Change the Message or Change the List

How long will it take to get the meeting? You have three steps first:

1. Make the list. And review that list and eliminate the dumb titles. Chris is a fan of Zoominfo.

2. Write the messaging. Remember, one turn of phrase can kill the meeting. Marketing language kills a sales call. Subtle nuances make or break the call.

3. Talk to people in that market, those that are intrigued enough to hear what we have to say. Who does the talking? Find and hire the ASKERS.

Tune in for this short episode of Market Dominance Guys: Change the Message or Change the List

Speaker 1 (00:06):

Welcome to another session with The Market Dominance Guys. A program about the innovators, idealists, and entrepreneurs who thrive and die in the high-stakes world of building a startup company. We explore the cookbooks, guidebooks, and magic beans needed to grow your business. So let’s get going. You’re listening to The Market Dominance Guys with your host, Chris Beall of ConnectAndSell, and Corey Frank of Uncommon Pro.

Chris Beall (00:41):

Hey there, Market Dominance folks. I’m here today without my brilliant and amusing cohost Corey Frank, and I’m just going to do a little practicum, I guess you’d call it. A little kind of look at the nuts and bolts of market dominance.

Chris Beall (00:57):

So in order to dominate a market, we’ve got to have the goods, obviously, we have to have something the market needs and wants. We have to have a notion of a market which we need to turn into a list. So key to market dominance starts with obviously a market, and a list is defined as a whole bunch of companies, if this is a B2B, a whole bunch of companies. Maybe two, maybe 50, maybe a thousand, who knows, maybe 10,000. That if any one of them on that list buys from us, then all of the other ones will be slightly more inclined to buy from us sooner rather than they would have otherwise, and at the price that we want to sell to them at.

Chris Beall (01:38):

So it’s kind of a self referencing or inter referencing list. So we need to make that list. So that’s step one, it’s a practical step. And I’ll talk a little bit about that. Step two is we have to have something to say to them, and we have to have a purpose in saying it. So we’ll go over that too. We’ll call that messaging. Step three is we’ve got to actually talk to people in that market. And we need to find the ones who are intrigued enough with what we have to say, that they decide to come and attend a discovery meeting, or what I call a confessional meeting. So how do we do all of that in the practical day-to-day way, and how long should it take?

Chris Beall (02:22):

So let’s start with step one. Let’s make the list. Thankfully, there are many, many list providers out there. I have a great fondness for the folks at ZoomInfo. And really you can make a list, which is nothing more than a hypothesis about your market. A list, not only of companies, but of people that you might want to talk with. So it’s titles at companies. Try to keep the companies more or less the same size that is within a band because small company titles are different from big company titles. At small companies, a title like mine, CEO, might be somebody you want to call a broad range of things. But when you get a Microsoft size company then you’re not going to call Satya Nadella and talk to Satya about, say for instance, oh, having the Microsoft employees have a lot more sales conversations. You need to find somebody who’s responsible for that.

Chris Beall (03:15):

And that might be a manager title at a large company. So get your titles lined up with the size of the company. And remember it’s a hypothesis. How long should this take? Well, it’s hypothesis. Doesn’t take that long. Actually, you can get a list that’s worth calling on about 30 to 45 minutes at work, let’s say an hour on ZoomInfo, and now we need to validate the list. So how do we validate the list? We’re going to have conversations with the folks on the list. Those conversations have got to be about something that’s relatively consistent, otherwise we won’t get a very good signal out of our validation. And so what we’re going to do is construct a message. The message will have essentially two parts. Part one is simply being in a position to have a conversation with the person.

Chris Beall (04:00):

We’ve ambushed somebody, these are going to be cold calls and or follow up calls. The beginning they’ve got to be cold calls because you can’t stop somebody a second time unless you’ve talked to them the first time. So we’re going to have, what we call, an ambush call or a cold call. That’s a conversation with somebody that is not expecting us to ring them up on the phone. And in that conversation, first, we need to get them to trust us a little bit. And the way we do that is through what’s called tactical empathy. We start from a position of knowing that they’re afraid of us as an invisible stranger. We offer a solution to that fear to the problem, the problem is us. And we offer that solution in a way that indicates that we’re competent. Competent to solve a problem they have right now and therefore we are worth trusting.

Chris Beall (04:46):

So here’s a situation where we can say a few words. I know I’m an interruption, can I have 27 seconds tell you why I called? And while you might want to cast around for a whole bunch of other different ways to start a conversation, that one is good enough. It’s above threshold. So my recommendation is don’t try to become the cleverest person on earth putting together the first two sentences. The first two sentences, or first seven seconds, are the most important part of the conversation. And there’s a bottleneck of all of market dominance. So it’s worth getting them right. It’s worth getting the tone right, and it’s worth having the underlying belief right. The underlying belief has to be a belief in the potential value of the meetings that we’re offering to this human being in the case where they’re never going to do business with us. And I know that sounds a little funny, sales folks and business leaders always want to go right for it. The fact is, it’s the hypothesis.

Chris Beall (05:40):

We don’t know what should happen, so we shouldn’t presume that what should happen is that they should take the meeting. We need to have an open mind, but we also need to have confidence that the meeting itself is a good product. It’s the universal product of business. Let’s understand the value from the meeting that they will achieve. And then let’s just say something that is interesting and intriguing to get some curiosity going. And let’s have it be positive. I believe we’ve discovered a breakthrough that completely eliminates, and name a bad thing that you’re going to take care of that has an economic value to them. A bad thing that has some sort of emotional value, and a bad thing that’s keeping them from getting where they want to go, call that strategic value. Do that without mentioning what category of product that you offer, without pigeonholing yourself in order to avoid getting the, we’re set, objection, the deadly objection, and move on from there and just ask for the meeting.

Chris Beall (06:39):

So you need to have your people learn to do this, or you need to do it yourself. Kind of depends on how big you are. I highly recommend you do it yourself first to get a feel for it. And asking for the meeting is just a question of asking something like, the reason I reached out to you today is to get 15 minutes on your calendar to share this breakthrough with you. Do you happen to have your calendar available? And that’s it. And then you both, you take your belief, which is, this meeting really is going to be of value to them, they’re going to learn a lot. And you let that guide you for the next little dot.

Chris Beall (07:10):

Now day-to-day, say you’ve hired the right people. So what are the right people to have these conversations? They’re people who are sincere. People who believe in the mission that you’re on. They don’t have to understand it deeply, they just have to believe in it. People who have good voices. People who are comfortable asking rather than having people guess what it is that they want. That’s a good way to look at this is that there are askers and there are guessers. There are families that work like this, cultures that work like this. You want somebody from an ask culture or an ask family, where people ask for what they want and it’s okay if they get a no, that’s a real key. And that’s a fairly easy thing to ascertain. In an interview you can find out, did they ask you for things? When you’re interviewing them, did they ask you for things, not just ask you about things, but for things? If they do, and they’re comfortable getting a no for an answer, and they’re capable of being an asker, they can probably ask for the meeting because that’s what they’re doing.

Chris Beall (08:08):

First, they’re asking for the 27 seconds and then they’re going to ask for the meeting. So find askers, hire those askers. And how long does all that take? Well, if you’re doing it yourself and you’re an asker, it takes no time at all. And you’re actually talking to people on day two. Otherwise you’ve got to find somebody. And I would recommend finding two somebodies, but that’s because it’s hard to test anything with the two different ways of doing it. And then train them up. So let’s say it takes a week to find and hire two people, good voices who are askers. Train them up means they learn the message, that takes about one day, and they need to practice it. How often? About 30 times. So 30 times in a row, just getting the message out, and then they need to practice answering the natural objections. Especially what we call the Venus flytrap objection, which is, hey, tell me more.

Chris Beall (09:02):

And when somebody says, tell me more, you have to get really comfortable saying, you know, we’ve learned the hard way that an ambush conversation like this isn’t a fair setting for talking about something this important. Are you a morning person? How’s your Wednesday? So getting to that point should take no more than a day. So now we have a day of putting our list together, a week of hiring, and now we have a day of training up our new hires, and then we want to have them talking. But from now on, they’re going to talk to people in a coached way. Now, how often should they talk to folks? My view is, lots. And I sell a product that lets them do that, so maybe I’m biased. But my people today, for instance, my 12 people have had 170 conversations. And my top conversationalist has already had 27, and it’s 12:49 in the afternoon here on a Wednesday on the west coast.

Chris Beall (09:53):

So I’m most concerned for my team, and you should be most concerned for your team about whether they’re having enough conversations. You probably gave them a good list. If the list has titles on it they shouldn’t talk to, if you can take care of just by inspecting the list, I recommend pivoting it on title and looking at the count. Sorting descending on the count of each title, and getting rid of the dumb ones, that’s all you have to do. So now they’re not calling dumb titles they’re calling ones that might be pretty good. And now we need to find out, are they having good conversations or not? Remember, that the first seven seconds is where it tends to go bad. So what we want to do is we want to find out, well, who’s having trouble in the first seven seconds? Thankfully, there’s a call outcome or disposition that tells us that. It’s the busy call back disposition, or busy call back outcome of the conversation.

Chris Beall (10:46):

So I could look at my sales reps right now, which I’m going to do. Our team has had 7,913 dials today. And I think there’s 13 people involved, 170 conversations. They’ve set 17 meetings and they’re converting at about a 10% conversation a meeting rate. It’s hard to get people on the phone today for whatever reason. 46.55 dials, thank goodness our people never have to make any of those dials. And they’re dialed to meeting, which has kind of an overall metric that says, how well are we doing economically? It’s a little high today, 465 to one. But not a lot we can do in one day about the fact that people are hard to reach. So I’m going to just say, let’s forge ahead. Converting at a 10% rate is pretty darn good. Getting 77 follow-up opportunities, which our team has done also, and eight referrals is also pretty good.

Chris Beall (11:39):

But I want to find out, how to keep the car on the road? And my analogy for this is, if you’re driving a car and you close your eyes, or just look down at your GPS, it doesn’t matter how good your GPS is, you’re going to run into things. You’re going to run into things, animate and inanimate. And that’s a serious problem. You’ve got to have your eyes on the road and you have to make the little steering motions, breaking motions, and use your brain in order to drive a car on any road. It’s the same thing about driving a company on a market dominance road. We need to look at the road, and the road consists of, interestingly enough, the outcome of conversations. So what we want to do is find out who’s having the most trouble keeping people on the phone? If we find somebody who’s had 22 conversations and 40.9% of the time they’re getting up busy call back later, and that’s the top of the heat for busy call back later, that means they aren’t keeping people on the phone quite as well as they might.

Chris Beall (12:36):

Maybe it’s their voice. Maybe it’s the list. Who really knows until we listen to the conversations. Because most likely it’s the voice, and most likely it’s in the first seven seconds. So we want to listen to the conversations of our reps who are having the most difficulty keeping people on the phone. And then we want to come back around to them, speak with those reps and say, hey, let’s listen to this conversation together. They might be off script. A common thing to do is to change some of the words around. Change, can I have 27 seconds to tell you why I called, to, do you have 27 seconds so I can tell you why I called? Very different effect. So the subtleties are important.

Chris Beall (13:14):

This an athletic kind of thing and we have to coach in real time every day. Fortunately at 30 conversations a day or so, that’s pretty straightforward to do. Now if we do all of this and then we note our conversation and meeting rate, if it stays about 5% forge ahead, forge ahead, forge ahead. If it starts below 5% and doesn’t come up to 5% as we tune our message, then our message needs work, or our list needs work. And that’s the primary adjustment.

Chris Beall (13:43):

One is to change the message, which is the most likely thing that has an issue. You probably put some marketing language in it and marketing language kills sales conversations, for sure. So you might’ve succumb to that temptation. But whatever it is, you change the message or change the list. That’s a little bit of a bigger task to change the list because you have to decide to go after a different market. So that’s pretty much it. Iterate, iterate, iterate, talk to lots of people, keep tuning and coaching and market dominance actually will come to you fairly naturally. So that’s a very brief episode of Market Dominance Guys for this week. Thanks everybody, appreciate it.

Corey Frank (15:09):

CEO’s who sell or don’t sell because what you’re, even at ConnectAndSell, it’s unusual that you, as CEO, your esteemed VP of sales, Jonty, and your chairman all still make regular sales calls and sell. And in fact are some of the top producing folks in the company. Why continue to do that? Don’t you have the market figured out by now? Isn’t your time, or Jonty’s or even Sean’s, at the chairman level? I mean, you guys are dominating your market, you’re growing at a great rate every year. It seems that there shouldn’t be that many changes to the marketplace, or are there?

Chris Beall (15:58):

You kind have a choice when you come in as a hired gun. You can choose to be what we call Mr. Monkey, in my circles. Mr. Monkey, you know those little monkeys that, the toy one that you get that you wind up and it’s got the cymbals that it bangs together? And that’s all it does, it bangs the cymbals together and it makes this noise, right?

Corey Frank (16:15):

I used to work for one. Yeah.

Chris Beall (16:17):

Yeah, yeah. Sort of a cheerleader monkey, right? And they’re just doing the same thing over and over. And then if the company grows under them, they take credit for it. Much like [crosstalk 00:16:26].

Corey Frank (16:25):

Oh absolutely. Know them well.

Chris Beall (16:28):

Stockbrokers, they’ll take credit for, you know, they’ll bring you a bunch of stuff and some of it’s great and they take credit for that, and stuff that’s not great suddenly they’re just bringing you new stuff. Just keep banging the cymbals together. So you can be Mr. Monkey and you know, you’ll probably do okay. I don’t object to it. Now Mr. Monkeys tend to negotiate hard for themselves, and as a result they tend to do okay. And there’s kind of a desperate shortage of people who are willing to be CEOs, regardless of what everybody says about the job. It’s not actually that popular for some pretty good reasons. It isn’t the very, very, most fun job in the world in a lot of places. That’s one way to do it.

Chris Beall (17:05):

But even if I were Mr. Monkey, I would do this. I would take one discovery call per day. One. Not curated, just one out of the mix and I’d have it assigned to me, one per day, half an hour. That’s what I would dedicate to my sales activity. And then I’d pass it off. Because frankly it’s in discovery that we make the greatest discoveries. So kind of learn a lot in discovery. I’m going to learn what our sales process is like at the tip of the spear. Finding out what customers need. I’m going to find out what my flow is like. Can you imagine if I came into a company, I said, give me discovery call a day. And they said, boss, we don’t have one, right? We don’t have one for you. We’re going to have to work at that. It’s like, really, that tells me something already.

Corey Frank (18:00):

Yeah, or five no shows in five days, or whatever, you know?

Chris Beall (18:05):

Exactly. You’ll gain more information through that half-hour than all the staff meetings you will ever hold in the entire year. You’ll gain credibility because you’ll be out there executing discovery calls. And if you’re really good at taking credit, you can take credit for the deals that come afterwards. Now, it’s kind of funny because all you are as a filter, but if you’re a pretty good filter, if you can discover need and the need turns into something that happens downstream turns into business, you know, those are your deals. So you’ll be an actual player. But what you’ll learn is stuff where you can move the needle with very little effort. It’s always hiding in there somewhere, no one’s going to tell you. No one’s going to tell you, did you know that we have three extra steps in our sales process, that we inherited from five years ago, that drive away the best customers? Right?

Chris Beall (18:57):

Why? Well, because somebody once said that if we make them sign the contract first, rather than whatever, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right? And when you’re the rep you’re going, are you kidding me? That’s crazy. You know, I could feel it, right? So you’ll find the points where you can have the maximum impact with the minimum disruption. And the credibility factor is huge. One of the things you need as a CEO in all cases is either credibility or the illusion of credibility. And real credibility doesn’t hurt the illusion. So if you’re an illusion kind of Mr. Monkey, then this’ll help. If you’re not, and you’re a reality kind, then this will help. So the one thing I would advise any CEO to do, and by the way, if you’re a VP of sales, chief revenue officer, whatever you are, including if you are that director of business development, take one discovery call per day on your calendar. 250 discovery calls a year will transform you and will transform your business.

Corey Frank (19:58):

That’s exceptional advice. And today, if you had to guess, right, since I’ve done all those roles and I failed in all those roles, and that’s such an incredible piece of advice, Chris, like I said, we’ve known each other for a long time. You’ve seen some of the organizations that I’ve been a part of, and that I created. And I can tell you that I fall into those, a lot of those same traps. Hey, I only want to be on the big deals or, you know, just, you know, just kind of save me for just the ones that, you know, have a lot of meat on that chicken wing. And I’ve been doing it completely backward. So that’s so incredibly, you know, embarrassing, cringe-worthy for a sales guy like me to hear that something so simple, outcomes raiser in that regard, that’s just one a day. So today from, I mean, you talk with sales organizations, you and Jonty, and Sean talked with sales organizations, VPs all day long, how many are doing that today, would you think? What percentage?

Chris Beall (21:00):

I’d be shocked if it was 5% of CEOs, I’d be shocked if it was two. I’d be shocked if it’s 2%. The easiest, cheapest thing in the world to give yourself information and organizational power, including by the way, board power. Because when you’re in a board meeting and those numbers are up there and somebody’s poking at the numbers, do you want to be held hostage by your VP of sales is the only person with the story?

Corey Frank (21:25):

That’s right.

Chris Beall (21:26):

Right. That might be the person you need to fire tomorrow for all you know. And so you better have something around stories and they better be firsthand, not secondhand. And so, you know, 250 stories to choose out of, for a year or so, a lot better than maybe zero or one whale that you’re going after you were called in on the big deal or whatever.

Corey Frank (21:45):

As always, it never disappoints. You put the quarter in and you listen to not just one song, but we get a whole bunch of songs here for our values.