EP174: Boosting Website Traffic with Cold Calls

Welcome to another episode of Market Dominance Guys! In this third installment of our Road Trip visit series, we join Helen Fanucci and the team at Branch 49 as they discuss trust-building, gratitude, and top-of-the-funnel strategies.

Helen Fanucci shares her experiences with cold calls while using ConnectAndSell, adjusting her approach to engage prospects effectively. Her customized calls-to-action cater to each prospect’s unique needs, leading to successful completions even when the prospect isn’t the right person or ready for a meeting.

The experts also explore the value of cold calls in generating website traffic, comparing it to targeted Google ads. The conversation emphasizes the power of trust in maintaining lasting relationships, highlighting that trust endures indefinitely, provided it’s not undermined by sales pressure. Join them for this episode, “Boosting Website Traffic with Cold Calls.”

Links from this episode:

Branch 49
Sean Snyder on LinkedIn 
Corey Frank on LinkedIn
Microsoft
Helen Fanucci on LinkedIn
Helen’s book, Love Your Team
ConnectAndSell
Chris Beall on LinkedIn
Chris and Corey’s book, Market Dominance: A Conversation with ChatGPT

Full episode transcript below:

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. Welcome to another episode of Market Dominance Guys. In this third installment of our Road Trip Visit series, we join Helen Fanucci and the team at Branch 49 as they discuss trust-building, gratitude, and top-of-the-funnel strategies. Helen shares her experience with cold calls while using ConnectAndSell, adjusting her approach to engage prospect effectively. Her customized calls to action cater to each prospect’s unique needs, leading to successful completions, even when the prospect isn’t the right person or ready for a meeting. The experts also explore the value of cold calls in generating website traffic, comparing it to targeted Google Ads. The conversation emphasizes the power of trust in maintaining lasting relationships, highlighting that trust endures indefinitely, provided it’s not undermined by sales pressure. Join them for this episode, Boosting Website Traffic With Cold Calls.

Corey Frank (01:19):

I love the concepts of gratitude reciprocates. And were you thinking the same thing? The fact that part of the challenge that we have, and an agency model like us at Branch 49, but I think this is endemic to, if you were a qualifier or an SDR or a Microsoft and you took that lead from that person and you threw it over the fence to your AE, they have the notes to read. And maybe they’ll give you a call, “Helen, tell me about this one,” but most of the time that never happens. They’re just going off of the notes and maybe they’ll be intimidated by the title. Maybe they’ll be surprised that, “You actually got ahold of so-and-so? Oh my gosh, this is great.” And they’re going to go through their own emotional machinations about how I should prepare and relax because now I’m going to be under pressure in this discovery call.

(02:04):

And we always talked about, Chris, that the natural state of somebody in a cold call is fear. And the natural state, something they came up with a few months ago, the national state of somebody in a discovery call is that one of apprehension. Because I’m about to get sold something and I’m not quite sure if they’re going to use the Ivanov gambit opening move or they’re going to use the Belarusian gambit to come off from the … what are they going to do? But I know it’s coming. It’s interesting to diffuse that by saying, “I know I’m an interruption, [inaudible 00:02:40] thank you. First off, before we get started, I just wanted to thank you for talking with my colleague, Helen.” So is that a hot tub epiphany as well, because I really like that. I think that could be very powerful for starting a discovery.

Chris Beall (02:55):

Yeah, I think it’d be amazing in discovery. It’d be amazing for a follow-up call. It actually harmonizes follow-up calls and discovery calls, even though the follow-up call is always an ambush. Never forget on the other side of an ambushed, they’re always in the same emotional state. I want to get off this call with my self-image intact. You have an animal in that state 100% of the time. Unless you call me, in which case I answer cold calls by going, “Great, I have a cold call here. I get a chance to make a sales rep’s day.” Not very many people-

Corey Frank (03:31):

That’s empirical evidence of what your cold call picker-upper score is.

Chris Beall (03:34):

It’s pretty good. My best phone number scores 94 out of 100 and I’m pretty busy most of the time. That’s not pretty good.

Helen Fanucci (03:42):

But you also ambush everybody or you boomerang everybody.

Chris Beall (03:46):

I have been known to point out to cold callers that perhaps their job is harder than it used to be. Because, sincerely, I do think their job is harder than it used to be. I always ask, “So what did you use to call me today?” They call this a honeypot strategy. It sits right there, it’s my cell phone. But yeah, this is the kind of stuff, when it comes to the top of the funnel, understanding is continuously evolving. We were talking earlier about, here’s something you might not know about cold calls. When you cold call somebody, or follow up call them, it doesn’t make any difference, they will almost always go to the website of the company that you mentioned. Almost always. But what’s that the equivalent of, in the economy? Those are Google Ads, right? Companies buy Google Ads hoping somebody will click on them to go to their website.

(04:38):

Well, you just got a more targeted person, because they’re on a list, to go to the website. So you provided something of the equivalent value of a Google Ad click, or a highly targeted person, just by having the conversation. Even if it didn’t lead to a meeting. So when we measure looking at opportunities, and threading back to conversations that preceded them, we find that for every dollar that comes through setting meetings, a $1.80 comes through the website. Just from the conversations. This is just being learned in the world right now. This is an example of something that folks are just figuring out. We call it an attribution report or an attribution interaction. And we see cases where, for say, I don’t know, 250,000 conversations. And we have some customers who have that many. They might produce four or 500 million dollars of pipeline. But if you go back to what came through the meetings, it might only be 100 million dollars.

(05:40):

So you look at that combination, you go, “Well, where’d all that extra money come from?” Well, they come to the website. So can you amplify it further? Sure, send him an email that says, “Thank you for our conversation today.” The only subject line in history that will be opened every single time, other than, we’re holding Jimmy hostage over [inaudible 00:05:58]. That’s a bad one, don’t use that. I think people try to use that on me on occasion. There’s one about alligators, doesn’t work either. But think about that, you’ve done a targeted advertisement by simply having a conversation. Now what’s important about that advertisement? Trust. Trust. You have seven seconds to get trust. I was out with some IBM folks a couple weeks ago in Atlanta, and I think I shocked the group by saying, “You cannot actually fail in a cold call.” If you have skill, you cannot fail because your goal is to get trust. And you will get trust 100% of the time if you have skill and you’ll apply your skill.

(06:34):

That’s the bar. It’s trust. You win. Why? Because trust is durable. It’s durable. Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference guy, book’s right over there. I asked him at dinner one night, “How long do we have to get trust in cold call?” He said seven seconds. I said, “Really? Our research says eight seconds.” He said, “Your research is wrong. Seven seconds.” Okay, what do we need to do in those seven seconds? He said, “Oh, that’s easy. We just need to show the other person we see the world through their eyes and then we need to demonstrate to that person that we are competent,” Listen carefully, “competent to solve a problem they have right now.” When he said right now, starbursts went off in my tiny brain. I said, “Well, right now, I’m a literalist. It means right now. What problem do they have right now?” Me. Can I solve the problem that is me? Yes, I am competent to solve that problem. I can go away. Wow, I’m in a really good position. This is fantastic.

(07:31):

I do those two things, I get trust. How long does the trust last? That’s the next question I asked him. He said, “Forever, until you blow it.” How do you blow it? He said, “Try to sell to them. Start selling to them, you’ll blow the trust.” That’s that energy thing we’re talking about. Put too much tension on the line, you’ll break the line. So this stuff all goes together. Helen was experiencing it from the position of being a vastly experienced salesperson and sales manager. But in this funny arena, the seven-seconder, where the game is played very, very, very differently because the emotional stakes are so high for the other person. And it makes you nervous because you’re the ambush. Or you don’t like it, it feels bad. I don’t like doing this to somebody.

(08:21):

But you have to know why you’re doing it, by the way. I don’t know if you guys all think about this. You need to set your mind in one place, I am only pushing this button for one reason, in hopes of helping somebody. What am I going to help them with? I’m going to help them go from whatever state they’re in to a state of being more willing to learn about something that might possibly change their life. I know people think business-to-business products don’t change people’s lives, that is utter bologna. These are the products that change people’s lives even more than any consumer product. The only thing you can pitch that’ll change your life more than that is, “Hey, you want to get married?” That’s a pretty good one. I got the energy wrong on that, thank God I did it better the first time.

Corey Frank (09:09):

What questions for Chris and Helen?

Sean Snyder (09:12):

Okay, so when you’re on calls or [inaudible 00:09:18] did you get to the ending of your work script or your extreme clip?

Helen Fanucci (09:21):

Yeah, so my intent was to set up a 15-minute call next week to get their feedback on the future of work and employee engagement. And that did not happen, however, it got navigated differently. So one woman, “I’m not the right person.” And so she’s referencing me to other people. Another one was, “Well, I don’t really have time to do that.” And I said, “Well, would you be interested in participating in a HR round table with your peers in a form for us to talk about the feature of work challenges and get feedback?” Oh yes, I’d like to do that. Can you send me an invitation? Yes, I will. So it just kind of navigated that way.

Chris Beall (10:08):

I listened. She got-

Helen Fanucci (10:09):

I don’t know.

Chris Beall (10:10):

The person who was trying to push her off, she asked for the meeting, it was fantastic. He was on ice. He had no idea who he was dealing with. He could tell that … Because she didn’t even say anything about, “Hi, I’m Helen Fanucci from Microsoft.” I can almost feel his fingers clicking on LinkedIn. How do you spell Fanucci? Who is this person? Because he could tell, he just was, I don’t like this because I can’t tell. This isn’t somebody junior. But she didn’t say what her title was or anything and it put him in a fantastic place to stay engaged. It was that energy. He was going to tug, but he wasn’t going to run. And finally it was like, well, he wouldn’t take the meeting, not immediately. And so then the conversation went a little further, but it did go all the way through the screenplay. You just didn’t know it. I mean, I listened to it. You weren’t thinking about, in terms of where you were getting, because this is technical cold-calling stuff that weirdos like us think about. But you did get all the way through it.

Helen Fanucci (11:08):

Okay. Yeah. And he told me I should tell him my title after he gives me permission to tell him why I called. Okay, that I run Customer Success Organization. I didn’t think about that at the moment, but that was a learning … Yes, I had a couple different calls to action in mind, and so, one of them was to see if he would be interested in this HR Roundtable. Because we do these forms to build peer-to-peer connections and stuff. So I don’t know the screenplay thing, but yeah, I had some ideas about where to take it and got there.

Sean Snyder (11:41):

So it would be like, at Branch, we like to call those completions. If it’s a wrong person, it’s a completion because now they’re out of the list, right?

Helen Fanucci (11:49):

Yeah, right.

Sean Snyder (11:56):

They ask for an email, they’re going a booking. So every, time for us, we review those as wins, just like [inaudible 00:11:56].

Helen Fanucci (11:56):

Yeah. Yep. And then I have people on my team that actually follow up with the invitations and stuff like that. And then I include them on the follow-up email, it’s a brief, and I say, “If there’s anything Angela or I can do,” my person, “anything we can do to for you and your team, just let us know.”

Sean Snyder (12:57):

Any idea of your release date …

Chris Beall (13:00):

Oh yeah, we do have a new book. The book got released on Tuesday. Actually, Helen bought the first ebook copy of it on Kindle on Monday night, I think it was. Was that Monday night? Not from a hot test, that would’ve involved risk to electronic equipment. But the book is kind of unusual, anybody who wants to check out the book, the idea behind this book is that everybody’s talking about AI and ChatGPT in particular. And I just had a curious moment on a Friday two weeks ago where I said, “I wonder if the work that we’ve done together on Market Dominance Guys …” Which was supposed to be a book, it was never supposed to be a podcast.

(13:37):

So Corey just called me up once and said, “I’m going to drag a book out of you. And the way I’m going to do it is I’m going to interview you every Thursday morning for an hour and a half until we have enough material for a book. Then we’ll throw it to an editor and we’ll get a book.” And well, here we are, three plus years later, almost four years later, and hey, no book. So it’s like, okay, so what do they call that? Either delay or frank failure? He’s Frank, so we’ll just call it delay. And I’ve taken three runs at the book, by the way, and I will admit I’m not one of those people who get stuck writing. Go read my blog sometime, I wrote all that crap. And so, why wouldn’t the book come out? And I thought, hey, maybe ChatGPT would like to write the book.

(14:20):

So I just thought, well, let’s give this a whirl. Let’s take 25 episodes of the podcast and see what ChatGPT has to say about. So we’ll have ChatGPT summarize them. So we just fed it the text, the transcript, and said, you summarize. So it wrote it summaries. The summaries are a little soft, I would say. If you read them, you won’t quite hear the edge that some people say they hear in the podcast. And these are the early episodes so it’s just Corey and me. So this is the book writing episodes so they’re even edgier because we’re really getting into the stuff that other people don’t believe, much less care to talk about.

Corey Frank (15:02):

Don’t make the spiders angry.

Chris Beall (15:03):

Yeah, it’s that kind. So we’re getting into the edgy stuff. So ChatGPT gave it a whirl, wrote some summaries, and then about each summary I asked a single prompt. It’s called prompt response kind of thing. And ChatGPT’s job, actually, is just to keep putting one word after another based on probabilistically what makes sense. This is statistical AI package. If you want to read about it, Stephen Wolfram wrote a brilliant article that explains it in a way that, every once in a while you’re going to want to skip some of the math, but it’s still pretty compelling to read. So anyway, just gave it a whirl. My boundaries for the experiment were 6:00 AM Saturday morning until midnight Sunday night. That’s all the time. And I wanted it done in two days, end to end. And so, most of my effort was copying and pasting. Just getting the cover Art from Dall-E, which is ChatGPT’s artistic cousin, was not trivial. So I’m down to 11 credits. I’ve only got 11 prompts left before it cuts me off. And then I came up with the one-

Corey Frank (16:18):

And since it’s so obvious on the folks, tell them how many prompts it took to describe your co-host here.

Chris Beall (16:24):

Well, here’s the term we used. Here’s what I asked for, I said I would like a book cover for a six-inch by nine-inch book, done in a minimalist Madison Avenue advertising style, that shows a … Now this sounds pretty bad, guys, but I had to do this. A tall, brown-haired businessman and a stocky, dark-haired businessman. Sorry, Corey. And a futuristic robot. Actually, the robot was the hardest part, because it kept giving me robots that looked like they were out of the 50s with square heads and all this. I finally thought, how about a futuristic robot having a conversation around a table. And it gives you three images and one of them was just, boom, that’s it. It’s like, you know it when you see it. So I snagged that one, sent it over to Susan, Susan did all the summarization work, by the way.

(17:21):

And Austin, our podcast editor, was the one that got her started doing stuff with ChatGPT. And my conclusion from all of this is that, what’s really interesting is not what comes out of ChatGPT when you start, but what it will learn if you tell it new stuff. So when we started, it thought Market Dominance Guys was a podcast by Nathan Latka. Now Nathan Latka is a fantastic guy, he’s out there doing great things and we would love our podcast to be as popular as his. But in fact Market Dominance Guys is our podcast and so I simply said to ChatGPT, “Actually Market Dominance Guys is a podcast with co-hosts Corey Frank and Chris Beall that explores blah, blah, blah.”

(18:07):

And ChatGPT said, “Oh, I apologize for my error before.” And then it explained to me what I just explained to it. So it does tend to talk a little nice. It started adding a paragraph of caution now. That’s a new feature I’ve noticed, that no matter what you ask it, after it does the, I don’t really know very much about this, and then it tells you a bunch of stuff. And then it says, “But don’t be so certain of this, you should check it out to yourself.”

Corey Frank (18:37):

Ask Tennessee to embellish.

Chris Beall (18:40):

I have a degree from Stanford, apparently, which I have since corrected. I let it know that my degree’s actually from Arizona State University in physics and education. ChatGPT said, “I’m trying very hard not to be disappointed to find out that Chris Beall doesn’t have an electrical engineering degree from Stanford.” No, it didn’t say that. So anyway, the book is out in ebook form in Kindle, supposedly coming out in paperback and hardcover. It is not 1/100 as important as Helen Fanucci’s book, Love Your Team, which is eternal. But it was a good experiment and I learned a lot. I’m still learning about prompt engineering. Very senior Microsoft person, when I described what I was doing, said, “Don’t ever say that again. Use the phrase prompt engineering.” I said. “Aye, aye, sir.” Prompt engineering is the new software development.

(19:35):

And you might have noticed, Microsoft made a little bet on this, about 10 billion dollars, three weeks ago. I’m going to make a prediction right here on the podcast that that bet will turn out to be one of the smartest things anybody has ever done in the history of business. This is quite remarkable. I mean, folks are using this technology to write protein sequences for novel proteins that kill bacteria because they just used the ones you already have and use them like a book. A little story. I have three applications that are in my head right now for using it to write stories about things like, well, what kind of people buy what kind of products, for instance? Or who should you maybe talk to next?

(20:22):

There’s some stuff you can imagine. ChatGPT’s thing is next, next, next, next. There’s a lot of problems that you can solve by saying, “I know this much so far, what’s next?” And that’s how it works. So I highly recommend getting yourself one, buy the Pro edition because you can do more with it. It’s cheap. And open AI, you can thank me for it, you don’t need any help from me anymore. But yeah, try to read the book. The book will be like the podcast so you’ll keep going, “I thought those guys were a little harder-edged than that.” It’s like, thanks, ChatGPT, you made it sound like nice dudes.

Corey Frank (20:59):

We’ll have it like the [inaudible 00:21:00]. We’ll increasingly get more and more attention as the story …

Chris Beall (21:06):

As the lion gets more fangs and claws.

Corey Frank (21:10):

It’ll be the unabridged version.

Chris Beall (21:11):

Yeah, the unabridged version. Well, let’s see, we have 150 more episodes that we can do this. So there’s plenty material for us.

Corey Frank (21:20):

Yeah and about 200,000 words in the transcriptions thus far.

Chris Beall (21:23):

Is that all?

Corey Frank (21:24):

Yes. [inaudible 00:21:26] talk last time.

Chris Beall (21:28):

Yeah, there are more coming out right now.

Corey Frank (21:31):

Any other questions for our guests here this afternoon? Helen, where’s the best place to find [inaudible 00:21:40]?

Helen Fanucci (21:41):

Well, I have a box of books to give to everybody here. And I’m happy [inaudible 00:21:46]. But amazon.com is where people are buying the book. It’s also in audiobook format, but I’m happy to sign a book for all of you.

Chris Beall (21:58):

The audio book is awesome, by the way.

Helen Fanucci (22:00):

There’s auditions and we picked a great narrator. And coincidentally, she happens to live about five miles from my condo in West Seattle, so that was completely a coincidence.

Chris Beall (22:15):

And our book, by the way our book Corey, myself, Susan, and ChatGPT, the book is entitled Market Dominance: A Conversation with ChatGPT, and we will have it read by a robot on the ChatGPT side. And since I asked the questions, I’ll provide the voice of the prompts.

Corey Frank (22:35):

Fantastic. Well thanks again, Helen and Chris, for visiting-

Chris Beall (22:39):

Thank you, Helen, for using ConnectAndSell. It only took almost four years.