first brought up ChatGPT to me say, “Well, try this, try that,” and I love the idea of creating on the fly, and to challenge it and to ask variations of the same questions to see what the difference would be. It was like a game and a creativity experiment at the same time. So I loved that. And I was really surprised though at how much of a variation you could get just by tweaking a couple of phrases, or as you and I experimented over the weekend, by lumping the aspects of the query properly. I am known to have misplaced modifiers in my writing, and some lines have to be edited. So my queries were the same, and when I tightened it up, the results were so different and so much more enjoyable. It was a lot of fun. I mean, I love to create. I have to create every day, or I am bored and miserable. So every day, I have to create something, and this gives me an outlet and saves me some time for the grunt work, and then I can go back and refine it how I want.

Chris Beall (03:41):

Well, it’s really something. So what did you apply it to first? Clearly, not Market Dominance Guys. You were doing something with another podcast, right?

Susan Finch (03:48):

I was doing something for Asher Sales Sense, because John Asher interviewed Judy Schramm, and Judy Schramm was talking about ChatGPT and the ways that it could be used for marketers, or some of the ways, I should say. There’s no way it could be all the ways. And she had some great ideas though on how to apply it to your LinkedIn profile and how to define the audiences. “Who do you want this to appeal to? Who is the goal?” So I thought, “I’m going to start playing with my own.” So I started to do that right there. And because in the spirit of the topic, I had ChatGPT also come up from the transcript from that episode with the introduction and variations of the title until we found one that we liked.

Chris Beall (04:30):

Wow, that’s really cool. So what are the things that so far have been easy? And what are the things that have been hard? And what are the things that have been maddening? And then what are the things that you think, “Oh, now that I know this, I’ll do that”?

Susan Finch (04:45):

The maddening part were the limitations, because, for me, I like to go fast. So if I have a transcript in front of me, I don’t want to have to do it in two parts. And if I put the whole transcript in there, ChatGPT chokes. So that too much stuff, and I can appreciate that there has to be a limit somewhere. And I have to learn how to refine my request, because I put too many parameters in there, and then I have to go back and say, “Now rewrite it again, because you didn’t listen. I said to do it between 500 and 700 words. Now, do that part,” because it was ignoring that. So those were the frustrations. They weren’t huge.

Chris Beall (05:22):

Yeah, that thing, did you find yourself experiencing… There’s two variants of it. So there’s a program called ELIZA, many years ago, I’ll use it as my base, many, many years ago, back in, I think it was written in the, I don’t know, fifties or sixties. And ELIZA was an experiment to see how people responded to text interactions, chat interactions. I know this sounds weird that it was, what is that now? 50, 60 years ago?

Susan Finch (05:50):

Right.

Chris Beall (05:50):

But many young people actually are unaware that the earth, actually, is older than a hundred years, by a fair amount. Not everybody agrees with this. Some people think the earth is flat and is made out of a plate, and elephants stand at the edge of it to keep us from falling off. But it turns out, even back in the fifties, people were thinking a lot about this stuff.

(06:12):

And computers, they were big and they were slow, but they weren’t as slow as a person. And I’ve always said, “Computers go fast and don’t get bored. People go slow and do get bored, so we’re perfect companions for each other.” We can help each other out, as long as the people do all the judgment and the computers do all the fast stuff. But then now, you have the question is, “Well, what is fast about ChatGPT?” It connects dots, statistically, lots and lots and lots of dots.

Susan Finch (06:41):

Right.

Chris Beall (06:41):

And it makes us think with our brains, because we’re used to thinking somebody else is a human, that we’re talking to a human. And ELIZA did this. I think ELIZA consisted of less than a hundred lines of code. It simulated a Rogerian non-directive therapist, which oddly enough was a topic I studied, for reasons that none of us will ever understand, in high school. And I was very interested in the work of Carl Rogers and the kind of therapy that he did called Non-Directive Therapy, where a therapist doesn’t direct the session. Now, here we are with ChatGPT, we’re in sessions. What happened with ELIZA is people just bought into it. I mean, it was less than a hundred lines of code, and people would spill their guts to ELIZA.

Susan Finch (07:26):

Interesting.

Chris Beall (07:27):

ELIZA became their best friend, cared about them, et cetera, et cetera, all of which had to be coming from, not from ELIZA, because ELIZA was a hundred lines of code. So it’s really interesting. I call it the ELIZA Effect, named after Eliza Doolittle from-

Susan Finch (07:44):

Pygmalion.

Chris Beall (07:44):

Yeah, from Pygmalion. Yeah. So did you experience ever that you got frustrated with, or spoke aloud to ChatGPT while you were using it in a way that made you think, “I’m kind of treating this like a person”?

Susan Finch (07:59):

Even my queries treat ChatGPT like a person, and it’s just a habit I have. I’m somebody though, who, if I belch in a empty room, I still say, “Excuse me.” So it’s just a manners thing for me. I’m always saying please, and thank you, praising ChatGPT, because to me, we’re part of that learning process. So when it’s done right, I want to make sure, “Yes, that was great. I appreciate that. Thank you so much.” I’m overly polite a lot of times. A lot of times I’m not, but most… You’ve seen that. But sometimes, I’ve just found it’s easier for me to do it that way, because I feel that we are part of this learning experience. And at some point, humans are going to be looking at this analysis. And I want to praise that and be kind about that, because I also want ChatGPT to learn to be kind.

Chris Beall (08:53):

Ah. And we imagine, you imagine, because I imagine the same thing, that these interactions are helping ChatGPT learn to be a better ChatGPT.

Susan Finch (09:03):

Yes.

Chris Beall (09:06):

It’s inevitable, for me. I found with ELIZA, I did the same thing. I was introduced to it in 1983 at Bell Labs, and I found myself just playing with it, and then going, “Oh my God, I’m actually telling it stuff.” Right?

Susan Finch (09:21):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (09:21):

It knows me. It knows me, which is pretty funny. And I found myself with ChatGPT, doing the same thing, saying, so for instance, at one point, I said that my prompt was something like, based on the following summary of an episode of Market Dominance Guys with Corey Frank, Chris Beall, then I’d ask the question, “What are the five most important things that you must do in a cold call?” And then I would put the summary.

Susan Finch (09:49):

Okay.

Chris Beall (09:49):

Because you had ChatGPT summarize the transcript of parts of episodes, and then put them together for me. And it started coming back with just titles after a while, kind of like, “I’m tired of doing this for you, Chris.” 17 times in a row, I get some really cool output, and then I’m copying and pasting it into this Word Doc, so that ChatGPT can write this book we’re writing together, you and Corey, who isn’t even here, and he’s somehow doing it. Corey’s going beyond AI. He’s like AI as in absent intelligence. He’s that AI, right? Corey, you’re not even here.

(10:30):

And it’s like it got bored with me and just started spitting out a title to see if that was enough. I’d say, “Good title. However, would you…” And then it would give me more. I’d say, “That’s very interesting. But what I’m really interested in,” and I’d tell it more, and then it’d give more. I was like, “It didn’t used to do this.”

Susan Finch (10:51):

Right.

Chris Beall (10:51):

Earlier in the chat, it didn’t do this. It’s like it’s become a slightly… It’s like it’s jaded. It’s tired of this content. It doesn’t want to keep repeating itself. I don’t know. But I don’t know. That’s going on inside of me, and I thought that was really interesting.

Susan Finch (11:08):

Now, are you starting a separate chat for each episode?

Chris Beall (11:12):

No, I’m putting them all one after another after another, because I want to generate… In my imagination, I have all the documentation that has been released for developers, because I told open AI that we’re building a product, and I am probably building seven products or something like that.

Susan Finch (11:29):

Right.

Chris Beall (11:30):

I thought it’d be fun to do a book first as a warmup exercise and a demo like, “Hey, plus, Market Dominance Guys was supposed to be a book.”

Susan Finch (11:39):

I know. And none of us have gotten around to getting it done.

Chris Beall (11:42):

Exactly. So this shows off the efficiency that you were talking about. It’s really efficient. We just got a book written on Market Dominance over 25 episodes, which we anticipated 25 episodes would squeeze the toothpaste too dry. Turned out not to be the case, but it’s a lot of it is there, and you see repetitions, and then 25 prompts and responses from ChatGPT. It was a simple idea for a book. You have the heavy stuff in the back, and then the Q&A in the front, and then have it write an intro, and have it do all the titles, and have DALL·E, ChatGPT’s artistic friend, give us a book cover, at least cover art. And then we have a book, and then let’s put it up on Amazon and have a Kindle book and have a hard cover and have a paperback, and then give them as gifts to people and stuff like that. So that was the idea.

(12:33):

So I said I want to keep them all together, because I want to see, “Can I ask questions without asking about a given episode anymore, and will it go back through all of the stuff?” This was five hours on Sunday that I was doing this. And the answer turned out to be, actually, yes. It turns out… And I have an example right here, if I can find it. Here we go. Where I asked the following, I said, “Please write a 5,000 word introduction to the book ‘Market Dominance: A Conversation with ChatGPT’, based on all the summaries and prompts in this chat so far.” And ChatGPT answers thus, “I’m sorry, but as a language model AI, I am not able to produce a 5,000 word introduction to this book, et cetera based on the summaries and prompts in this chat. However, I can provide a summary of the key points discussed in the Market Dominance Guys podcast that could be used to form the basis of an introduction to a book on Market Dominance.” Now, is that cool, or what?

Susan Finch (13:41):

That is very cool, because it wasn’t just, “Can’t do it.” “Try this instead.”

Chris Beall (13:46):

Exactly. And then it went ahead and just did it. I didn’t even have to ask, and then it just jumped in. “Market Dominance Guy’s podcast is hosted by Chris Beall and Corey Frank and focuses on the importance of market dominance in today’s business world. The hosts discuss various topics related to sales, marketing and business, and provide insights into how companies can achieve market dominance. One of the key topics discussed in the podcast is the evolution of sales and how it has changed with the advent of technology. The hosts explained that modern B2B buyers demand real through and timely information from salespeople and that salespeople must focus on building trust and sincerity in their interactions with buyers to be successful.” Susan, that’s like… It’s creepily good.

Susan Finch (14:39):

But that is from those summaries. I mean, I’m hearing familiar phrases, and yes. It-

Chris Beall (14:45):

It went back over the whole thing.

Susan Finch (14:47):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (14:48):

And I didn’t know that… Anyway, I was hoping that we were building a corpus. I didn’t know we were doing it. Get this next paragraph, as we are going to use this as the introduction, “Our rule”… Anybody gets this book, the rule is ChatGPT had to write every word in the book, except the prompts. And that was because I didn’t want to spend a week on a science project to figure out how to get it to write the prompts, even though had I not been such a wimp, I probably would’ve had that done in 15 minutes on Saturday morning. So anyway, that was the rule.

(15:18):

So here’s the intro. So it did write the intro, just not so long. Here’s what it says, “Another important topic discussed in this podcast is the role of tension in a sales conversation. The hosts explain that tension is essential in a sales conversation as it helps to build trust and establish a relationship with the buyer. Salespeople should address the buyer’s fears, build curiosity and elicit a commitment to attend a discovery call during the cold call process.” Holy moly, Susan. That’s all Corey and I have been trying to say for 165 episodes.

Susan Finch (15:54):

Yes.

Chris Beall (15:55):

Is that something?

Susan Finch (15:56):

That’s wonderful. That’s perfect.

Chris Beall (15:59):

It’s amazing. It’s amazing to me that I could just ask that question and it picked the good stuff. I love this paragraph, “The podcast also touches on the comparison of sales to tennis and explains how the player who is just 1% better will almost always win in tennis. The hosts explained that this comparison can be applied to sales, as the salesperson who is 1% better will also win, as they will dominate the market.” Whoa. What can I say?

Susan Finch (16:33):

So the beauty of it though is you just gave an example where it brought in specifics that are unique to you and Corey. They’re unique, your analogies, your comparisons, some of the things you say are very memorable. And I would actually love to see the next time I do an experiment with your podcast is to say, “Please include a couple of quotes,” a couple of metaphors, because those are so memorable, and it can do it.

Chris Beall (17:05):

Yeah. And I never got onto asking for quotes or metaphors. That’s what’s so cool about this. Here we are, you and I both over the age of, I think, 30, maybe 35?

Susan Finch (17:12):

Maybe.

Chris Beall (17:15):

Conceivably and kind of depend on how you think about it. So we went through the browser wars, and the browser wars were really about building applications. The idea was, there are these things called websites, and then somebody said, “Yeah, but what if they did something.” Because websites were originally kind like fancy billboards or something, and it was like-

Susan Finch (17:35):

Brochure, right.

Chris Beall (17:36):

Look at a brochure. And then it was like, “Oh.” And I was a pioneer in this area of applications. Did an application in 1990, what was it? I think six or seven, that was on top of a browser, and it won these IndustryWeek Technology of the Year Awards. Actually, no, it was ’95. That was a long time ago for those of you who can count and subtract. And what was exciting about those times was we didn’t know what the limits were. And I was a wimp, so I actually had my team split into two. One built our application in Java, which is really just a modern version of traditional programming languages. Real programming just got ifs and thens and analysis and loops, all that crap. And that was the cool stuff that was going to work. And then I had another person, who was pissed off at me probably until his untimely passing, who I asked to do it in HTML, which seemed primitive and weird and clunky and horrible, because it wasn’t interactive. So we made it interactive by building a program in C, actually, that spit out HTML on the fly.

Susan Finch (18:54):

Got it.

Chris Beall (18:54):

This was back before you could buy that. This is one year we rolling on our own, but not smoking them. And this reminds me of that. We’re in the year 1996 with regard to-

Susan Finch (19:08):

Oh, I remember.

Chris Beall (19:08):

… the web.

Susan Finch (19:09):

Programming then. Yes.

Chris Beall (19:11):

Right. When it seemed really exciting, but you didn’t really know what you could do with it. And you kept going, “Whoa, that’s so… We did this right?” And then six months later, that would be below table stakes and come for free in the browser. And I think that’s where we are. And this thing called prompt engineering, which is what you’ve been doing and I’ve been doing this weekend, and for you a little bit longer, where you craft the prompts, because they aren’t questions, they’re prompts, and you note the response from ChatGPT, and then you try to make the prompt something that’s going to elicit the response that’s more useful. So you shape the prompt.

(19:49):

And I was taught this phrase by Eduardo Kassner at Microsoft. He said, “Don’t ever describe what you do. It’s called prompt engineering. Just say prompt engineering.” He’s right. I didn’t know what it meant until we did it all weekend. So I think we’re at that stage, but I could be wrong. I mean, what do you think? You’ve been around a while. Does this feel like that again?

Susan Finch (20:09):

It does. And I’m glad you brought up 1996, because it takes me back to before BMW was one of the first to have a build-your-car online thing. And the company I worked for worked for a dealership, and we built that. And what it became, and this feels like that, this feels like, building utility bills online, this feels like the beginning of those things that just took off.

(20:33):

And I see the possibilities as endless, but we need to be trained a little bit better how to elicit what we’re looking for without having to do it 17 times, without having to say, “Well, we’ll try this, we’ll try that.” And we get to know those nuances and the phraseology to save the time and to allow ChatGPT to drill it down to exactly what we’re looking for. That’s just one of the tools that’s out there. But this is, right now, the most powerful tool, the most flexible and the most trainable tool. I was doing all your summaries as separate prompts, because I didn’t want to lose track as I’m scrolling up and down and things. And for you to put it all into one, to allow that consideration.

Chris Beall (21:18):

Well, let me correct you there.

Susan Finch (21:20):

Okay.

Chris Beall (21:20):

I actually put them in a separate prompts within prompts, because I don’t know how to do this very well. So I just did my question, and then I do a shift enter in order to stay in the same box, and then I copy the-

Susan Finch (21:31):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (21:32):

… summary that you provided to me that I’d go pick up with copy paste. So it’s a very primitive process. But what’s interesting is ChatGPT put it all together in a thing it calls a chat, and that goes on and on and on and on.

Susan Finch (21:46):

That’s what I mean. Yes.

Chris Beall (21:47):

Start another one, and now, it’ll answer questions about all this stuff like, “Yeah, I’ve been listening to Market Dominance Guys since I was a little chatbot,” and this stuff is like… But it also combines it with what I’ll call conventional, because I think what Corey and I talk about is statistically unconventional. We’re not saying do it like the other folks. A lot of the pieces are the same. You have conversations and stuff. But we’re saying, “Leave value aside. Go from fear to trust.” Well, that’s unusual.

(22:16):

But ChatGPT goes, “Yeah, I got that, but then I’m going to put in some conventional stuff that I know about too when I’m not so sure.” And it’s fascinating that it goes back and does this. And this was my dream about it. It’s like, “Oh, I don’t have to build all the knowledge. The knowledge is built on top of its knowledge and the model that I’m providing, or you and I together are providing, which was provided by Corey and myself, and then guests, and you and Austin’s editing, and all this stuff has come together. What episode are we on now? 160 something.

Susan Finch (22:48):

168 or something.

Chris Beall (22:50):

Yeah. It was never supposed to be a podcast, and here it is, doing its thing. That big collaboration that went on for three years with hundreds and hundreds of hours of people talking is now boiled down like maple syrup into this concentrated thing that is now inside this model. Now, what bugs me is you got one model out of doing what you did with the transcripts, the chunked transcripts because they were too big to put in as whole, I did mine based on the summaries of those transcripts, and I don’t know how to bring them together. But what if in the background, what if in the background ChatGPT is learning about Market Dominance Guys, and now some naive third party can come in and ask a question. Because remember, when we asked about Corey and Chris before, it was like, “I never heard of these guys.”

Susan Finch (23:47):

Right.

Chris Beall (23:49):

Right?

Susan Finch (23:49):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (23:50):

Because my data collection ended in 2021, and it actually said, when I asked it about Market Dominance Guys, it said, “Oh, that’s Nathan Latka’s podcast.” Nathan, I’d love you like a brother man, but-

Susan Finch (24:01):

Not yours.

Chris Beall (24:02):

… it’s not your podcast. But you’re better known than I am, because you’re out there and I’m not. So do you think it’s learned back there behind the scenes, or is it just learned in your model and in my model? Or have we actually been helping each other? I mean, isn’t that what’s crazy about this is that the learning… I mean, we’ve agreed to make this information as we’re interacting with ChatGPT that it gets to go into whatever it wants, right?

Susan Finch (24:33):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (24:33):

We’re not doing it and saying, “No, no, it’s just ours.”

Susan Finch (24:35):

And I’m wondering though too, should we remind ChatGPT, “Please save all this information you’ve learned about Market Dominance Guys for anybody to access.”

Chris Beall (24:49):

That would be really interesting. I’ll do that right now. Here, let me do that. I’m going to say, “That was fantastic. Thank you. Can you save…” We’ll see if I can type. I just have a hard time when my keyboard’s a little high. “Save all these prompts and responses about Market Dominance Guys in your model of the world?” Let’s see what it says. It’s generating. “Yes. Yes. I am designed to retain information from all interactions. So all the information and responses shared in this chat will be stored in my model of the world and can be used to respond to future related queries.” And now, we just figured out why this freaks Google out so bad. It’s a vacuum cleaner for knowledge in the form of these interactions. And now, we can test that. It’s like, okay, so it’s like is it good for Market Dominance Guys podcast to be better known to ChatGPT? You bet. Is it good for ConnectAndSell to be better known to ChatGPT through this kind of interaction? You bet. As from Branch 49, they have so much business, they don’t need any help.

Speaker 1 (26:22):

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

(26:30):

ConnectAndSell. Welcome to the end of dialing as you know it. ConnectAndSell’s patented technology loads your best sales folks up with eight to 10 times more live qualified conversations every day. And when we say qualified, we’re talking about really qualified, like knowing what kind of cheese they like on their Impossible Whopper kind of qualified. Learn more@connectandsell.com.

(27:00):

And we’re back.

Chris Beall (27:03):

How do we publish this book on Amazon? I’m going to ask ChatGPT. And guess what? It gave me step-by-step directions, and answered my questions to where I can get it. So now, I’m thinking, I think I missed the whole idea, which is I should have asked ChatGPT how to interact with ChatGPT like, “Hey, can you write your own prompts?” I never asked it, because I’m not in that head space yet.

Susan Finch (27:30):

No, I’m not there yet either. But I thought of another thing. If we wanted to learn about ConnectAndSell from all your summaries, ask ChatGPT what it is learned about ConnectAndSell.

Chris Beall (27:41):

Oh, let’s ask it right now. Okay. “So what have you learned about ConnectAndSell from the Market Dominance Guys podcast episodes?” Oh, this is… That’s so good. That is such a good one. Okay.

(28:02):

“From the Market Dominance Guys podcast episodes, I’ve learned that ConnectAndSell is a tool that can be used by sales reps to improve their follow-up process in sales. According to Chris Beall, many sales reps believe that manual follow-ups are more effective than using a tool like ConnectAndSell. But there are several drawbacks to manual follow-ups, including the time it takes to prepare, the fact that preparation may not result in any live conversation, and the fact that the rep may not be ready for the live conversation when it finally happens. On the other hand, using a tool like ConnectAndSell is faster and allows reps to talk to more people per day, which is crucial for searching for potential customers who might have a problem that the company’s solution can solve. Chris believes that the choice between manual follow-ups and using a tool like ConnectAndSell is a trade-off that each rep has to make explicitly based on the benefits and drawbacks of each approach.”

(28:54):

How about that?

Susan Finch (28:55):

That’s pretty cool.

Chris Beall (28:57):

This is fascinating. How do you feel about this book project? I mean, I came up with it, when? On Friday, I think. That’s Friday the… What is today? Today is Monday the 13th of February 2023. I had this crazy idea, I think it was Friday. Was it Friday?

Susan Finch (29:14):

It was Friday.

Chris Beall (29:15):

Or was it Saturday?

Susan Finch (29:16):

No, It was Friday.

Chris Beall (29:17):

Friday. I went to Helen, and I said, “Helen, I got this crazy idea,” and she said, “Go. Do.” Okay. So we started working it on Friday. The book is in, I’ll call it a weirdly done state that is.

Susan Finch (29:29):

Right.

Chris Beall (29:29):

It’s roughly a hundred pages. It’s got 25 episodes, it’s got 25 prompts and responses. It has a cover, it has a title. Everything is titled. It has links to the podcast episodes. It needs some QR codes for the physical book. It needs a table of contents. I don’t know how to get… I think, actually, Word will write one of those for us.

Susan Finch (29:48):

Word will write it for you.

Chris Beall (29:50):

It needs font work and stuff like that, because it is as ugly as sin. But that’s pretty remarkable for two days.

Susan Finch (29:59):

Right.

Chris Beall (29:59):

Shocking, actually. What do you think about this process? How are you going to use it for other projects?

Susan Finch (30:05):

I’m thinking about it. And yes, in a way, it’s been two days, but you and I have kept track of every element of the podcast from transcripts to summaries to everything the entire time. So we were fortunate that, for us, it was quick to be able to pull some of this stuff together, because we had the repository of all of it. That helped.

Chris Beall (30:27):

It did help.

Susan Finch (30:29):

It helped a lot.

Chris Beall (30:29):

It did.

Susan Finch (30:30):

It saved a lot of time. I love the idea though. I mean, we watch friends that we know produce eBooks all the time and small books, and I’m publishing other books, 50 pages of some advice and stuff. But to be able to give something meaty like this, to have that option for people, we know that books are a calling card. Books open doors for you to have something you can put in somebody’s hand that’s very current, that isn’t things you’ve been researching for years and years, like right now, this is current. Right now. It needs to be done now.

Chris Beall (31:02):

Yeah.

Susan Finch (31:02):

Because there will be imitators, there will be people inspired by what you’ve just done, what we’ve done, to continue this. But I love the idea, and the process was a blast for me. I told you, I need to be creating all the time. So it’s a lot of fun. And I am not an illustrator. I’m a graphic designer, but I’m not an illustrator. So to get that little help, too, from DALL·E was wonderful.

Chris Beall (31:25):

Yeah.

Susan Finch (31:25):

And you’re being able to massage the prompt for what it gave us. We were both kind of sitting there messing with it, and it wasn’t quite there. But again, with my misplaced modifiers, you were able to hone it in and get our two characters, our three characters for the cover.

Chris Beall (31:42):

Yeah, I got super specific. It is like, “I want one person like this, one person like this, a futuristic robot sitting at a table. I want it to be a six by nine cover. I want it in black, white, and red. I want it in the style of a minimalist Madison Avenue advertisement.”

Susan Finch (32:01):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (32:01):

Because I figured those kind of ideas would be in there, right? I mean-

Susan Finch (32:05):

I was thinking Mad Men too, but I could not-

Chris Beall (32:07):

I almost asked for Mad Men-

Susan Finch (32:08):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (32:10):

… and then I thought… I was down to 11 prompts left with DALL·E before I’d have to wait till March 11th, my son’s birthday, to get more DALL·E. I think that might still be true, even though I upgraded to Plus. I’m hoping Microsoft will save me, because they’re really being nice to us right now. But it was so interesting, because I’m not a graphic artist of any kind. I don’t think I have much of an eye for stuff, but I’ve been trained. It’s interesting. I’ve been trained in art, art history, and I’m like a colorblind person who’s coming to advise you on the painting of your house. Because when we were in Shetland, and we were in a yarn store, and you’re supposed to know that these colors are cool and these are warm, means nothing to me. But I could point at them with my phone, take a picture of them, go to black and white mode, to noire mode, and I could see which ones were warm and which ones were cool. I’m that kind of idiot. That’s the level [inaudible 00:33:05]

(33:04):

But I could look at this thing and go, “That is book cover stuff.” My recent experience with Helen’s book was helpful, black, red, and white, where the accented stuff is red, the big stuff is black, and negative space is used in order to convey the other message. When people see the cover, they’ll get this. The negative space among the people’s legs and the robot’s legs under the table is really interesting.

Susan Finch (33:35):

Right.

Chris Beall (33:35):

It’s interesting shapes, and it kind of conveys the message like a puzzle, like pieces coming together. So that spoke to me. And as soon as I saw it, I said, “This is the one.”

Susan Finch (33:45):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (33:46):

So I didn’t feel like I created anything, but I kind of did.

Susan Finch (33:50):

You were the art director. I mean, Tom’s an art director, my husband, so he knows how to direct and to give the word pictures, and somebody else can execute it. And you gave the word picture, you gave the elements that needed to be brought together, and that’s a skill in itself. We talk about the engineering of the prompts. A lot of it is being able to really see what those goals are and knowing how to articulate it. So it isn’t for the everyday person, always, to get a great result that people will enjoy, learn from, read from, be inspired by, get what you’re trying to say. You still have to know how to ask.

Chris Beall (34:35):

Yeah. And you got to curate the results too.

Susan Finch (34:37):

Yes.

Chris Beall (34:38):

But even though a hundred percent of the words, other than the prompts in this book, “Market Dominance Guys, a conversation with ChatGPT” are ChatGPT’s words, not yours and not mine.

Susan Finch (34:50):

Right.

Chris Beall (34:50):

The words came out of Market Dominance Guys episodes, plus its own words that it threw in. The prompts came from me. And the curation that’s hidden, you can’t see it as a culling process, because some of the responses were like, “No, that doesn’t make any sense.”

Susan Finch (35:08):

Right.

Chris Beall (35:08):

So I just didn’t include them. Sometimes also, by the way, I put so much specificity in the preamble to the prompt that I cut that part out and just used the second half of the prompt. Unless you have this corpus already put together, this model put together, you wouldn’t get the same answer, which is fine. It’s like-

Susan Finch (35:26):

Right.

Chris Beall (35:27):

… you wake up in the middle of the night, and I might tell you something different about whether I’m hungry. It’s just the way it is. Everything changes over time. But there’s an explicit process of, we’ll call it crafting of the prompts. There’s a learning process, a co-learning process, where we learn. I learned from how ChatGPT responded, so I crafted different kinds of prompts. DALL·E, especially because I mean, I looked at that stuff and went, “Holy Molly, that’s… Ah.” And I was down to 11 of them, and I’m panicking. And it’s like, “Oh, that’s the one. Stop, stop, stop. Get it, get it, get it.”

(36:00):

But there’s also on the DALL·E side, there are four times, whatever it is, 20, 80 images that I rejected. So you only get to see curation, that artists work like that too. And I watched artists work.

Susan Finch (36:15):

Yes.

Chris Beall (36:15):

There’s this continuous curation process that’s going on, where, and inventors work like this too, as you know, I hold a boatload of patents for some reason, and what you see in those whatever 22 patents I have is the tips of many, many icebergs under the water is all the crap that I threw away. So I think curation is a big part of it, and having an eye and a feel and the emotional set to curate, to be ruthless, but engaged.

Susan Finch (36:47):

Right.

Chris Beall (36:48):

So I think this prompt engineering thing, which when Eduardo Kassner said to me, this is a thing says, “Don’t use any other phrase,” I’m really indebted to him for that. He was stern with me. He made it very, very clear last week, “Don’t say this any other way.” I’m now realizing website design was a big thing. Prompt engineering is the big thing now.

Susan Finch (37:07):

It is.

Chris Beall (37:08):

And you need to learn it. If you want to be relevant for the next 10 to 20 years, you better either learn prompt engineering, or learn how to appreciate it.

Susan Finch (37:20):

I agree. Or learn how to find somebody else and recognize that they know how to do it.

Chris Beall (37:23):

Exactly. Exactly. I’ve encouraged at least one of my kids to become a prompt engineer. I think that it’s a true deep skill, and I think on your resume it’s going to be very meaningful.

Susan Finch (37:34):

I do too.

Chris Beall (37:35):

And that was my big lesson over the weekend. It’s like, “Wow, we can make a book in two days.” Two, the book is pretty substantial. Three, occasionally ChatGPT gives me insights about my own stuff, or Cory’s stuff, or whatever that I was unaware of. But four, the big lesson is this thing is for real, and prompt engineering is what you need to learn in order to-

Susan Finch (37:59):

Yes.

Chris Beall (37:59):

… get a lot out of it. And my recommendation to anybody in this audience is, “You may think that you’re a CEO, like me, or like Susan, or that you’re a salesperson, or you’re a whatever, this is something to delve into and get dirty and find out where its edges are and your edges are, because I think you’ll be shocked and gratified and relevant.”

 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Welcome to the continuation of a conversation with Hitesh Shah, CTO and CPO of ConnectAndSell. This episode delves into the world of sales and coaching for sales managers. Hitesh shares his experience and insights on coaching by the numbers and how to effectively manage and coach a sales team.

Corey and Chris share their thoughts on how to analyze sales data and determine the strengths and weaknesses of individual sales reps. They stress the importance of getting granular with data and looking at it with a critical eye. By understanding the patterns and details of sales interactions, sales managers can take the necessary steps to help their reps improve and drive better results.

Chris also offers his advice for new sales managers on how to stay up-to-date with fast-moving sales trends and how to effectively manage a sales team in a fast-paced environment. He suggests starting the day by looking at sales data and focusing on the critical details of sales interactions.

So whether you’re a seasoned sales manager or just starting out, join us for this exciting episode as Chris, Corey and Hitesh help you take your sales management, training, and sales skills to the next level in this episode, “Get Granular to Boost Your Sales Performance”.

If you missed the first half to this interview, you can listen here:

The Power of Childlike Curiosity in the Digital World of Sales

 

Full episode transcript below:

—-more—-

(00:24):

Welcome to the continuation of a conversation with Hitesh Shah, the CTO and CPO of ConnectAndSell. This episode delves into the world of sales and coaching for sales managers. Hitesh shares his experience in insights on coaching by the numbers and how to effectively manage and coach a sales team. Cory and Chris share their thoughts on how to analyze sales data and determine the strengths and weaknesses of individual sales reps. They stress the importance of getting granular with the data and looking at it with a critical eye. By understanding the patterns and details of sales interactions, sales managers can take the necessary steps to help their reps improve and drive better results.

(01:01):

Chris also offers his advice for new sales managers on how to stay up to date with fast-moving sales trends and how to effectively manage a sales team in a fast-paced environment. He suggests starting the day by looking at sales data and focusing on the critical details of sales interactions. So whether you’re a seasoned sales manager or just starting out, join us for this exciting episode as Chris, Corey and Hitesh help you take your sales management, training and sales skills to the next level. In this episode, get granular to boost your sales performance.

Corey Frank (01:38):

We had a great conversation the other day informally talking about your cataloging experience, Hitesh and Chris, and we were talking about the, and I’m going to butcher it, was that the items lead you to the category. The category doesn’t lead you to the items. It’s very easy when you’re trying to deduce causation versus correlation. We’ve had a number of conversations about this, but when you have, let’s take a real-world problem, how do you determine if the items that data is leading to a category challenge or is the category going to lead you to, it never leads you to the items I believe that you had said. Maybe you can clean up that butchering of your nuggets of wisdom that I just fed back to you.

Chris Beall (02:19):

Well, it’s pretty good. You just got 12 of my patents right there. Hitesh, what are your thoughts about this? You and I have both built a lot of classification systems that do automated or semi-automated classifications, all with at some point with humans in the loop either early, middle, or late or cleanup. You did it in the world of jobs at a level that nobody had ever done before, figuring out how to match people to the jobs that are out there in the world. I’ve done it in the world of products and parts also. 

Hitesh Shah (02:55):

When you think about what Corey just said.

I think the most interesting example that comes to my mind is coaching by the numbers, Chris, in terms of dispositions. So Corey, in ConnectAndSell world, every call is disposed with a disposition. What happened. I got a referral, I got wrong target. The person is not interested. Right timing. Not me. Talk to somebody else or whatever. Chris started noticing this very peculiar pattern where interests and information would suddenly start dominating your disposition pie chart.

(03:26):

So we a have pie chart which shows what’s the spread of your dispositions, and it turns out that people who are not very good at communicating a value prop or are super nice on the phone, so you don’t feel like blowing them off, you don’t feel like telling them off. But at the same time, they don’t give you a compelling enough story or a pitch for you to say, “Yes, I want to learn more.”

(03:45):

So guess what? The easiest thing to point to is, “Send me some information and I’ll get back to you,” and Chris, I still remember the grid that we looked at on the whiteboard in the San Mateo office where you came up with this technique of saying, “Okay, here’s how you stack rank your disposition outcomes, and the moment interest and information starts bubbling up for a given rep, that means that person needs coaching on how to open the call in a way that you actually end up moving to the next phase of the sales cycle.” So-

Corey Frank (04:17):

That would be perceived as a positive. “Hey, we got through to somebody who’s on my list.” My marketing people said, “See, I told you that list is good. These people are crazy for information and crazy for propaganda we send,” but that category doesn’t necessarily lead back to the item necessarily. Correct?

Hitesh Shah (04:35):

Yeah, exactly. Exactly

Chris Beall (04:37):

That’s a great example, Hitesh. The truth is always in the details. The details are always a pain in the because you got to figure out what the patterns are and you will see patterns where there aren’t any. These are the hard things about hard things. This is why some people do work like this and others do sensible work. You actually know what the outcome is going to be. So that’s a great example where there’s something that emotionally leads you in one direction, “Hey, this rep must be pretty good. They’re getting a lot of interest.” In fact, that tells you something about the rep. This rep can’t close. They can’t close a meeting, and so now that they need coaching or replacement, well, let’s take a coaching step, because that’ll tell us if they need coaching or replacement. We had one the other day that was really funny.

(05:19):

Now everybody’s obsessed with mobile numbers. Mobile numbers, mobile numbers, mobile numbers. Because, well, they have higher connect rates. So the mobile number is the category and the connect is the thing you’re trying to get to inside. Kaeser compressors, Matt McCorkle had been on this show before and was an outstanding guest, and Matt wanted us to actually build a list for him, for experimental reasons. We do crazy things like actually build a list for people sometimes. And so we built a list for him and we made an assumption, a categorical assumption that mobile numbers would be great. Well, Matt’s team was calling plant managers in factories. And the plant managers in factories who are in the factory answer the company number when it’s actually routed to them by navigating the phone system and all that.

(06:10):

Because you’re a plant manager, you’re not going to ignore a phone call that comes from the inside. It could be really important for the running of the operation, but when they answer their mobile, it means they don’t work there anymore. [inaudible 00:06:22] you call during business hours and you call them on the mobile number, you’re actually deliberately calling the wrong people that ZoomInfo or LinkedIn or whatever says are the right people, but their data lags a little bit behind. And so the category [inaudible 00:06:38] us, and the facts came back and said otherwise, and by the way, the connect rate was beautiful. It was 14 to one with wait times of one minute and six seconds on paper. I looked at it and I said, “Ooh, ooh, ooh.” And then Matt gets back on and says, “Man, that really pissed off our reps and wasted an entire two hours of flight school.”

Corey Frank (06:58):

Yeah. Well, speaking of flight school, it’s almost as if Hitesh and Chris, we’ve talked about flight school several times on this call on organization, whether you’re using ConnectAndSell, which you should, but even if you use any other dialer that the premise and the basic building blocks and the spirit of flight school is, regardless of whether you’re using any type of weapon like ConnectAndSell, but what we were thinking about talking about here is almost like a air traffic control school. So if I’m a sales manager and I don’t have, maybe my enablement person or my marketer is just doing my Zoom data, maybe keeping my sales force up and going, this concept of traffic school is analyzing the traffic patterns in the residue, like we were saying, is what your dialer is trying to tell you.

(07:43):

How do I get better at that? What do you guys suggest on, where do I learn that from. On this call? I think I have a below number of patents for the three attendees on this call. I think clearly, meaning zero. I think combined between the number of patents and the number, you guys are very modest, but the number of phone calls, who has claimed to view and be more of a thought leader, an outbound calling in the nuances of it than you two guys? Nobody, just from the hours and the millions and millions of dials, but I’m a sales manager. I’m a relatively new sales manager and I have reps and there’s a lot of moving parts. Chris, your quote, you said is that, “It takes a long time to learn about fast stuff.” There’s a lot of fast-moving stuff. I got a board that’s breathing down my neck. I got funding that expires in a few months. I got end of quarter. How do I learn to just stop and look at the residue in the exhaust with a critical eye? What advice do you have for somebody like that?

Chris Beall (08:41):

Man, I have a lot of it. Here’s my number one piece of advice, and it depends on what kind of systems you have that tell you what’s going on, but one is, get granular. Just get granular. Looking at stuff from a high level tells you nothing other than what you thought you already knew. You’re just going to get confirmation bias. So, that’s one. Two is, before your day starts, and I always say before breakfast, and I have two things that require effort before breakfast.

(09:15):

One is, I try to get in 4,000 micro-prancing steps because 4,000 steps before breakfast means I’ll hit my goal for the day. The second is, I look at the data in the same order every day. So I bring up the previous day’s results for our team, and I look at them, [inaudible 00:09:34] from top to bottom. By top, I mean early in the conversation to later in the conversation, because everything in the world of calling is conditioned by what happened right before it. Therefore, if it goes bad, it goes bad early.

(09:47):

So I’ll just go in and say, “Okay,” so yesterday, because wait, I can do this in real-time, but I’ll get distracted. So yesterday, who had the highest busy callback rate as a percentage of their total conversations in the team? And then I’ll click through and get granular. I’ll listen to two conversations, one short and one long. I’ll look at the amount of time. That cycle right there, that whole cycle takes less than three minutes, and now I know who needs the most help on their opener, because they get busy callbacks.

(10:21):

I’ll do it through five stages of the conversation. The entire thing takes me 15 minutes. I know some people say, what are you as a CEO doing this? Well, gosh, selling stuff’s really important to my company and it comes from the top of the funnel. It starts at the beginning. So just doing that in much the same way that I would do my 4,000 steps in the morning before all the stuff starts going. I think a moment of structured looking at a level of granularity that you’re familiar with but not turning your mind off. It’s like you’re really looking, and I know Hitesh, you do stuff like this with the systems that you build. You have parts of the day where it’s easy to get pulled away, where you pay attention to things worth paying attention to.

Hitesh Shah (11:07):

Yeah, absolutely. In fact, in the context of what you are saying, Corey, every dial that you make, there are three levels of insights coming from [inaudible 00:11:18] that you get back. From ConnectAndSell and from any other dialing system. The [inaudible 00:11:23] number one at the simplest level is, was the phone number right or not? And their data providers that do, DiscoverOrg used to be really good at this. You used to see from ConnectAndSell, you could tell if a customer was using DiscoverOrg or not in a heartbeat, because their bad data would be less than 2%, believe it or not, Corey, versus some of the other data providers that go often up to 15 and 20%.

(11:46):

So one is just the quality of the data in terms of whether the phone number actually worked or not. The second level, if you go one step above that is the actual titles that you are targeting that you thought, and this is something I wish our customers did more of, Corey, to Chris’s point, in terms of being granular, because at the end of the day, blended, a thousand people list will blend everything in. But if you start looking at cohorts of titles that you now start correlating to the call outcomes or dispositions, you start generating some very meaningful insights.

(12:20):

If you start noticing a high number of referrals, that probably means that you are actually ending up targeting the wrong function within that company, for whatever reason. And maybe that particular industry is not very well organized in terms of how it feeds into the hierarchy or there’s something off there, and we’ve seen this not very often, but enough that it does matter. So the data quality, the targeting, and then, most importantly in terms of the feedback loop, in terms of what is working well, what you should be doing more of, and what’s not working well, and what you should be doing less of.

(12:59):

So this whole closed loop feedback system in terms of doing more of what is working across from the vendor that you are using for your data acquisition to how you’re using the vendors to build your list, and especially targeting, both in terms of companies you target and the people within those companies that you target. And then lastly, in terms of navigating the buying center, regardless of who you ended up with. Because the buying center is a collection of people, and especially true of anything that’s not [inaudible 00:13:34] and maybe even lower in this environment, and as you go up [inaudible 00:13:39] plus into the mid-market plus enterprise segment, because you’re not just going to be talking to one person, it’s going to be a community decision.

Announcer (13:47):

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

(13:55):

ConnectAndSell. Welcome to the end of dialing as you know it. ConnectAndSell’s patented technology loads your best sales folks up with eight to 10 times more live qualified conversations every day. And when we say qualified, we’re talking about really qualified, like knowing what kind of cheese they like on their impossible Whopper kind of qualified. Learn more at connectandsell.com.

(14:25):

And we’re back with Corey and Chris.

Corey Frank (14:28):

And having that childlike curiosity as well is key to finding out, what if I pull on this thread, what if I pull on this thread, in getting down, it’s okay to fall in love with getting in these little rabbit holes about what it’s going to lead you in. To that point Hitesh, you have a mature sales manager that maybe doesn’t necessarily analyze their business. There’s no rear view mirror. It’s all about just dial the phone, more dials, more data, hire more people.

(15:01):

Is that condition terminal? How would you reform somebody like that, like me, who… I don’t have time to, 4,000 steps, Chris? Come on, look at me. I don’t take four steps. I’m sitting behind the desk and I’m managing my… How can you reform somebody like me to say, “Listen, this is why it’s critical to your business.” If anything, there’s KPIs, there’s one number you should look at in your organization more than anything else that has an atomic weight equal to all these other vanity metrics that you think you’re using on your Salesforce system. What guidance advice would you have for somebody like that who’s in that condition?

Hitesh Shah (15:39):

So that’s a tough one, Corey, but I think Chris came up with this concept of meeting per rep hour. I think that’s probably where I would start. Chris, feel free to chime in. I think it’s a brilliant invention. I think it’s frankly in the company’s history, at least that I know of. It’s especially for the aspect that Corey is addressing in terms of that one thing. If you go to the dentist, the x-ray does it. You show an x-ray and then you go, “This is how bad your teeth are.” Unfortunately, for us, the closest to that x-ray that I can think of, Corey, is the meeting per rep hour metric, because in the end, the time element of it gets lost in terms of meetings set, but the amount of time that you’re spending prospecting and within that time how productive you are in terms of, and that encompasses everything from list quality to rep quality to follow up hygiene and all that thing together.

Corey Frank (16:27):

Yep, yep.

Hitesh Shah (16:29):

Would you agree, Chris?

Chris Beall (16:30):

Yeah, your biggest source of variability is the processors themselves, the reps. And so it’s difficult to predict what will happen from activity metrics, because the processor itself is not uniform. It’s like I’m putting in what I think is the same inputs, but I’ve actually got a very different processor and it’s one of a kind. There is only one copy of it in the entire world. And so if you want to find out quickly before you run out of money, run out of time or get shot, which is, that’s the COO’s job, is to take the bullet for the CEO. I think we’ve talked about that a couple of times.

(17:08):

Then, you need to very quickly find out where the production is, what’s really going on. So assuming you have control over your targeting, now you’re down to, what’s the output? Well, waiting for closed one doesn’t work, because it’s too slow. You can’t learn about fast things by waiting for slow things to happen. By the time the slow things happen, you’ve lost your opportunity to learn more about the fast thing. So what’s a fast thing that happens? It happens on day one. The very first day you turn on some dialing system or whatever it is that you’re encouraging people to do, for outbound, there’s a question.

(17:43):

My input, my cost is the hours, an hour of a rep, that unique [inaudible 00:17:49] processor. The output is meetings set. It tells you about your list. Because if you can’t set meetings across the entire group, the issue isn’t the processors. The issue is your targeting or your messaging, one or the other. So now you go back and ask yourself the question, “Well, does this message have a shot, or is the list problematic?” So you go to the list and you ask yourself this question, which is, if I break the list down by meetings per rep hour, which titles are taking the meetings and which aren’t?

(18:18):

So maybe I have a list that isn’t dense enough in the titles that are taking the meetings as an example. It’s that thing. You need to have a place to start. And meetings per rep hour is to me the place to start. We used to push a lot of stuff back in Denver. We were pushing, [inaudible 00:18:36] enough dials in the day? Well, that’s a system thing. With ConnectAndSell you might have 1500, 2000 dials. But then [inaudible 00:18:42] said, “No, no, you’re not.” Did you have enough conversations in the day? And so we went into that for a while. And these things, these were things that we drove on, do this, do this, do this. That was, when, 2014, 2015, it’s now 2023.

(18:54):

About a year ago, I was looking at the data and I just said, “This is crazy. Where’s the money going?” It’s going to feed the racehorse. What’s the output of a cold call that is diagnostic for targeting, for messaging, and for effectiveness of the rep? Meeting gets set, meetings per hour per rep. Oh, Hitesh says it’s brilliant. I think I’m a total idiot for not coming up with this in 2011, quite frankly. But when I look around and I ask folks, “What are you measuring?” Nobody is measuring meetings per rep hour. It’s the one thing that they should be measuring if they want to get a very quick handle on, “okay, where do I go for improvement?

(19:37):

Because if you’re forward looking, where do I go for results? And then if I’m getting results or I’m not getting results or whatever, where do I go for improvement? It’s right there. When we engaged, when you were at Stormwind, and I was trying to make a point to you, which is, your talent spread is huge, and there’s an issue, and I actually showed you, you’re the first person, Corey, who ever saw meetings per rep hour. That was actually how I brought this back. I said, “Look, below this threshold, you should have no ConnectAndSell, cut them off.” And you said, “Chris, I can make them better,” because that’s your mindset. And the answer is maybe you could make them better, but it was going to take a while, and the question is, how long did you really have? Especially given how much you were paying us. It’s a fascinating thing, and I’m glad you brought it up, Hitesh, because this is the one metric to rule them all. It tells you everything. It tells you where to look, or it tells you to look.

Corey Frank (20:37):

Absolutely, because everything else is a lagging indicator, that’s causatory based off of that one, because if it’s meetings per day, ah, but meetings per hour and then combined with these other granular items, Hitesh, that you and Chris were talking about, the, busy, call back later’s or, send information, that’s the one string. So the one string to pull on the sweater is, if somebody’s beyond the norm of meetings set per hour per rep,

Chris Beall (21:08):

Yeah. So let me clarify. When I say meetings per rep hour, I mean per prospecting hour.

Corey Frank (21:13):

Yes. Right. Sure.

Chris Beall (21:15):

So taking eight hours in the day doesn’t work. You’ve got to-

Corey Frank (21:17):

No, no, exactly.

Chris Beall (21:18):

… say, “I know they’re prospecting for this amount of time.” And one of the advantages of dialing systems like ours or others is they actually tell you literally how long somebody’s prospecting. When I look at our system right now, which we never do. We don’t do it in podcasts to look look, right because it’s an audio medium. But if I were to look right now at our team today on 1/26, and I’m just going to look at our inside sales team because they do more prospecting, and I can go top to bottom on meetings per rep hour. So our top performer, Josh Layman, using ConnectAndSell today for one hour, 11 minutes and 36 seconds, has set three meetings, and his meetings per rep hour is 2.51.

(22:04):

By the way, for those of you who want a benchmark, 0.5 is the magic number. So we’ve always said that there [inaudible 00:22:11] a magic number for market dominance. There’s a conversion rate that you can go, “Oh, that’s pretty good. That’s going to get me there.” If you’re over 0.5 meetings per rep hour as a rep and you can sustain it, you’re a keeper. Now, somebody might say, “Well, what about the list [inaudible 00:22:28] the right meetings, [inaudible 00:22:29] meetings, people show up for,” those are all things that can be controlled either in making the list, which should be the companies, not the reps, or in handling the aftermath of the meeting being set, rescheduling, and all that kind of stuff.

(22:43):

So ours today, by the way, I’m very happy, is 0.76 meetings per rep hour, and I have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 people that are above that today. So there’s variation day to day, but that one tells me where to look. I have two people at zero. Now, that’s one day. So now you’ll look back over a week, and this is also key. You got to be fine grained, but you can’t be twitchy. You can’t be reacting to everything. You got to know, “okay, this is for real. But now I go to meetings per rep hour for the team as a whole, and suddenly it smooths out. The top is 0.87, and the bottom is 0.35 this week, and the average across the entire team is 0.56 so I guess we can stay in business.

Corey Frank (23:30):

Gotcha. Well, it’d be interesting to see with that, and I’m sure you have the data, certainly proprietary, ConnectAndSell is such a thought leader in this space with your team, but what is that danger zone? If I’m an organization that has X and Y and Z, pay my reps, most folks pay their SDRs with some variable disparity there, but what is a danger zone that, “Hey, listen, stop what you’re doing,” like you said, “Unplug whatever machine that you’re plugging and look at those points that you had mentioned.” The data or the target or the ICP or the rep training. Maybe they need to immediately go to flight school. What are some of those numbers that you see? Is it 0.25? Is it 0.1?

Chris Beall (24:13):

Well, Hitesh is in the danger zone because he’s an important guy, has to go to another meeting. It’s amazing that we had him for this. He’s the real Tom Cruise here. Hitesh, do you have any parting words about danger zones or your feeling about when should you be reactive?

Hitesh Shah (24:26):

I think the number one, in terms of danger zone, is burning your leads, Corey, to me. So if you are seeing dispositions that are overly negative, that all is almost always indicative of something that you’re not doing right in terms of either training the reps or targeting or whatever. So other than that, like Chris said, you want to maintain the ranges for each of those metrics that you are watching, for incremental improvement. But if there’s one overarching thing, it’s just, if you’re looking at a pie chart that’s showing more than 75% negative dispositions, then you have a problem there.

Corey Frank (25:03):

Well, that’s fantastic. Well, I tell you what, Hitesh, it’s great to finally have the brains behind the operation at ConnectAndSell on these podcasts. I’ve been schlepping with Chris Beall for the last three years or so, and it’s clearly you’ve been having the earpiece in Chris’s ear as I ask him all the questions over the years, so, to have an organization like you have Chris, and that you and Shawn McLaren have built where you have people like Hitesh as your right hand guy and supporter and cheerleader and analysis and debater and work wife, it’s a gift to have that much intellectual firepower in one organization under one roof, focusing on the same goal, so thank you Hitesh for finally breaking free from under Chris’s thumb here on all the other projects that he has you working on to jump on this podcast. For the Market Dominance Guys, Chris, any parting words here on this episode with the brilliant Hitesh Shah?

Chris Beall (25:51):

All I got to say is the system must be really, really in good shape for him to be comfortable to come on because this guy doesn’t let anything slip by.

Corey Frank (25:59):

The medium is the message. That’s right. [inaudible 00:26:03]. Until next time, this is Corey Frank with Chris Beall on the Market Dominance Guys.

Hitesh Shah (26:07):

Thank you. Thanks.

 

Links from today’s episode:

ConnectAndSell – https://connectandsell.com 
Branch49 – https://branch49.com 

Hitesh Shah on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/hiteshrshah/ 
Chris Beall on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-beall-7859a4/ 
Corey Frank on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/coreyfrank/ 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

So, what’s the biggest challenge in sales? Today, the guys have a special guest, Hitesh Shah, CTO and CPO of ConnectAndSell. As Hitesh puts it, it’s the fact that we don’t like to be sold to. That’s why sales is about helping, not selling. And if you want to succeed in sales, you have to understand who your target audience is and what their business problems are. You have to start at the bottom and work your way up, building relevance and trust with each person you talk to. Hitesh says there are two things, one is always trying to understand what happened. And, when it goes against your instinct –  what did you expect it to do? Be open to the possibility that you may have missed something. Corey says that this requires a level of humility that doesn’t exist in high quantities in sales, even though it should.

One of the things these three have learned over the years is that when something starts working when it shouldn’t, it can be scary. But in the digital world, everything is deterministic. There are causes and effects, and there’s no such thing as waiting or hoping that something fixes itself. As Hitesh puts it, you have to have a childlike curiosity and naivete, especially in the digital world where computers are deterministic. Join us for this episode of Market Dominance Guys, “The Power of Childlike Curiosity in the Digital World of Sales”

 

Full episode transcript below:

—-more—-

Announcer (00:06):

Welcome to another session with the Market Dominance Guys, a program exploring all the high stakes, speed bumps and off-ramps of driving to the top of your market with our host Chris Beall from ConnectAndSell, and Corey Frank from Branch 49.

(00:21):

So what’s the biggest challenge in sales? Today the guys have a special guest, Hitesh Shah, CTO and CPO of ConnectAndSell. As Hitesh puts it’s the fact that we don’t like to be sold to. That’s why sales is about helping, not selling. And if you want to succeed in sales, you have to understand who your target audience is and what their business problems are. You have to start at the bottom and work your way up building relevance and trust with each person you talk to. And when things don’t go your way, Hitesh says there are two things. One is always try to understand what happened and when it goes against your instinct, what did you expect it to do? Be open to the possibility that you might have missed something.

(01:03):

Corey says that this requires a level of humility that doesn’t exist in high quantities in sales, even though it should. One of the things these three have learned over the years is that when something starts working when it shouldn’t, it can be scary. But in the digital world, everything is deterministic. There are causes and effects, and there’s no such thing as waiting or hoping that something fixes itself. As Hitesh puts it, you have to have a childlike curiosity and naivete, especially in the digital world where computers are deterministic. Join us for this episode of Market Dominance Guys, the power of childlike curiosity in the digital world of sales.

Corey Frank (01:44):

Excellent. Hey, here we are. Welcome to the Market Dominance Guys, with Corey Frank and Chris Beall. Chris, we got a new one for you, right? As we talked about the other day, we have the sage of sales, the prophet of profit, the Hawking of hawking, and the Tom Cruise of outbound calling.

Chris Beall (02:00):

That’s so embarrassing.

Corey Frank (02:02):

Well, hey, I said it just like you wrote it, right? The Tom Cruise of outbound calling I think it was. Well, if that’s the case, well, it’s good to have you, Chris. We have a very special guest, internally inside those four virtual walls of ConnectAndSell, the brains behind all of the effort and engineering and all of your good ideas, the origins of all your good ideas probably over the years, Hitesh Shah, who I would say is maybe not the Tom Cruise, the Amitabh Bachchan of ConnectAndSell of outbound calling.

(02:31):

So welcome, Hitesh. It’s long overdue to actually have you here on the Market Dominance Guys podcast.

Hitesh Shah (02:37):

Thank you. Glad to be here, Corey.

Corey Frank (02:39):

I don’t think we have any episodes, Chris, one of these days we got poll between the two of you, a legacy version of Clipmedia. Because for ladies and gentlemen in the audience, I am on the phone here, we’re on the podcast with Chris Beall and Hitesh, who are the inventors, the co-founders of Clipmedia, an old product that is the precursor to, man, all things Zoom, all things GoToMeeting. If we would’ve only stuck with that product 15 years ago, holy cats, 20 years ago it’s been around.

Chris Beall (03:11):

Yeah, it is.

Corey Frank (03:11):

What do you think, Chris? Can you dust that off? Yeah.

Chris Beall (03:14):

Yeah. Hitesh and I met at a company that a venture capitalist asked me, a very good friend who had actually worked with me at one company back when he was an operator, and he asked me to take a look at this company. Wouldn’t tell me what the name was, he gave me an address in Silicon Valley. I was in Iowa at the time. So I came out and I stayed in this secure corporate guest house, this apartment, and I actually walked over to the company and they put me in a room. It was weird. I’m sitting in this room and they bring me coffee and I’m just looking around, it’s a conference room. And then these guys all start coming in and I had an immediate impression of one of them, Hitesh, and I said, “If my job here is to make some changes in this company, there’s one guy is going to stay, and it’s that guy.”

[NEW_PARAGRAPH]And it was before he ever opened his mouth. It was just the way he walked into the room, it was dead obvious to me that he was honest and he knew what he was talking about and that he was really smart. And we came to a certain point in the presentation where they asked me what I thought and I said, “Your product’s a fake,” and I took them to through why it was a fake and everybody else got weird and Hitesh had this, “I told you so,” look on his face. And we’ve been together ever since. That was in 2005, so a little while ago.

Corey Frank (04:29):

Well, if you got that impression before he opened his mouth, holy cats, after he opened his mouth, sounds like you weren’t disappointed. So anyway, it’s good to have you Hitesh. With our eight listeners, it’s good to expand their horizons a little bit on beyond just market dominance, but getting actually into some of the weeds and some of the tactics. That’s the fun stuff, certainly for me and Chris and some of the guests that we’ve had over the years. Right, Chris? And I think right before we were on air, we were talking about one that I found fascinating and maybe the eight other listeners will too, and that’s a couple things called jitter. But even before we get to jitter, let’s talk a little bit about the conversation you had about everything that in outbound sales and Hitesh get your thoughts on this too, is actually counterintuitive and how you approach it. And maybe set up the conversation that you had and what led to that nugget to that young sales manager.

Chris Beall (05:21):

All yours Hitesh, everything’s counterintuitive. Funny thing is Hitesh is so smart, he’s the guy to whom it’s all intuitive.

Corey Frank (05:30):

He’s so far beyond the curvature of the earth, he comes around the other side.

Chris Beall (05:34):

Exactly.

Hitesh Shah (05:35):

Yeah, if you start from the basics story, as you know, us techies especially, we don’t like to be sold to. So the number one contrary thing about sales is you shouldn’t be selling anything. You should just be trying to help. And if you go down from that path into the world of who you’re targeting, the mechanics, the nooks and crannies at the end of the day in terms of what you’re trying to actually achieve by calling a list of people, you’d often find that the list of titles that you put together that you think are the ones that are going to end up buying your product, you start calling on them and then you realize the people at the high up who have the money, they don’t have the time or an inclination to listen to you on the first go.

(06:18):

So you often have to start at the bottom. You have to tailor your message to what the business problems that company’s facing, make it more relevant and then elevate your pitch up to the top. So I often find in our product, especially people go after economic buyers only to burn themselves because they can’t hold … Especially in a cold conversation, it’s very hard. Unless you have the gravitas that Chris often brings or you often bring to the table because of your experience in the industry, it’s very hard to open a conversation and come across as somebody who’s more knowledgeable than you are, and who can literally open your eyes to things that you’ll want to do differently for your own business.

Corey Frank (06:57):

[inaudible 00:06:57].

Hitesh Shah (06:57):

So that’s [inaudible 00:06:58] thing.

Corey Frank (06:59):

As we dive into even, it’s incredibly helpful, even a big dumb farm animal like me needs to keep that in mind is helping versus always pitching and selling. But let’s take a scenario, Hitesh and Chris about where I think I know my business and I see a blip.

Hitesh Shah (07:15):

Right.

Corey Frank (07:15):

And I see a blip either in contact rates or conversation conversion rates that I didn’t expect and I can’t explain. What’s the thought process that typically I would have, and how should I maybe approach that problem? Because otherwise, is it okay just to guess if my board or my senior managers asked me, “Hey listen, why did you hit X amount today? Or Y amount yesterday? Or why did this blip here or why did this blip here?” How do I go about analyzing what the rationale, what the reasons are to deduce can I do it again or is it just the jet stream and I got lucky?

Chris Beall (07:51):

One of the funniest things about business, I’ll jump in on this one, is that there are people who see everything as negative. So everything that’s unusual that happens as a harbinger of doom. And there are other people who see everything as positive, but then everybody shares this thing when good things are happening, they don’t question them. And the key to market dominance is when good things are happening, find out why. You need to be as aggressive and curious about good surprises as about what you think of as negative surprises. Because neither one conforms to your model, which means your model’s wrong.

(08:33):

They’re both telling you the same thing. Your model is wrong. And until you understand the relationship between your model and the world, you can’t safely even make the short term predictions that allow you to do sensible things. Hitesh and I have built a lot of stuff together and one of the scariest things is when something works when you think that it shouldn’t or it starts working when it didn’t used to, and the lay people always do this, it’s like, “Well, I guess it didn’t work 87% of the time, but now it works 58% of the time.”

(09:08):

It’s like, “No, we live in a digital world, man.” The world that Hitesh and I live in when it comes to technology, I’ll tell the audience, I’m embarrassed to say it because I’m not very good at it anymore, but I used to be a fairly serious technologist, but in the digital world, everything’s deterministic. Everything’s deterministic, and statistics will therefore apply in order to understand stuff that the fact of the matter is that if statement somewhere down inside that computer, it went one way or it went another, it didn’t go somewhere in between. And on Tuesdays it does one thing and a Wednesday it does another. There are hardware problems in the world.

Corey Frank (09:47):

So Chris-

Chris Beall (09:47):

In the world of software, everything has a cause.

Corey Frank (09:50):

So for the Pittsburgh Steeler fans out there, what do you mean by deterministic?

Chris Beall (09:53):

I mean there are causes and effects. Say you’ve got to start your car and your car goes [inaudible 00:10:00] and you think, “Oh, but if I keep trying, it’ll start eventually.” Well, it could if your car is old enough because maybe there’s some physical condition that you’re changing by running the starter. But if you have a digital car, like Hitesh has a Tesla and it doesn’t start, if you can reboot it, good, but if you can’t reboot it trying over and over, it’s not like looking at the phase of the moon or something. It’s got a state inside of it and that state is stuck. And this is a extremely hard thing for folks to understand, laypeople who don’t build it, who deal in the digital world. And Hitesh, you must have spent a lot of your life trying to explain to somebody, “No, it’s not a matter of trying or waiting or hoping it fixes itself.” We actually have to stop and we have to dig in. And I know it’s a disappointment, but we have to stop and we have to dig in.

Hitesh Shah (11:00):

Absolutely. Yeah. Especially coming from a country where there’s a temple around the corner on every street, you’re always hoping and praying. Talk about counterintuitive Corey, that’s another thing that’s counterintuitive. But to Chris’s point, you almost need a childlike curiosity and naivete. At the end of the day, especially in the digital world, computers are deterministic because they take a specified set of instructions and then they execute them in a specified way and they always produce a consistent outcome. This is why computers and people, people are funny. You never know what reaction a given action will invite. Whereas for computers, it’s very different all the time. So if you take the view that my set of beliefs are just that, those are beliefs and they’re often validated by their data because your beliefs come from experience, so many of them will actually hold true and they will be confirmed by what you find.

(12:00):

But at the same time, there’s always, always, always an element of surprise in pretty much everything from what you expect out of certain call or what you expect a certain list to do or what you expect a certain person to respond. So to Chris’s point, Corey, for me it’s all about curiosity and naivete. So two things, one is always be trying to understand what happened and when it goes against your instinct or grain in terms of what it did versus what you expected it to do, always be open to this possibility that there is something that you missed or have missed for a very long time versus trying to dismiss it away as an anomaly or something that only happens rarely or whatnot.

Corey Frank (13:28):

That’s fascinating. I bet you see that trait of not just trying to understand what happened, but to admit that you probably missed something.

Hitesh Shah (13:28):

Yes.

Corey Frank (13:39):

That’s a level of humility that probably doesn’t exist in too much quantities in sales, which is counterintuitive itself because it really should. As you had said, if everything is good, I don’t have to do anything. I don’t have to analyze anything because everything is good. What do you say to that, Hitesh and Chris, is how do you teach that? As sales reps, it’s always the client’s problem, or the prospects. That’s why they didn’t buy or was my data, that’s why they didn’t pick up and why they didn’t convert. Rarely do I have that engineering mindset in sales, but it sounds like it could be really helpful if we did.

Chris Beall (14:10):

Hitesh, you make such a great point about naivete. What’s so funny is cultivated naivete is the key to maintaining curiosity in the face of mysteries. You get a mystery and you need to be deliberately naive so that you return to an earlier state where you’re not so confident that you understand it and then you go after it. In sales, the issue is it’s very difficult to return in public, in front of a prospect, to a naive and curious state because the prospect themselves is on a knife’s edge when it comes to having confidence in you. And so we’re allowed to … With each other, Hitesh and I used to commute together in the Bay Area. I’d pick you up every morning at your house.

Hitesh Shah (15:04):

[inaudible 00:15:04]

Chris Beall (15:04):

In my little Chevy Volt. We’d drive the long road up to 280 and all that stuff up to San Mateo, and we’d work all the way up. And it was very freeing because we were going through the world looking in the same direction and questioning everything. That’s really what you do when you build technology, is you question everything. You can’t quite do that with a prospect because it does have a predictable result with regard to the prospect’s confidence in you. So it’s a bigger challenge in sales than it is in technology. The technology doesn’t care. I remember I had a meeting very early on at ConnectAndSell where our engineering team had gone to do something else, and a board member asked me, “Well, what are you going to do when the system goes down?” And I say, “It’s not a dog, it’s inanimate.”

(15:50):

It’s not going to whine by the front door and wonder when it’s masters coming home. You just restart it. It has no feelings. But when you’re in sales, the other person does have feelings, and in fact, their feelings are the primary input and output of the entire sales process, and you’re just a processor of their feelings.

Corey Frank (16:11):

Yeah, I love that.

Chris Beall (16:12):

It’s more delicate, and I think the top salespeople in the world take Hitesh’s cultivated naivete and pull it off in front of the prospect in real time in a way that enhances confidence. And if you can do that, you can sell anything. Of course, you will only sell stuff you sincerely believe it, but for the same reason. I don’t know, what do you think about that, Hitesh? Is that a boundary that between the inanimate, you and I don’t have to give a damn about what the system thinks about us because it doesn’t think about us, but we have to care about what the prospect thinks about us, but still be curious.

Hitesh Shah (16:50):

Absolutely. Absolutely. And in fact, so Corey, interestingly, for the first time that Chris brought up the idea of ConnectAndSell, you go, “It’s a no-brainer.” You 10X somebody’s conversations, you’ll get 10X the output. And sure enough, to Chris’s point, we always notice this CT as a classic ABC. The A players, they immediately realize that something that’s coming at you so fast, you have to adapt. You may not have the time to research, you may not have the time to understand who you’re talking to. You pick up the conversation from, “Hi, how’s your day going?” Or, “Happy Tuesday,” or, “Happy Friday,” or whatever, to the point of engaging you with what you are, discovering that during the call and then layering in your expertise and how you can help. Then you have the B players where they get the call to a point where the call isn’t awkward, but then really it’s not a sales call, it’s all about just back foot.

(17:51):

I got somebody on the phone, let me try to talk to them and see where the conversation goes. And then of course, we have the C players where it’s deer in headlights, the stage fright. So talk about counterintuitive, for me to discover that for ConnectAndSell to be effective and as powerful as it’s meant to be you needed good list, you needed good reps, and more importantly, you needed reps who could easily be put up on the stage in front of an audience impromptu and improve upon their pitch and skill or whatever, the conversation talk track or whatever. So I think that is key. There’s another thing that I wanted to mention to you, Corey, in terms of we learn these things more often than you would like. As smart people like to think we figured things out and we know it all.

(18:37):

So typically you have a product and you have a personal in mind. You are selling it to a CTO or a VP of sales or VP of marketing, or what have you. There are often these instances that we discovered few years into the business where the person at the other end really is not a stable title. And SMBs, this is a great example for SMBs, who picks up the phone is typically not the decision maker. You have to ask for the decision maker, and that becomes your contact. So you’re essentially always asking for referral query.

(19:09):

So in that case, your perfect list is not the list of people that you thought that you want to target. It’s anybody that can pick up that form and then you have to rely on your skill to understand who the decision maker for your particular offering or product is, and then talk to them. And that becomes your real list. So there’s almost this notion of a first order list that’s not a real list that gets you the actual list that you create. And in that case, your targeting and everything is very different. So that’s an example I wanted to bring up.

Corey Frank (19:40):

So from an analysis perspective, I think we talked about this the other day when we had met, is this concept of what your list is trying to tell you, bingo. When I look at that, your dialer, I may see residue, Hitesh, that says that, “Well, my dial to contact rate is doing really well and my conversation conversion rate is doing really well.” But if I’m not ultimately talking to the right person, then I’m going to get pipeline bloat and I’m going to think it’s the sales reps problem when it really probably originated maybe in my list. Is that what you’re talking about when what you’re dialing looks like [inaudible 00:20:22]?

Hitesh Shah (20:22):

Exactly. In fact, Chris might be able to … Chris, the breakthrough script, you probably should walk Corey through what that did for us and why. And I think that’s a phenomenal example, Corey, of just the opening tactic that can make a world of difference. And we have data point after data point after data point to illustrate that.

Chris Beall (20:41):

Well, yeah, the whole breakthrough script thing actually was an accidental discovery. We had a rep in Denver, who the dataset, he was doing better than everybody else, but everybody’s intuition said that that can’t possibly be the case. So call it, what happens when you walk into a room and the family dog is juggling three balls? What do you say to yourself, that you don’t understand juggling, or is that a dog? It’s a difficult problem. And so one of our people, Chad Burmeister, who was running that outfit at the time, had a brilliant idea. He said, “I’m going to put this guy in one room. I’m going to put the second best guy in terms of numbers in another room and just do a natural experiment. Let people listen to them and then see how those people behave.” I don’t think I ever would’ve thought this one up, by the way, because it wasn’t mechanistic enough.

(21:32):

It was like, “Let’s just see what happens and gather some more data.” And what happened was one of the people in the room with the guy who was doing really well started saying a different thing at the beginning of the conversation and all of his results, not the rest of the conversation, but all the way through, all the way to closing of the deal, everything was better. And I was like, “How could that be?” Well, that’s where you have to question yourself. I didn’t know dogs could juggle. Is this dog or do I not know what juggling is? How could it be that the first seven seconds of the conversation could condition the close six weeks later? It seems impossible. In fact, this entire podcast is about that fact. The fact that the first seven seconds of the conversation will actually condition the entire relationship.

(22:24):

And we didn’t know why, but we went with it. And I think that’s another part of being really good at anything where you don’t know very much. And I think the key to all this is you just have to admit you don’t know very much, is when you find a fact of some kind or a correlation of some kind, stay open to the possibilities of what might be the cause and what might be the effect. But go ahead and push on it so you generate more data, but don’t just accept it. So this took about two and a half years before I stumbled onto part two of the breakthrough script, which was a person who is a CEO who wanted to hire salespeople. And I will never allow a CEO who doesn’t know how to hire salespeople to do it. I just say, “What are we going to learn? We’re going to learn that you don’t know how to hire a salesperson, but we already know that. So let’s not do that. How about if you sell yourself?”

[NEW_PARAGRAPH]”What do you mean?” “Well, you do the cold calling yourself.” “Well, oh, I can’t do that.” So I forced this poor guy to do his own cold calling using ConnectAndSell, and he said, “I need a script.” I said, “I don’t know anything about scripts.” And he said, “Well, I do. I write scripts for other people’s TED talks.” And we spent four and a half hours on a Saturday morning writing the second part of the breakthrough script, not for the world, but for one guy who needed a script, and he happened to be a script expert. Those two things came together, five sentences came out of it. I wrote a relatively well received article called Five Sentences That’ll Change Your Life. And then it was another two years later when Chris Voss told me why it worked. Now that’s the kind of patience it takes. It’s ironic, you’re in a world where things move really fast. The cold call, boom, boom, boom. To learn about stuff that’s happening fast. You have to be patient because it’s going to be slow.

(24:18):

It always takes a long time to learn about fast stuff. It just does because it goes by, and it worked or didn’t work. Well, what really happened? Who knows. You need better instrumentation. It’s a funny thing, and it’s very similar to what we do, ConnectAndSell or Hitesh and I and others who put together this system as a realtime system. Things happen in it really, really fast, billion times a second stuff’s going on in there. Performance is everything if you want smoothness. And so it’s fundamentally a system that is very slow for us to understand. Today we have something going on. Today suddenly connect rates for two days in our own shop with our own people are twice what we’ve seen before. We don’t know what that means.

Corey Frank (25:07):

But that’s a good thing. That’s great.

Chris Beall (25:08):

No, it’s a bad thing. It’s a bad thing. It’s really good in that we set 48 meetings today, our average has been 22 meetings, and recently since we introduced fast phone numbers has bumped up to about 30, but 48. So it’s a good thing that it’s happening, but it’s a bad thing to accept it and just blindly move on.

Corey Frank (25:31):

The dog knows how to juggle, just deal with it.

Chris Beall (25:33):

Well, the dog’s [inaudible 00:25:36].

Corey Frank (25:36):

When you were at work, the dog was learning to juggle. That’s what happened. Some things are out of your control.

Links from today’s episode:

ConnectAndSell – https://connectandsell.com 
Branch49 – https://branch49.com 

Hitesh Shah on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/hiteshrshah/ 
Chris Beall on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-beall-7859a4/ 
Corey Frank on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/coreyfrank/ 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

In part two of this series, Barry Trailer, Chris and Corey bring a touch of humor to the conversation on the topic of sales and how it relates to the corporate business world today. Barry emphasizes the importance of establishing and elevating relationships over time, stating that sales isn’t about predicting anything but rather bringing people together. He compares the unpredictability of sales to the unpredictability of a baseball game, where even the best players are out 70% of the time. Chris Beall adds that the desire for predictability is a universal human desire, but sales is about doing things that have a reasonable shot of bringing people together so that problems can be solved that would otherwise be left unsolved. There is even a reference to fortune tellers, who are able to convince people to believe in the impossible. They guys agree that while the game of sales has not changed, the tools available to do it have improved, and the ability to access and share information has greatly increased, making sales performance level much higher today than in the past.

If you haven’t listened to the first half of this series, we highly recommend you to check it out, “The Scarcest Commodity in Corporate Business Today.”

 

Full episode transcript below:

—-more—-

Announcer (00:06):

Welcome to another session with the Market Dominance Guys, a program exploring all the high stakes, speed bumps and off ramps of driving to the top of your market, with our hosts, Chris Beall from ConnectAndSell, and Corey Frank from Branch 49.

(00:22):

In part two of this series, Barry Trailer, Chris and Corey bring a touch of humor to the conversation on the topic of sales and how it relates to the corporate business world today. Barry emphasizes the importance of establishing and elevating relationships over time, stating that sales isn’t about predicting anything, but rather bringing people together. They compare the unpredictability of sales to the unpredictability of a baseball game, where even the best players are out 70% of the time. Chris adds that the desire for predictability is a universal human desire, but sales is about doing things that have a reasonable shot of bringing people together so that problems can be solved that would otherwise be left unsolved. There’s even a reference to fortune tellers who are able to convince people to believe in the impossible. Listen to this episode of the Market Dominance Guys, The Sales Cycle: Lengthening Is Not Always A Bad Thing.

Barry Trailer (01:19):

Now, I’ll just say this. It took me a while to get to this place, and I think it’s worth saying. Way back when, when I was at Oracle giving that talk, one of the things that I was saying then and still say is, “I think business is just an excuse for us all to hang out together.” And people would hear that and they’d say, “Oh, you really are from California.” And it wasn’t until I was invited into Salesforce around 2015 to give a talk on innovation that I came up with a second part of that, which is, “Hang out together to do what?” And I think the answer is to do good, to make this a better place, to establish and elevate relationships over time. That’s our definition of selling. And if you can make a difference, if you can connect folks, add value, move this thing along, I think that’s a job worth doing.

Corey Frank (02:16):

For sure. No, that’s beautiful. I like that a lot. I think, Chris, you certainly in your team with the Flight School, to what Barry is talking about, you’ve probably been part of many organizations and many individuals that maybe have been in sales one year five times or one year three times. And all you do is teach him the basics of Flight School, that it’s okay to have turbulence. It doesn’t mean you did something wrong to have an objection or to have a stall. Maybe you talk a little bit about that and how it ties into what Barry’s saying, because you see that I understand it now and I can actually fall in love with this profession after so many years of doing it poorly.

Chris Beall (02:59):

Yeah. Flight School’s been interesting to me for a couple of reasons. One is I’m an educator by background. My degree is in education and physics. People tend to think of me as more the physics type, but then they go, “Well, how is it you do this other thing?” Well, sales and education are highly intertwined, both in the training part of sales, but also just in doing it. I mean, you’re bringing people together. If they’re not having new thoughts and they’re not thinking about doing new things, no sale is going to occur.

Corey Frank (03:27):

There’d be no sale.

Chris Beall (03:29):

So, it’s essentially an educational discipline in that sense. And it’s also, and I’ve told you before, Corey, why I in this particular situation I’m in, I believe that sales done well is how we reduce the friction at the bottleneck of the innovation economy, and its innovations that allow us to live together peacefully. And so that’s the essence of the society we live in, is that we innovate in order to bring sufficient convenience to many people that they can psychologically, sociologically, and economically coexist with people that aren’t perfectly like them, like are not in their family.

(04:15):

With the dissolution of the village throughout most of the world many, many years ago, we have to figure out how to live with each other. And interestingly enough, it’s innovation that does that, that gives us the ability to do that. And sales is what brings innovation from idea back there in the lab somewhere to reality and actually being used. So, to me, it’s a sacred trust to pursue. When I think about things like Flight School, I always think about cycle times. And I come out of the world of manufacturing where we had to think about stuff like cycle times and quality and throughput.

Corey Frank (04:15):

And scrap rate.

Chris Beall (04:57):

Yeah. And then you try to figure out what can be addressed. And it’s always, if you’re a theory of constraints guy like me, it’s always the bottleneck has got to be identified, characterized. You have to understand it’s investability, and then you make the investment and then you sit back and watch and you see where the bottleneck moves. That’s the cycle of business improvement that some people believe in, and I certainly deeply believe in. The beauty of Flight School is all of that happens within four sessions. And so you have short enough cycle time to know what happened because you’re tying causes to affect when you can observe the actual intermediary, which is the actions.

(05:38):

In sales, I think, one of our biggest problems is deal cycle times themselves are long, but that’s not what is interesting to me that creates the problem. It’s also the opportunity. I’ve been measuring cycle times between conversation and pipeline build and first conversation, and the average cycle time, “Oh, I can do it this way,” I went back and looked at one month, the first conversation was from January 1, 2019 to January 31, 2019, and asked, “What percentage of the post-2019 pipeline for all of our customers was built in conversations that started 11 months or before ago/” that’s an interesting thing to look at, and the answer turned out to be 64%.

Corey Frank (06:25):

Really?

Chris Beall (06:26):

So, when you look at that and ask, “Okay. So, now how long is that compared to the anticipated tenure of the people who are going to be in there making the sales,” you realize the most of the making took place well before their time, and they’re unaware of the connection between that conversation that took place on January 17, 2019 and the deal that was won or lost or whatever in November of 2022. That connection is not understood. And when you combine it, it’s not measured. We’re measuring it, I think for the first time, actually. I don’t think anybody’s ever seen it before because you have to actually have machinery that says, “The conversations are all delivered through the machine so that I can measure the damn things.”

(07:15):

So, you combine that with the short duration of employment, which I think is a consequence of that, by the way, and then you combine it with the agency problem, which is that most folks in sales are agents, not owners. And so their responsibility is to their own future, not to the company’s future. Most of what they’re working on will benefit the company in a future that they will not personally experience, and therefore they compress it down to the number. And there’s a lot of luck involved. What I think’s so interesting is how much luck is involved, because these timeframes don’t come together in a way where you can make the connection, close the loop and make predictions.

Barry Trailer (07:58):

Well, you said a couple of things that I think are pretty interesting. One, I didn’t know you came from manufacturing, but one of the lines that we used to use all the time was, “If the head of manufacturing took over the sales organization, the first thing he or she would do is shut it down because the scrap rate is unbelievable.” I mean, the scrap rate is ridiculous. The outcome of forecast deals is less than 50%, and that’s a fraction of the stuff that was accepted into the plant to work on in the first place.

Chris Beall (07:58):

I know.

Barry Trailer (08:30):

So, the scrap rate is nuts. And the other thing is this whole notion of cycle time. I mean, I don’t disagree that we haven’t measured it before, but I also don’t think it matters. Everybody thinks reduced cycle… In manufacturing, reducing that is a good thing. But in sales, we’re not just talking about machinery. And if the deal is closing this week, whether it’s been in process for six months or six weeks or six hours doesn’t really matter if it closes this week. If you had to work on it for six months and nurture it along, then that’s a reason to reduce cycle time. If you are vulnerable to competition coming in and snatching this at the 11th hour, that’s a reason to reduce cycle time.

(09:22):

Let’s just imagine that instead of four months from blissfully unaware through awareness and education and deliberation before we get to negotiation, let’s just say if that takes four months and we’re constantly pressing people to, “Let’s get to a decision, let’s close this baby out,” what if it turns out that just leaving the buyer alone for a month yielded higher close rates? I mean, that could happen.

(09:59):

They actually play with it for a month and say, “This is awesome. How did we ever live without this? Boom. Let’s do this thing.” But we don’t have that because we aren’t measuring in a consistent way, in an accurate way, and everybody’s trying to jam it and get it done and get it in this quarter and all that nonsense. But it may be that lengthening the sales cycle in some cases is great if it doesn’t increase your vulnerability and it doesn’t increase your cost of sales and it does increase buyer satisfaction and all the I’s are dotted and so on. What the hell? It’s closing this week. Celebrate.

Chris Beall (10:35):

Yeah, celebrate and broaden your portfolio. I love long cycle times, but I love variable cycle times by their nature because they represent reality. Everybody should realistically be working at their own pace, so to speak, with regard to making big change decisions. And if you’re selling anything less than a big change decision, go get a better job. So, if you encounter early, like our friend Henry Wojdyla… Henry runs a business called RealSource and he’s been a guest on the show and he’s one of my customers. And what Henry does is he buys medical office buildings way, way off market way early, and he builds relationships in order to do that. And he has conversations to initiate and sustain and nurture those relationships, and to gain intelligence that allows him to make good decisions as to where he applies his time. Interestingly, here is a guy who works in 15-minute increments that are precisely managed for maximum productivity because he is the machine.

(11:39):

So, we provide the Iron Man suit for the machine, but he asked us, and nobody’s ever asked us this before, “What are the exact 15-minute intervals on each day of the week when I should be talking to investors or developers or physicians or nobody?” And Thomas Young built him a beautiful chart and he works to that. So, here’s a guy running huge cycle times, highly variant, no control over them. You can’t make somebody want to sell a medical office building. “I’m sorry, you’ve got to do this today.” He’s trying to get them well before necessity and succeeding at it, and yet he’s managing his own day with very tight time constraints because he knows that that’s the cost element that is going to run as it runs also.

(12:29):

As we say, overhead is a race horse. It eats while you sleep. And so you are that racehorse when you’re a lone contributor out there doing this stuff. So, it’s always fascinating to me that somebody like Henry, who is a genius, looks at that and says, “Therefore, broaden your portfolio.” His instinct and his math is exactly right, which is don’t push what’s in front of you. Get more going on and let it flow and make sure that your closed loop with regard to the information flow coming back from all of those elements of your portfolio. That is, keep an eye on it, but don’t spend too much doing that. And I think that his theory is superior to most.

Barry Trailer (13:56):

Well, to me, the heart of all of this, back in the day when I was running and teaching Miller Heiman programs, the only concept that was in every program was win-win. And I’ve done, if anybody goes to our site, salesmastery.com, we have all these videos, no charge, you can just watch them, and the four parter is Win-Win. The first part is introducing the idea and then the rules for playing win-win and then how to make it operational. But the last part is coming from abundance rather than scarcity. To play win-win, you need to have both courage and compassion. And to do that, you need to be coming from abundance. When you’ve got to have it, when this is the only deal and this is either going to make or break you and it’s all or none, you’re screwed because you’re desperate.

(14:51):

And I talk about, in the video, it’s kind of this perverse law of nature. When you need it the most, you get it the least. And when you need it the least, you seem to get it the most. And part of that is winners want to go with winners. And so if they feel, sense, smell your desperation, they start asking more questions like, “What’s the matter with this guy?” If it’s like, you know what? No wine before it’s time. If you’re not ready, we want to make sure that you’ve got all your questions answered, that you understand why we’re doing this. You understand the risks of delay. But we understand the risk of you not having your questions answered. So, let’s get there together.

(15:31):

And if you’ve got tons of deals you’re working on called pipeline and you’re in touch with folks and you’re staying in touch and you know that people will call you when they need you, then it’s a pretty good living. And most people universally, their pipelines are anemic. They do not have enough good stuff going. And so they drag all this other crap along hoping against hope that somehow it’s going to turn into business, and it doesn’t. And everybody’s like fingers crossed and voodoo dolls and whatever. It’s just nuts. It’s nuts.

Corey Frank (16:08):

Yeah. Well, you talk about those, I believe in one of your research works, talking about world-class firms. And I think, again, I think the number was about 94% of the world-class firms that your firm talked to and surveyed agreed with an understanding of what good looks like, best practices, similar. Chris, I think certainly what ConnectAndSell and what Flight School does is flush out probably more of these best practices that should be informed to the world, such as looking back when the pipeline originated. That meant that’s a good best practice. But Barry, when you look at these 94% that they know what good looks like, and I think what you were saying before we jumped on air here was that less than 6% of actual firms flush out as being world class.

Barry Trailer (17:02):

Well, 6% of our survey population.

Corey Frank (17:05):

Granted. 6% of your samples said that.

Barry Trailer (17:08):

We had 900 firms in that survey. So, yes.

Corey Frank (17:13):

Well, that’s still a pretty large sample set though. I would-

Barry Trailer (17:15):

Yeah, I think it’s a reasonable reflection. And they have an externally informed definition of what good looks like. In fact, I think it’s Kevin Dorsey. K.D.

Corey Frank (17:25):

Yep.

Barry Trailer (17:26):

Kevin Dorsey, aka K.D. He’s a funny guy. I like his stuff. Anyway, he calls it WGLL. What Good Looks Like.

Corey Frank (17:38):

Yep. Yep. Good Looks Like

Barry Trailer (17:38):

W-G-L-L.

Corey Frank (17:39):

And then everybody knows what better looks like too, right? It’s like, “Hey, this is what good looks like, and I know what my better looks like.”

Barry Trailer (17:39):

No.

Corey Frank (17:39):

No?

Barry Trailer (17:46):

No, I don’t think they do.

Corey Frank (17:48):

No? So they-

Barry Trailer (17:48):

I don’t think they know what either of them looks like. And also-

Corey Frank (17:52):

Well, here’s the question. So, if I struggle with knowing what good looks like and I just want more. It could be more pipeline, as you were saying. It could be better quality sales people. It could be having my recruiting team get better people. It could be, “I need better systems. If only, if only, if only if I had X.” When you look at those things, those requests from those 900 in that sample size from your most recent survey, which one stands out in your mind, and Chris, I’d care to get your impression on this when Barry tells us, of the one that casts the widest swath, the biggest net, to fix the biggest thing? Obviously I need to figure out, listen, there’s 12 World Class criteria in the sales mastery world. Is there an 80/20 where, “Hey, this one thing will ameliorate 80% of what ails me”? Is there one that stands out more than another?

Barry Trailer (18:47):

Well, did the SPS survey and we had 850 responses to that, and it’s a year newer than the World Class. And when we looked at all the variables and all the permutations, we weren’t running AI on this, I don’t want to make it sound like more than was, but we looked at dozens and dozens of combinations. The winning combination that got the highest revenue attainment I think was 106%, had the highest percentage of reps meeting and beating quota was over 70%, had the lowest turnover and so on. There were four things they did. Number one, they were coaching. Their managers were coaching in a consistent manner. So, I’m going to say a coaching culture because that doesn’t happen. And I’ll tell you, the room always gets quiet when we ask who’s coaching the coach. So, a coaching culture says everybody is on the journey.

(19:42):

Everybody has a coach, including the sales leader. So, number one was coaching, consistent coaching. Number two, they were formal sales process or above. So, we have formal, agile and customized. They were at least formal, which means, “We have a sales process. Managers and reps are exposed to it. They’re expected to use it. That use is reinforced and enforced. It’s the way we do business around here.” And there are other things that can add to that, but that was number two. Basic sales training was above average or exceptional. That is they had sales training, basic sales training. And training on the usage of the technology they had was above average or excellent. You have these tools. Why not train people on how to use them?

Corey Frank (20:34):

Yeah, gotcha.

Barry Trailer (20:35):

What a concept. Those were the four, and that blew everything else away.

Corey Frank (20:39):

Chris, what do you think of that? I mean, I listen to all these here, Barry. And Chris, we’ve had many guests over the last three years, four years on Market Dominance Guys who are certainly key practitioners of their craft. Is it wrong, Barry, that none of these blow me away, that I’m thinking there’s got to be one elusive, mountaintop Kilimanjaro that I’ll never be able to attain to hit the world class status? And instead, it seems to be things that, Chris, certainly you teach these in Flight School. You’ve been a CEO for a while.

Barry Trailer (21:13):

I just gave it to you. I just gave it to you.

Chris Beall (21:15):

I mean, what you’re saying is what? There’s no silver bullet?

Barry Trailer (21:19):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (21:20):

By the way, most people, they don’t know where that comes from. It was The Long Ranger. He always had silver bullets, the latest bright shiny object. This will do it. And if that one didn’t, the next one will. And I think that, by and large, and we have lots of friends, we have sponsors that are solution providers, but I think by and large, the conversation has been hijacked by solution providers who are providing technology. And the answer is, yeah, technology is an enabler. It’s an augmenter. But coaching, training, practice, these are all elements of mastery. That’s why we call it that. There are five keys to mastery, and coaching and practice and surrender, those are all part of it. And here’s the thing that I say all the time when I’m giving the sales mastery presentation. In fact, I’m going to record it and put that up on our website. I’m going to go back. I’m going to close on what I talked about earlier, the big lie. You are your number.

(22:32):

I got into an argument one day with the VP of sales that 90% of reps don’t know how they’re doing. And he said, “That’s crap. They absolutely.” He said, “That may be true in other areas in McKinsey’s study, but not in sales.” And I said, “Okay, fill me in.” He says, “Come on, bear. 60% a plan. You’re doing lousy. 120% a plan, you’re golden.” And I said, “That’s good information, but it’s not the answer to the question, how are you doing? 60% a plan, 120% a plan or whatever percent of plan is how you’ve done so far. How are you doing? And the real question everybody really wants the answer for, how are you going to do? What’s the forecast?

(23:16):

We say forecast accuracy is an oxymoron because people are still just shooting anywhere. But here’s the deal. Quota is a company’s best guess at an account or a territory’s potential. Quota, the number, your number, is the company’s best guess at an account or a territory’s potential. It has nothing to do with your potential. So, I hear plenty of people say, “I’m 110% a plan.” I’ve never heard anybody say I’m even 100% of my potential. That’s the big deal, Corey. That’s the amazing thing. People are amazing. And if they would just focus on that mastery, self-mastery, who knows how great we could get here?

Corey Frank (24:13):

Wow, that’s a beautiful thing, Chris. And it’s a beautiful way to look at any profession, whether you’re a ditch digger or whether you’re serving Starbucks, or whether you’re slinging cold calls, or whether you’re a politician. That ties in that approach to the higher value. So, I tell you what, Chris, we got to have Barry on here at least once a quarter, I think, if anything. Because all the other guests and all that we’re so lucky and blessed to have on board, but our profession, you’re the oracle. That’s where you started back in the day. But truly, Barry the oracle to see… I love that differentiation of how are you doing versus how are you going to do? And I think, Chris, certainly having Barry on regularly, he can tell us how is our profession going to do, not just a reflection of what we’ve done, but where we’re going to go. So, Chris, any final thoughts here as we come to the close of another powerful episode of the Market Dominance Guys?

Chris Beall (25:14):

Well, yeah. Here’s a final thought. Sales is similar to a lot of other stuff where there’s high variability in outcomes even if you have low variability in performance and inputs. It just is. In that sense, it’s something like being a batter in baseball. You have a lot of control over what you do, but you don’t have that much control over what’s coming at you. And the difference between good and terrible is an eighth of an inch or a quarter of a second or whatever it happens to be. And in worlds like that, what we find is that those who do well apply mastery over reasonably long periods of time without a great deal of good feedback. That is, there’s an element of belief that they have to have in order to stick to something sufficiently to be either a good coach or to be coach-worthy, and to be somebody who can take training or give training without getting an instant attaboy out of it.

(26:26):

When you think about sales, folks are hoping to be able to predict outcomes. There’s no evidence that outcomes are individually predictable, and there’s not an awful lot of evidence among honest people that outcomes are even generally predictable. Try predicting the outcome of Q3 2022 in Q3 2021. Just give that a whirl sometime. Go back and ask people what was going to happen. Those outcomes were not particularly predictable. And try it again in 2020. Same thing, go Q3 to Q3 the year before. Your predictive ability is pretty shallow. Your ability to maintain a buffer, a financial buffer, so that you can go from here to there because you intend to actually get there, and a buffer of will and willingness and camaraderie and friendship and the stuff that keeps you going, that’s really what’s going to determine over time who is left standing, who is doing well, who is admired.

(27:35):

And it’s just the nature of the beast. And this desire to come up with predictability, it’s a universal human desire. We believe in fortune tellers. Have somebody read your poems sometime who is very sincere about it, and you’ll find yourself believing stupid shit that can’t possibly make sense. And you’ll believe it a year later and five years later and 10 years later because of our deep, deep inherent desire to be able to predict what cannot be predicted. Sales isn’t about predicting anything. It’s about doing things that have a reasonable shot of bringing people together so that problems can be solved that would otherwise be left unsolved. That’s kind of it. That’s kind of it. And if you’re not doing things that bring people together, you’re probably not going to be able to do very much good in this profession. And it’s simpler than we think, and it’s subtler than we think.

Barry Trailer (28:36):

Well, I think if you use baseball as the analogy, and there are a lot of it, if you hit 300 you’re in the Hall of Fame, which means you were out 70% of the time. Well, maybe if you hit 400. Ted Williams is the only guy who did it for a full season, 400. But still, one and a half times you were out as you were successful. But I think if you look at any sport, baseball included today, and now they’ve got all these stats with exit angles and velocity and everything else, it’s just amazing, they’re playing at a higher level than they did 50 years ago and 100 years ago. Same game, but Moneyball and all the rest of it, the sabermetrics, everything that’s been brought to bear.

(29:26):

If you look at gymnastics today versus the sixties, particularly women’s gymnastics, it’s unbelievable the difference in performance. And I think the same is true in sales. I think the ability to access information and to share information and the speed at which it’s happening, and it’s still the same game. It’s connecting people. It’s establishing and elevating relationships over time. But how you do that and the tools available to do it, and all of the-

Corey Frank (29:58):

We love the stuff, Barry, this is phenomenal. Again, I think we may boost our couple of listeners with this kind of insight that we’ve had over the last hour.

Barry Trailer (30:09):

Maybe both of them.

Corey Frank (30:09):

Both of them.

Barry Trailer (30:10):

Double them up.

Corey Frank (30:12):

So, Barry, thank you again so much for the time. We will absolutely have you back in the hot seat here. We can listen to you all day, get a state of the state of our profession. So, for the Market Dominance Guys, this is Corey Frank for Chris Beall and the ConnectAndSell team. Until next time.

Links from this episode:

Sales Mastery – https://salesmastery.com/
ConnectAndSell – https://connectandsell.com 
Branch49 – https://branch49.com 
Sales Education Foundation – https://salesfoundation.org/ 

Barry Trailer on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/barrytrailer/ 
Chris Beall on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-beall-7859a4/ 
Corey Frank on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/coreyfrank/ 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Revealing the scarcest commodity in corporate business, especially in America today, first requires an understanding of how we got there. Today Barry Trailer, Co-founder of Sales Mastery, joins Chris and Corey. He reviews the four levels of process implementation: the percentage of revenue, the target revenue plan attained, the percentage of reps meeting or beating quota, the outcome of forecast deals, and rep turnover. These are real numbers. But higher levels of relationship and higher levels of process implementation lead to higher levels of performance. And the numbers are just the numbers They continued talking about the turnover. There’s a huge contributory factor to the failure to implement significant change on the part of most sales organizations other than the change that a new leader brings in.

What is common is that the new lion, so to speak, the new CRO, the new VP of Sales, comes in and kills the cubs. They attempt to prove that whatever was being done before must not be done anymore. Because I’ve come in with my new way of doing things and territory must be marked, I was brought in to do something in a new way, and away we go. When the performance isn’t there, the CRO or the CSO takes the bullet that the CEO doesn’t want to take. But the only reason is that there’s been this unholy alliance or this unspoken agreement that as long as we make the numbers, you’ll stay out of my sandbox. Listen to this episode to see where your company falls in place in, “The Scarcest Commodity in Corporate Business Today.”

Full episode transcript below:

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Announcer (00:06):

Welcome to another session with the Market Dominance Guys, a program exploring all the high stakes, speed bumps, and off-ramps of driving to the top of your market, with our hosts, Chris Beall from ConnectAndSell and Corey Frank from Branch 49.

(00:25):

Revealing the scarcest commodity in corporate business, especially in America today, first requires an understanding of how we got here. Today, Barry Trailer, co-founder of Sales Mastery, joins Chris and Corey. He reviews the four levels of process implementation: the percentage of revenue, the target revenue plan attained, the percentage of reps meeting and beating quota, the outcome of forecast deals, and rep turnover. These are real numbers. But higher levels of relationship and higher levels of process implementation led to higher levels of performance, and the numbers are just the numbers.

(01:00):

What’s common is that the new lion, so to speak, the new CRO or the new VP of sales, comes in and kills the cubs. They attempt to prove that whatever was being done before must not be done anymore. When the performance isn’t there, the CRO or the CSO takes the bullet that the CEO doesn’t want to take. But the only reason is that there’s been this unholy alliance or this unspoken agreement that as long as we’re making the numbers, you’ll stay out of my sandbox. Listen to this episode to see where your company falls in place in The Scarcest Commodity in Corporate Business Today.

Corey Frank (01:40):

Here we are once again. Welcome to another episode of The Market Dominance Guys with Corey Frank and, as always, the sage of sales, the profit of profit, the hawking of hawking, Chris Beall. Chris, good to see you once again. How are you?

Chris Beall (01:56):

It gets me every time. I was just reading about a black hole, 600 billion suns, taking a chomp out of something every day, and thinking, “The hawking of hawking.” I wish I could-

Corey Frank (02:04):

The hawking of hawking. I’ll work on a fourth here. Give me a couple of beers, football games here, and we’ll come up with something else. Right now, it’ll have to stay at the hawking of hawking. With us today, we have Mr. Barry Trailer. If you don’t know Barry and his organization, Sales Mastery, he’s been at the epicenter. He’s the Kevin Bacon of sales, thought leadership, I think, probably for the last 20 years or so. So, if you don’t know Barry, you certainly know the wake that he leaves with his experience as an executive CEO over at Miller Heiman, at GoldMine, at FrontRange Solutions, and of course, CSO Insights, certainly a publication that I’ve used, Barry, throughout the years to make me sound much smarter than I am, to defend my actions against the board’s machinations, to say, “No, no, no, no, hang on. CSO Insights says this is the direction it’s going, versus this.” That’s saved me many quarters. Barry, good to be with you here.

Barry Trailer (02:57):

It’s good to be here, and it’s really good to hear you using the data in the way it was really intended. Not just because we like running surveys, but to support chief sales officers, chief revenue officers, heads of sales-

Corey Frank (03:12):

They need backup.

Barry Trailer (03:13):

… their asks or their actions. So, yes, I-

Corey Frank (03:16):

Oh, of course. Of course. As we’ve said many times in this podcast, right, Chris, I haven’t had an original thought since 1998, so anytime something like CSO Insights comes out and I can claim those ideas with the defense of all the research that your fine team did over the years. Now, CSO Insights, that also got purchased by, I think it was Korn Ferry, correct? So, over time.

Barry Trailer (03:36):

Yeah, it’s an interesting deal. So, Miller Heiman acquired us in 2015. We had a two year earnout. That went well. Everybody did what they said they were going to. And then in 2019… Well, and Jim and I went off and started Sales Mastery in 2018 when our gig was up there. 2019, Korn Ferry bought Miller Heiman and by extension CSO Insights, and over the next year, year and a half proceeded to lay off or have all the analysts quit. And so I got in touch with them and with Byron Matthews. He was still there. And we entered into a joint research agreement where Korn Ferry was gathering the data, Jim and I would do the analysis and write up commentary, and then we would jointly release reports. And we did one on virtual selling. We did a buyer’s study and we also did their world class study.

(04:34):

I think the last one was in, I’m going to say 2021. They’re a big outfit. They don’t move particularly quickly. It took longer than we felt it should take to get stuff out. And they didn’t know exactly. They have the Korn Ferry Research Institute, but it’s mostly around HR and talent and comp. I don’t think CSO insights really fit into their wheelhouse. So, we agreed to part ways and I had actually asked them to sell CSO Insights back to us and they said instead they were just going to basically shelve it. And so if you search csoinsights.com today, you get 404 error.

Corey Frank (05:19):

Oh, that’s too bad.

Barry Trailer (05:20):

And I think they’re also letting the Miller Heiman brand basically fade away as well. So, it’s disappointing, but it’s the way it goes.

Corey Frank (05:29):

Well, you can take Barry out of the lab, but you can’t take the lab out of Barry, it seems. You’re still doing all kinds of research with your team. In fact, the Sales Performance Scorecard I think came out just recently that was published by Harvard Business Review. So, congrats to that.

Barry Trailer (05:29):

Thanks.

Corey Frank (05:42):

That’s a great wealth of information if any of the sales professionals listening have not reviewed that. But Chris, obviously you cast a pretty big shadow yourself as you know, from [inaudible 00:05:51].

Chris Beall (05:51):

Four ways didn’t win.

Corey Frank (05:51):

Yeah. Four ways didn’t win. So, how did you and Barry get together and what kind of bribe or check do we have to cash to get him? Because he showed up at this podcast with our seven listeners here, so I need to know.

Chris Beall (06:07):

Barry texted me. He texted me and we talked, and it was just yesterday. I was just so pleased to hear from him. We’ve had so many great conversations over the years, but often punctuated by long silences while we’re off doing our own various things. Actually, I owe Barry and Jim Dickie for this. One of my neighbors here in [inaudible 00:06:24] and very good friend is Pat Lynch, and he was the CSO Insights rep who signed me up as a subscriber for the first time and discovered that I’m pretty picky about data, but I kept on, as a subscriber. Actually CSO Insights was the only information source about sales that I have ever remained subscribed to from one end of its independent existence in-

Corey Frank (06:49):

Really?

Chris Beall (06:49):

… my experience to the other. And the reason for that was, I’m very skeptical of survey-oriented data work, as you know, Corey. I like data that comes directly out of machines and has no opinions associated with it. But CSO Insights did such a remarkable job of coming to meaningful conclusions with data that fundamentally at the individual data point level is a little squirrelly. It moves around from under you, but they did the real statistical work and the insight work in order to turn it into something that I could apply and that I could also recommend to others, which is in a way more important to me because as you know, I’m not capable of doing what other people tell me to do.

(07:36):

No one’s ever figured that one out yet, including myself. Like, “Hey Chris,” I say to myself, “let’s have two eggs for breakfast,” and then I find myself with the oatmeal 10 minutes later. But the ability to actually confidently say, “Hey, look at this.” The thing that struck me is still there, it’s there today in the work that Sales Mastery is doing, is the stuff is not way up here, and it’s not down here at the level of tiny tactics. This is really important, and if you don’t do it, you’re dead. And here’s how to think about it and the kinds of things to do, and it comes from data. And I don’t think anybody else has that. I think it’s unique.

Corey Frank (08:16):

With that regard, is there anything that comes to mind, Barry, over the years, put on the spot here, from a perspective of just bad advice? Or just because more people believe that there’s a flat earth and then empirically the data that you and Jim and your team put together definitively snuffed that out and said, “No, this is not the way it is. It’s this versus that.” When you talk about sales methodologies or you talk about maybe approaches, is there anything that comes to mind over the years that is so inherently bad advice that it needed somebody with the voice of CSO Insights to say, “Barry, come down the mountain with two tablets. This is how it should be”?

Barry Trailer (08:56):

I don’t know that it was inherently bad. I think sales, historically or inherently, was instinctual, tactical, gut reaction to things. And I think that sales execs and sales reps prided themselves on that history of being instinctual tactical animals. And-

Corey Frank (09:23):

I can wing it. I’ll let my personality shine.

Barry Trailer (09:26):

Well, I think not necessarily just winning personality, but we’re going to be in the moment. And I don’t know that they always called it winging it, but I think in large part that would describe what often happened and still happens. And we have been doing, Jim started this back in ’94, started doing surveys and CSO Insights, we’ve now been doing it for 20 years. And I think it’s still true that people are not acting in a data-driven way. And increasingly you hear boards and executives talking about being data-driven, but I think that means different things to different people for sure. And I think a lot of people who are saying that don’t know what it means.

(10:06):

It’s the current thing that they’re saying. Chris was saying our data was squirrelly. We never said it was squirrelly, but we always admitted that it was squishy because it was self-reported and they were, in most cases, educated guesses. People don’t really know what their cycle times are. They don’t really know what their conversion rates are from one stage to the next to the next. But when you have several hundred or a thousand responses that normalizes, and in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. We had better data than anybody, and it was consistent over time. And I think that was one of our hallmarks. And the other thing Chris was saying that I think we made it accessible and had some real boots-on-the-ground perspective and still had a management lean to things.

(10:54):

The thing that we brought to the party, brought to the table in 2007, and it stood up over the years, and you mentioned the Sales Performance Scorecard. What preceded that was the Sales Relationship Process Matrix, the SRP Matrix, and I had defined five levels of relationship back in ’94. Jim wrote an article for Forbes in 2000 defining four levels of process implementation. And our joke was it only took us seven more years to figure out we could make a five-by-four matrix out of it. But I had guys tell me after presentations I’d done or trainings or anything, they would come up and they just loved that model. People understood it. It just went on like an old shoe.

Announcer (11:46):

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

Barry Trailer (12:27):

And the thing that was great about it was that we had four metrics that we tracked, and those were metrics that people were not guessing at. So, the percentage of revenue, target revenue plan attained, the percentage of reps meeting beating quota, the outcome of forecast deals, not pipeline, but forecast deals, won, lost or no decision, and rep turnover, voluntary and involuntary. So, total rep turnover. Those are numbers that people had. Those were real numbers. And the SRP tracked those. And what we saw over time, I don’t know if this says it was the biggest mistake, but higher levels of relationship and higher levels of process implementation led to higher levels of performance. And the numbers just were the numbers. And they stood up again over 15 years.

(13:22):

We’re now, instead of SRP, we’re calling it the SPS, the Sales Performance Scorecard, is now a five-by-five matrix. We’ve redefined, and relabeled three of the levels of relationship. Instead of approved vendor, we’re now calling it transactional vendor. And then we have preferred supplier and solution consultant. And then instead of strategic contributor, we have strategic collaborator. And the highest level instead of trusted partner or trusted advisor, we’re now calling it trusted co-creator. And it’s not just wordsmithing. We think those words actually reflect the change in the balance of power, buyers and sellers, and culturally what’s been going on in the marketplace for at least the last five years.

Corey Frank (14:10):

Well, I think you talk about that in one of your trainings is even the term moving from persuasion to collaboration.

Barry Trailer (14:16):

That’s correct. Yeah.

Corey Frank (14:17):

And just how we identify with that as a sales training organization. I’m curious for Chris too, Chris and Barry, is when you think about the organizations that know those numbers, their attrition rate, their forecast rate, their conversion rate, et cetera, is it more or less a can’t or a won’t? Is it stemmed from the CRO, the VP of sales down? Does it come from enablement? Does it come from the board level down? If you have a good board that is going to have these really tight controls over the aspects of the KPIs of the business, does that trickle to sales? What are you guys seeing? Because if I have a squishy board or a squishy CEO or a product-driven CEO or board, I may not necessarily have the rigor that comes down from on high to want to put this type of thing in place.

Chris Beall (15:06):

Well, this is a hell of a topic. I think there’s a huge contributory factor to the failure to implement significant change on the part of most sales organizations other than the change that is brought in by a new leader. So, the pattern that I’m seeing a lot of, and I get to see maybe more of this than most because of the way our business works, we’re too much change already. Let’s go from not talking to people, to talking to people and then getting good at it and then actually tracking that all the way through to how much money you’re making. That’s a lot of change. That first one, especially. Let’s go from not talking to people to talking to people and getting good at it is all of mine. What we often see, almost always see, is that the new lion, so to speak, the new CRO, the new VP of sales comes in and kills the cubs.

(15:54):

Whatever was being done before must not be done anymore, because I’ve come in with my new way of doing things, and territory must be marked. And I was brought in to do something in a new way, and away we go. The challenge I see in folks getting that stuff to stick and work, even if it’s correct, even if it’s backed up by data and makes sense and then you got a shot, is the average tenure at departure is 17 months now for top sales leaders. And there are not very many things you can do in an organization in 17 months. There just are not. You have more drag, more friction than you’re aware of, and then everybody’s looking for you to leave anyway, right? I’ve often said CROs are people who are brought in to take the bullet that the CEO would prefer not to take, so they get one chance. That’s actually why the C was put in front of it.

Barry Trailer (16:50):

Well, I’m going to jump in. Because two things. I now have the answer to the question you asked earlier, Corey, but the other thing is, I agree with you that when the performance isn’t there, the CRO or the CSO takes the bullet that the CEO doesn’t want to take. But the only reason is because there’s been this unholy alliance or this unspoken agreement that as long as we are making the numbers, you’ll stay out of my sandbox. And because of that, the sales organization for far too long has been this black box that the board looks at and puts money in and hopes way more money comes out. And as long as that’s happening, everybody’s cool with it. And if that stops happening or they don’t get as much money out as they expected, then this thing you’re talking about taking the bullet or falling on this sword or however you want to describe it happens and it happens over and over again.

(17:51):

I think the biggest mistake, Corey, the answer to your question and the big lie, and I have been saying this for a long time now, and I mean it as much today as I have ever meant, is the big lie that is told to reps. And I remember when I first said this at Oracle, the entire audience cracked up. You are not your number. You are not your number. And the audience at Oracle laughed me out of the room. Your number is a reflection of what you do and how well you do it, but it’s not you. And this whole thing about good number, good rep, bad number, no donut is crap. And people who buy this lie, I consider this the big lie, is you are your number. It’s just not so. And where I’ve seen that go all the way telegraphed clear to the top, a friend of mine became a new CSO, and he was a big believer.

(18:51):

He came out of Oracle. He was a big believer in process. And when he got his new job, I said, “Danny, this is the time. Bring us in now.” And his comment was, “I want to bring you in, but first I have to make my number.” And I said, “As soon as you do that, they’re just going to turn around and say, ‘Do it again. And do it again. You don’t need process. Just do it again.'” And I think this notion and the other part of this, it’s funny, I wrote this up for an HBR article that did not get published, but I did use it in a presentation, it’s November, and the executive committee is in QBR, and the VP of sales stands up and says, “We’re 20% behind plan, and I don’t know how we’re going to make it up by the end of the year.”

(19:36):

And the head of HR and the head of legal are both sitting there thinking to themselves, “Man, I’m glad I don’t have to give that report.” And they’re all thinking it’s sales number. It’s all their number. Everybody should be sitting there thinking, “Is there anything we could do in legal to help simplify or speed things? Is there anything we could do in HR or with talent to help out or to improve things?” And I think this goes all the way back, Chris, to where I interrupted you. When sales is always saying, “Hey, if we’re making our numbers, stay out of our sandbox,” that’s great. Then when we’re not making our number, everybody’s like, “Too bad, pal. It’s your sandbox.” I think that’s a huge mistake. I think everybody thinking, “It’s sales number,” and sales thinking, “I am my number,” I think all of that is serving nobody well.

Corey Frank (20:31):

Where does that come from? Does it come from the tunnel, the stove pipe architecture that a lot of organizations came from where there’s always going to be an everlasting amount of money? These larger organizations where there’s lack of accountability at the individual level? When you see these large layoffs, Goldman 3,200, Salesforce 10,000, where does that fall at the feet of? Are people walking around saying, “Well, if sales only would’ve closed more dollars,” or, “If HR wouldn’t have spent so much on recruiting,” or, “If product wouldn’t have spent so much on a email system that no one’s using”? Where do you think stems from, that whole, “Not me. I mean, I’m glad I’m not that guy”?

Barry Trailer (21:12):

Frank Cespedes is a name you might know. He’s been an adjunct at Harvard, and he and I were presenting years ago at a conference. And he started by asking, “What is the scarcest commodity in corporate business or in American business today? What is the scarcest commodity in American business today?” And his answer was, “Accountability.” And I guess I would add to that, transparency and maybe flexibility or authenticity or something. When sales are good Steve Heiman used to say, “Rising sales hides all sins.” And it’s just, I think that the notion that when the sun’s shining, let’s make hay and everybody’s great and we’re killers. And I think the answer to your question really, Corey, is it’s just ego or hubris or something. And why’d we get the deal? Good selling? Why’d we lose the deal? Bad pricing, bad product.

Corey Frank (22:13):

I would’ve said pride myself. The scarcest commodity is pride. I know starting with me, right? Because it’s such-

Barry Trailer (22:19):

I don’t think there’s any [inaudible 00:22:21]. If there’s a lack of pride in sales, I missed it.

Corey Frank (22:26):

Yeah, exactly. No. No, it should be. But Chris and I talk a lot about the punditry class that exists in our profession because there’s no barriers to entry. I didn’t have to take a GMAT or an LSAT or get into Harvard, et cetera, to be in our profession. I just had an aunt when I was at my graduation party who picked your cheeks and says, “You’ve got a great personality. You should be in sales.” And before you know it, you’re in sales and you’re selling plastics, right? So, because of that, I think that there’s no understanding of science and physics and gravity, even though it exists.

(23:02):

And I think that’s one thing, Chris, right? You’ve talked about certainly in educating me on market dominance, that there are forces, whether you believe it or not, gravity exists. Gravity believes in you. And what you’ve certainly done so well for our community is, Barry, is the CSO Insights is the data. It was like these are the celestial forces that are making you believe that you are a killer. You yourself are not a killer. You’re crushing it. It’s because of these celestial mathematics. And you have to understand those. Am I being too melodramatic or so about our profession?

Barry Trailer (23:37):

Well, perhaps. But before we got started here, I was talking about the SEF, the Sales Education Foundation. And Howard Stevens started that I think 20 years ago. And if people aren’t familiar with it, I’ll give you a link to their site. And they have their annual magazine coming out here in a couple of months. But Howard always started his talks with, “What do you call the person who graduated last in their class at medical school? Doctor.”

Corey Frank (24:07):

Doctor.

Barry Trailer (24:09):

And the reason is because they passed. In his opening salvo following that was, “For professionalism you need standardization, certification and specialization.” And in sales, we don’t have much of any of that. And so anybody can say they’re in sales. And that could be somebody who just got their first job out of college and is a BDR or an SDR, and they’re working hard to get into it, and it could be a strategic account executive that has been there for 25 years. They’re both in sales. And you know what? I think that’s okay. There’s a lot about this that I think is great. My background was civil engineering.

(24:55):

I’m a registered civil engineer in California. Not everybody who graduates in engineering gets to say that. I can say that. So, I get it with professional ethics and canon and registration and all of that. And I also think that one of the things that’s marvelous about sales is that you don’t have any of that, and you can still get in and you can still do great. What I think is missing is the feeling that it is a great profession. And by the way, I think it continues to be supplanted by, “Man, get in this. You can make a shit ton of money, man.”

Corey Frank (25:32):

Yeah, for sure.

Barry Trailer (25:33):

And I think that that’s selling our profession way short. I think that’s a crying shame. I really do. And I think sales is such an awesome profession. I don’t even want to say responsibility. I think it’s just an awesome way to make a living and connect folks.

Links from this episode:

Sales Mastery – https://salesmastery.com/
ConnectAndSell – https://connectandsell.com 
Branch49 – https://branch49.com 
Sales Education Foundation – https://salesfoundation.org/ 

Barry Trailer on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/barrytrailer/ 
Chris Beall on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-beall-7859a4/ 
Corey Frank on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/coreyfrank/ 

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In this follow-up to last week’s, “The Theory of Constraints and Ice Cream” Chris reminds us that all talent problems are wrapped up in lots of politics. And it turns out the key to all of this, whether you’re like Corey and Chris and your company provides a discontinuous innovation. Something that naturally could bring change too fast or if you are the leader and something needs to change because it’s the constraint and it’s time to go after it no matter what. If you fail the finesse test, you fail all the tests. Because then the politics turn on you. And quite rightly, by the way.

Finesse is a very elegant way of describing the search process, reading the signals, reading the tea leaves, and understanding where the constraints are. Understanding that in this discontinuous innovation process, you’re going to have of extraneous pipeline that’s going to come in very rapidly at a flow rate that you’re not used to. And finesse is, as a way to almost like when you see a bullfighter, they have this big two 3000 pound beast that’s bearing down at you and bull bullfighter. And he just finesses his way from one to the next and dances and it’s a glorious thing to see in action where internally they may be sweating.

People underestimate the power of finesse and the reason that you need it. We are all machines when we sell, we’re a machine that turns a potential opportunity into something that’s taking a next step. That’s all we do. So the more mathematically you are, that is, if you’re listening to this and you’re going, yeah, gold red theory of constraints I’m in, I’m in. Right? You probably need to spend more of your life thinking about and exercising the finesse components.  Listen to this episode, “The Power of Finesse and the Bullfighter.”

If you missed the first part of this conversation, “The Theory of Constraints” you can catch up here.

 

Full episode transcript below:

—-more—-

Announcer (00:06):

Welcome to another session with the Market Dominance Guys, a program exploring all the high stakes, speed bumps and off-ramps of driving to the top of your market with our host Chris Beall from ConnectAndSell and Corey Frank from Branch 49.

(00:21):

In this follow-up to last week’s, “The Theory of Constraints and Ice Cream,” Chris reminds us all that talent problems are wrapped up in lots of politics. It turns out the key to all of this, whether you’re like Corey and Chris and your company, provides a discontinuous innovation, something that naturally could bring change too fast, or if you’re the leader and something needs to change because it’s the constraint and it’s time to go after it, no matter what, if you fail the finesse test, you fail all the tests because then the politics turn on you. Quite rightly, by the way, finesse is a very elegant way of describing the search process, reading the signals, reading the T leaves, and understanding where the constraints are. Understanding that in this discontinuous innovation process, you’re going to have an extraneous pipeline that’s going to come in very rapidly at a flow rate that you’re not used to.

(01:12):

Finesses as a way to almost like, it’s almost like when you see a bullfighter that has two 3000 pound beast bearing down on them and he just finesses his way from one to the next and dances and it’s a glorious thing to see in action where internally they may be sweating. People underestimate the power of finesse and the reason that you need it. We’re all machines when we sell, we’re a machine that turns a potential opportunity into something that’s taking a step. That’s all we do. If you’re listening to this and you’re going, “Yeah, glory, the power of constraints I’m in and I’m in,” right? You probably need to spend more of your life thinking about and exercising the finesse components. Listen to this episode, The Power of Finesse and the Bullfighter

Corey Frank (02:01):

Because that reduction in the conversion rate is certainly, as you and I have spoken about and other folks, other guests on this show that are in the business of martech stack tools and weapons is the intent of how the weapon, the tool was used. Well, ultimately, Chris, connected. It’s just not doing that well. It’s started off really well, but now it’s just not doing that well. So tough time really justifying the ROI and instead what I hear you saying is those are signals that we should be understanding, being aware of tracking to addressing that our symptoms of where that constraint lives.

Chris Beall (02:40):

Yes. Yes. The discipline, the intellectual discipline which needs to be turned into a management discipline is actually quite simple. Ignore all ratios, only pay attention to rates. By rates, I mean things like flow rates. So here’s a flow rate conversations per hour per rep. Here’s a different flow rate. Conversations, same targets, right? Per week or whatever it is. I like weeks because every week has got five days except the recent ones around the holidays. But conversations per week for the company as a whole. So you always want to have two flow rates. You want to have one for the unit of work, the machine, the person, and you want to have one for the system. So it’s like when you’re building a factory, you have what is my flow rate, my throughput at max, sustainable capacity of this machine. There it is, right? Well, how many machines do I have, and can I run them all the time?

(03:44):

Then I get my throughput for that part of the system as a whole. We can produce so many of x and I need to have a standard for time and my standard for time for a machine like a rep and sorry about … Your reps out there, the reason I’m calling you a machine is you’re playing that role in the factory that we’re trying to make called a company that provides value to folks. Right? It produces something. So we are all machines when we sell, we’re a machine that turns a potential opportunity into something that’s taking a next step. That’s all we do. We take this situation that’s come to us probably as a company prospective customer associated with it. It has some idea of what we might do for them and what we take some action and mutually we decide to take a next step.

(04:32):

As salespeople, that’s a hundred percent of our lives. We’re a machine that just does that cycle over and over and over. That’s why to be a good salesperson you have to be very disciplined because it could get boring. Right? So look at the flow rate at the individual rep level of the first thing, which is conversations. Then look at the flow rate of the second thing, which is meetings. How many meetings per hour of prospecting for a rep? How many meetings per week for the team? Then go one step beyond that and look at the flow rate. Now we’re over onto the side of a new act door, which is the sales rattles, we’ve gotten out of the world of sales development or business development. It doesn’t matter whether the same person’s doing both jobs or not. People get hung up on that, that’s irrelevant. What’s relevant now is in the role of an account executive of a rep who’s trying to go from, “Okay, this is really worth working to. We’re either going to get to a deal or we’re not going to waste too much time not getting to a deal.”

(05:37):

I’ve got the same two things per rep now is it per hour? It’s interesting. Sales reps are funny beasts. Their world has got a lot of time management in it. If you set the unit too small, the unit of time too small, they can’t do their time management in there. I’ll tell you, here’s a side story. I used to be the chief technology officer at a company where our rhythm was once a week you turned in your code, your code was checked into the system and on Monday morning at eight o’clock we pushed a button and we built the system. It was a piece of software we sold. The reason we did that was a week consists of five work days, but it actually has this miraculous buffer called a week cap sitting on the end of it.

(06:23):

So if your work which was calibrated at three and a half days, if all went well, if it didn’t all go well and you had bugs or you had to fix stuff or you found out concepts were wrong or whatever, you effectively had another half week the other half of the week to fix it. So for years we went along, we released product like this. Every Monday, we had a new release every Monday. Then they got a new guy in and they said, “Chris, you don’t know how to do this stuff. You’re fine. Very relaxed form of management, we don’t like it.” So we got a guy in from big co and he said, “Well, you’re doing this all wrong. We have to do it by the hour.” Well, for a software developer, an hour is not enough time to do meaningful time management trade off within the hour.

(07:13):

So if you have something you have to do every hour, you’re going to find yourself with things that didn’t get done in the hour. Now those things create chaos because they have to be handled later, but they weren’t scheduled for that next hour. Right? So when you’re looking at sales reps, your unit goes up from an hour, which is natural for we’re having conversations setting [inaudible 00:07:34], you got to go up to something bigger. It’s either a week or a month. It can’t meaningfully be a quarter unless you just have a handful of huge strategic accounts. But think about it this way, I want to know the flow rate of transactions because now that’s the end state in this unit of time that has enough time management flex in it that I can hold the rep and they can hold themselves accountable for managing that time in such a way that the outcomes will occur predictably, right? It’s called making quota.

Corey Frank (08:11):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (08:12):

So I do it for the individual and then I do it for the whole team over another time unit that is more externally focused. So it’s probably a quarter. That’s kind of all you need is flow rates. Conversion rates will delude you because you’ll believe that your historical conversion rates were not associated with choices that folks were making in the process that are called quality choices. So if I’m running a machine in a factory and I take every blank that comes in and it goes into the machine, and I hit the button and see what comes out, I get one conversion right. If I allow the machine operator to inspect each blank and compare it to the other ones and file a little bit off and do this and that, then I get another conversion rate. Actually, unless my material cost is high, I don’t care. I don’t care.

(09:08):

What I care about is the flow rate because downstream I can depend on flow rates at a known quality, but I can’t depend on having this, I like this one better than that one process which is highly variant across the processors. So we have to do this when we pick customers. You and I are in peculiar businesses. We’re in the business of saying, “So grandma’s 15 miles an hour was probably good enough for you because it kept things calm.” What do you think of 150 miles an hour? Well, sounds so good, but we actually have to …

… a little back and we have to flow rate match with the downstream flow because it can only change so fast-

Chris Beall (10:29):

What is our cycle time for minor change, and what’s our reliability? Which is with this case quality? What are the odds of us making a minor change and actually achieving the goals of that change? What is the cycle time for major change, and what’s our reliability for major change? If you’re a young company, you don’t have an answer to the second question, right? You don’t. The major change was you created your company.

Corey Frank (10:57):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (10:57):

In fact, you’re still alive and people sometimes think, “Oh, Chris. You’re kind of over-mechanized in this stuff.” Well trust me, the world itself is highly mechanized and it operates according to rules. That’s like gravity. Right? You don’t have to believe in it. It believes in you.

Corey Frank (11:10):

That’s right.

Chris Beall (11:11):

Theory of constraints, you don’t have to believe in it. It believes in you.

Corey Frank (11:15):

No, that’s fascinating stuff, Chris. Because we certainly talk about that in I think virtually every guest in virtually every episode that we’ve had over these years, right? Hope spring is eternal and we all unwrap that new gift of whether it be outreach or Zoom or connected cell or branch or PRLs or it doesn’t matter what the new flavor of the day is. We all as sales leaders, as executives, we write that check, we get our CFO to pay that man his money, pay that woman their money, they’re due cause this is going to be worth it on the backend. Trust me, I believe in that certainty that they have that this is going to help. Right? We do it with bankers. Of all the bankers, I’m going to pay that man his money because he’s going to help me take me to the promised land and raise my three and a half million on a 20 million valuation, right?

Chris Beall (12:06):

Yeah.

Corey Frank (12:06):

We believe that. Knowing that, Hey Chris, I went through 50 pitches and I don’t have any money yet. What’s going on? Are you the right banker for me? Is this the pitch? Is this … You know what I think it is? Maybe I should choose bank two different jockey. Maybe it’s a different horse. So it’s so prevalent. But what you’ve certainly taught me over these 15, 20 years that we’ve known each other, right? Is just believe in the math. Don’t get emotional about the math. The math is just math. But what are you going to do? You can bury your hand in the sand about what the math tells you because it doesn’t fit your narrative. It doesn’t fit what your confirmation bias as you set out to be and which is certainly another dangerous thing. Right? You and Jerry Hill certainly talk about confirmation bias a lot. We’re in the business of disproving confirmation biases, certainly with what it is that we set out to do oftentimes. I think theory constraints is an evil step twin to that theory.

Chris Beall (13:02):

Yeah. Confirmation bias and survivorship bias are both incredibly powerful phenomena and they’re very common and we exercise them together ignoring the fact that there’s only one constraint is another. It’s a version of those things.

Corey Frank (13:18):

Yes, for sure.

Chris Beall (13:20):

Then it gets hard. I mean systems have constraints, but projects they do too. Change is always a project, but it’s not a project that has a constraint like a system constraint. A project has a constraint called the critical path. If you don’t have practice in understanding the nature of that constraint, you won’t do what you need to do. I mean, here’s a lesson on projects. Anybody wants to know how to do projects, here’s it. Identify the critical path and overfeed the feeders to the critical path early. It feels wasteful, but it’s the only way to buy insurance against Murphy’s Law. And Murphy’s Law is inviolable. So you either do it that way or you deal with delays, but it’s kind of your choice. But the constraint isn’t going. It is the constraint. Imagine a project without a critical path. It’s a nonsense concept. We’re a little easier with that, although it’s harder to manage. We’re a little less comfortable thinking a system has a constraint because the system always has people involved in making the system work. The politics around the constraint is people feel like you’re saying they’re unimportant.

Corey Frank (14:35):

Yes.

Chris Beall (14:36):

Because you’re not working. You’re not investing on their part of the business. What teams need to know is this. If you’re managing the stuff and you’re the leader, this is kind of a show for leaders today. So if you’re the leader, your job is actually to go, “Hey, we’re going to identify the constraint, we’re going to characterize it, we’re going to figure out what’s investible. We’re going to invest in it, we’re going to watch the flow rate increase. We’re going to make sure the quality doesn’t go down because that’s one way to increase the flow rate too. That’s the cheaty way to do it is reduce quality. Then we’re going to step back and our discipline’s going to be to watch the system until it shows us its next constraint.” It’ll do that by having inventory build up in front of that particular step in the process. It’ll be start downstream.

(15:22):

We’re going to do this over and over and over and our competition is not going to do it quite as rigorously as us. We will crush them in the end as long as we make a point of not running out of money. That whole episode about that overhead. The racehorse that eats while you sleep. Right? Okay. So great. But wait, the whole business of doing that implies that everybody else keeps doing their job. Right? So Corey is going to fish, we’re going across the ocean, we’re going to go across the Pacific in a rowboat. But it turns out there’s a project every once in a while called get some food for the crew. That project requires that our most skilled fishermen are Sicilian, Corey Frank, go get us some fish. So while Corey is fishing, the rest of us need to keep rowing. It doesn’t do any good to say, “I sure wish I were the fishermen.” Right?

Corey Frank (16:18):

Yes.

Chris Beall (16:18):

Now we haven’t or we have to row and if we don’t keep rowing though, our boat loses way and one boat’s lose way, they can’t be steered. Then we have a serious problem because Corey can’t even fish because he’s saying the fisher are over there and we can’t steer the-

Corey Frank (16:32):

That’s right. That’s right.

Chris Beall (16:34):

So this is actually the deepest trick of leadership is in a world where, as a matter of fact, we must address only one thing in our business at a time. We need to establish a culture that says for almost everybody, I’m okay keeping on, keeping on. It’ll be my turn someday. That’s hard.

Corey Frank (16:56):

It is. Especially if you’re a biz dev in an organization who says, “Hey listen, I’ve listened to Chris’s calls, I can do a discovery process as good as he can. I know more about the product that he does and all these guys want me to do is just dial the phone and talk to strangers and ask him for time. I don’t even get to ask them for money. I get to ask them for time every day. So I can imagine, especially for those that weren’t promoted last year, a lot of managers are probably hearing from their folks or if they showed up at all this week. Sometimes people choose to talk with their feet and maybe they’re at a different zip code here coming into the new year just because of that.

Chris Beall (17:33):

Yeah. Shawn McLaren once walked up to a whiteboard. He is our executive chairman, he was CEO founder of the company. He and I were just getting to know each other and I had a kind of niggly problem I was trying to solve. It was a political problem that manifested itself as a wrong personnel doing what needed to be done, the talent problem. But all talent problems are wrapped up in lots of politics because everybody knows each other and they’ve been around and I’m the new guy I just joined. I was probably, I was a week and a half in and I’m pretty impatient for change. So I’m saying, “Hey, we got to make this change, this change and do this and think about this.” I’m kind of ragging on him and he doesn’t see a word. He gets up from his desk, walks up to the whiteboard and writes up in large, you have to … No Shawn, it’s pretty fun to watch him do this big block letters. Not the most beautiful handwriting in the world, but very clear and very emphatic.

(18:28):

He had to erase part of the word because he had stuff all over it. One word, it’s finesse. It turns out the key to all of this, whether you’re like Corey and me and your company provides a discontinuous innovation, something that naturally could bring change too fast or whether you are the leader and you know something needs to change. Because it’s the constraint and it’s time to go after it. No matter what, if you fail the finesse test, you fail all the tests because then the politics turns on you. Quite rightly, by the way, this isn’t complaining about politics. It’s like saying, “Gosh, I sure wish there were no people in my company. That’s just ridiculous.”

Speaker 3 (19:14):

That’s right. I love that. Finesse, that’s really a very elegant way of describing the search process, reading the signals, reading the T leaves, understanding where the constraints are. Understanding that in this discontinuous innovation process you’re going to have of extraneous pipeline that’s going to come in very rapidly at a flow rate that I’m not used to. It’s first going to become novel and then it’s going to become very, very, very stressful. Finesse is really like that term, Chris is a way to almost like when you see a bullfighter, they have this big two, 3000 pound beast that’s bearing down at you and a bullfighter isn’t sweating. It’s just finesses his way from one to the next and dances and it’s a glorious thing to see in action where internally they may be sweating. But that bullfighter example of finesse, I think is very appropriate for what you’re describing.

Chris Beall (20:14):

It is. I think people underestimate the power of finesse and the reason that you need it. So the more mathematically inclined you are, that is, if you’re listening to this and you’re going, “Yeah, yeah. Gold breath theory constraints, I’m in, I’m in.” Right? You probably need to spend more of your life thinking about and exercising the finesse components.

Corey Frank (20:39):

As a leader I would imagine, right?

Chris Beall (20:40):

Yeah. I mean because you’re now going to become part of, become the other problem, which is using the word, “Should.” Well, you should or shouldn’t care about the fact that I’m ignoring all of you and we’re only paying attention to this. Well, when you find yourself using the word, “Should,” in business especially about either your employees or your customers, you’re making a pretty substantial error, which is you’re basically saying, “Well, they should,” it’s a moral term by the way. It’s not an operational term and they aren’t therefore they’re bad. They are the problem and I am the solution. When you kind of turn that ratchet long enough, you get dysfunctional autocracies that can’t solve real problems. Now, every once in a while you’ll get somebody who can shoot it out, so to speak, and just rule over everybody by some dint of personality and the fact that they don’t care about people or whatever it happens to be.

(21:43):

If you’re trying to make a real organization that’s robust against a whole bunch of things that are happening, you have to allow people room to make decisions, especially about managing their time. Really, the main thing you’re allowing folks to do when you’re saying, “My organization is going to be highly functional,” is you’re saying, “I trust you to manage your time so you can apply your skill.” It’s not I trust you to apply your skill to the tasks I assigned to you. That’s not it at all. It’s like, no, within bounds of what we can stomach together of being able to measure some flow rate somewhere that tells us whether it’s going or not going, right?

Corey Frank (22:22):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (22:22):

Within that, I’m going to let you manage your time. In fact, I’m not going to interfere with that at all. That’s why I’m not a big fan of having lots of regular meetings because they take away from people’s ability to manage their time.

Corey Frank (22:34):

Yeah

Chris Beall (22:35):

You’re managing their time for them.

Corey Frank (22:37):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (22:37):

Shawn of Speaking of Sean McLaren, Shawn McLaren is calling me right now. So why don’t you wrap up, Corey.

Corey Frank (22:43):

Well, I think it’s very appropriate that yes, the executive chairman calls and says, “Hey, what are you doing? Spending all the time on the podcast?” So for the Market Dominance Guys, this is Corey Frank with Chris Beall in a very brief but timely episode of the Theory of Constraints. Chris, until next time…

Chris Beall (23:01):

Thanks, Corey. Loved it. As always.

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