EP186: Hot Dogs and Hot Deals – Devouring Sales Records
Chris and Corey asked me to prepare you for a mind-expanding journey as we take Dr. Goldratt’s theory of constraints beyond its traditional boundaries and revolutionize the way you approach sales. Discover the art of identifying the true constraint and learn why pulling together as a team can sometimes snap the traces. We uncover the secrets of critical paths, buffers, and the profound impact of time in the fast-paced sales arena. Embrace your inner rebel and challenge the norms by seeking fresh perspectives from other disciplines.
But wait, there’s more! Get inspired by the legendary story of competitive eater Kobe and his unconventional strategies that shattered records. We’ll show you how to think outside the bun and achieve unprecedented sales success. Join us for this episode covering mastering sales success by unleashing the power of constraints and revolutionary strategies but we’ll just call it, “Hot Dogs and Hot Deals: Devouring Sales Records!”
Links from this episode:
Corey Frank on LinkedIn
Chris Beall on LinkedIn
Full episode transcript below:
(00:21):
Chris and Corey asked me to prepare you for a mind-expanding journey as we take Dr. Goldratt’s theory of constraints beyond its traditional boundaries and revolutionize the way you approach sales. Discover the art of identifying the true constraint and learn why pulling together as a team can sometimes snap the traces. We uncover the secrets of critical paths, buffers, and the profound impact of time in the fast-paced sales arena. Embrace your inner rebel and challenge the norms by seeking fresh perspectives from other disciplines.
(00:53):
But wait, there’s more. Get inspired by the legendary story of competitive eater, Kobe, and his unconventional strategies that shattered records. We’ll show you how to think outside the bun and achieve unprecedented sales success. Join us for this episode covering mastering sales success, unleashing the power of constraints and revolutionary strategies, but we’ll just call it Hot Dogs and Hot Deals, devouring sales records.
Corey (01:24):
Well, here we are again. Welcome to another episode of The Market Dominance Guys, with Corey Frank and, as always in the sales throne, virtually next to me, Chris Beall, the sage of sales, the profit of prophet and the hawking of hawking. Chris, you look tan and rested. You must have been somewhere where there’s water and sunshine and fetching Ms. Fenucci and celebrating something. Correct? I see-
Chris (01:49):
Celebrating something. Our first anniversary, we got married last year. This is being filmed… It’s not filmed, but whatever we call it nowadays, Zoomed here on… What are we on? July something, or the 6th of July 2023.
Corey (02:04):
Wow.
Chris (02:04):
We got married on the 2nd of July 2022, and we went over to Hawaii to the scene of the crime where I proposed to her. I call it the second proposal. Oh no, the third, she calls it the second. She claims the first one was a proposition. This is where you can disagree about terminology, but agree on a course of action, in our course of action with this. So yes, back here in Seattle right now where it may as well be Hawaii. It’s 90 degrees and the sun is shining here as well. So why did we go anywhere?
Corey (02:36):
Indeed, indeed. Well, as long as you’re back here, both in front of the microphone where you belong, where we can talk about all things market dominance, and of course. Right before we hit the record button, it seems, Chris, that every time I come whining to you about a business problem that I may have, or other folks who climb the mountaintop to pick your brain about a course of action and what state they may be in, which you can talk about that certainly as a great review, we end up always coming back to the good and fine Dr. Eli Goldratt and his theory of constraints. And I think if we had a heat map of how many times we’ve talked about the theory of constraints in our episodes, but I think the real answer is it’s not enough. Already-
Chris (02:36):
Not enough.
Corey (02:36):
Not enough.
Chris (03:20):
Not enough. Kirsten, not enough there.
Corey (03:24):
Kirsten not enough. So I bet a guy like you, Chris, you see the theory of constraints in everything, not only in businesses and restaurants, but you probably had an episode or two when you’re on some boat or on some surfboard in Hawaii where it probably came up as well.
Chris (03:41):
Yeah, it’s interesting. We were just out the other day on a little boat tour. You get on one of these big catamarans and you go out somewhere. And if you’re lucky, it’s the kind that is not Coast Guard certified, therefore you can only have four couples on it, and then two of them cancel, so then there’s only two couples. And then you got white pineapple, which is like candy, so then you’re really doing well and they have some other things.
(04:04):
And I had a conversation with one of the captains on the boat, not the captain captain, but the mate who wants to go around the world on a cruise for three years in a sailboat. Serious stuff. And he’s a serious guy and he’s preparing for it seriously. And we had this discussion about what’s the constraint that needs to be understood and needs to be characterized, and you need to invest in you as a system before you go out and attempt to do something kind of nutty, which is to sail a sailboat 25,000 miles except it’s further because you don’t get to go just around the earth, you have to kind of go all the places, continents in the way and crap like that.
(04:42):
We had a brief conversation and I told him, “I believe the constraint for you is in this value chain or this action chain that goes on that says, everything’s going okay, now it’s not, what do I do?” So something happened, now what do I do? So when everything’s going okay, you’re probably in a state of flow, so there’s nothing to invest in. Whatever it is, you’re doing it, pay no attention to it, just keep doing it.
(05:11):
But when something happens that draws your attention, you need to know which of the other two states that you can be in as a system. And that’s what I was telling you I was, “Look, just think of yourself as a system. You’re going to go buy this system that’s going to be able to… or build it and it’s going to be able to go around the world without dying or getting lost or whatever, and you’re going to deal with a lot of stuff.”
(05:33):
So number one state, flow. Great, wonderful. Number two state, however, is you’re stuck. You don’t know what to do. There’s something bad happened. An orca off the coast of Portugal has got your boat’s rudder in its jaws and is looking over at its buddy going, isn’t this fun? I’m so glad we invented rudder fighting or whatever they call it in orca land. And this is going on a lot off the coast of Portugal right now. Well, what do you do? Well, you’re stuck. So even though you might feel like you have to take immediate action, you don’t know what action to take and you need to learn. So when stuck, switch modes to learning and that link in your value chain will be getting the attention that it needs.
(06:23):
And then the third one’s the tough one, which is you’re not stuck, you’re not in flow and you just have to wait. And this happens a lot of times when you’re doing things, like I used to do mountaineering, doing sailing or whatever. When the world is bigger than you are, sometimes there’s nothing to do but just wait. And you can find something else to do and go get in flow doing that. That’s why you should always keep puzzles around that you don’t know how to solve, because you don’t need to solve them, but you need something to do to help you be in flow when you’re waiting. That’s a real key, because waiting is the hardest thing of all, in business is the very hardest. Just waiting, waiting for the right time to talk to somebody about a deal, waiting for that moment. There’s externalities and you have to wait. And the best way to wait is to turn yourself away from waiting into a state of stuckness about something that has nothing on the line.
Corey (07:24):
Well, let’s talk about that learning. I think that’s key. Certainly as an impatient guy and salesperson, I resemble both of those pejoratives, if you will. There’s a book from a few years ago, Think Like a Freak, the authors of Freakonomics. What he talks about, Chris, which I know you’ll appreciate, is this concept of don’t be embarrassed by how much you don’t know and how much you don’t act. And he has this simple story that he uses. And here’s the story. A little girl named Mary goes to the beach with her mother and her brother and they drive in a red car. And at the beach they swim, they eat some ice cream, they play in the sand and have sandwiches for lunch.
(08:09):
Now the questions that are given are what color is the car, and did they have fish and chips for lunch? Did they listen to music in the car? Did they drink a lemonade with lunch? And so now let’s compare the answers in your mind, in our listeners’ mind with what a bunch of British school children aged five to nine who were given the same quiz, what they said. Now, nearly all the children got the first two questions, the car was red and they went to the beach. But then when you start asking other questions, such as did they listen to music? Did they build sandcastles? Most of the kids will try to bluff their way through it. Those are the kids that become salespeople, right?
Chris (08:55):
Oh, exactly.
Corey (08:57):
But we used to always say that the hardest words in English language are to say, I love you. But the authors of Think Like a Freak say the actual hardest word to say is, I don’t know. Because you often can’t admit, especially in business, you can’t admit what you don’t yet know. And so he talks, he postulates that in order to really get out of these stuck states, you have to think like a child. And we’ve talked a little bit about asking small questions versus trying to ask the big questions and how the small questions by their very nature are less often asked and investigated the simple questions. But they’re virgin territory for true learning. So what do you think about that when you’re asking the ship captain or even some of the experiences with some of your clients here in the last couple of months or so, when I’m stuck, what are the questions I should be asking? Because how do I know if I’m stuck or if I’m waiting, which one is it?
Chris (09:54):
Yeah. Well, that’s a great question. How do you know if you’re stuck or you’re waiting? After all, that’s a process itself. That’s a process in which you could be in flow figuring out if you’re stuck or waiting, or you could be stuck about being stuck or waiting. You could be waiting to see if you’re stuck or waiting, right? All of the above could be going on.
(10:14):
The safe place to go always is stuck. Always is stuck. Because it turns out, even if you aren’t stuck on this particular thing, you’re stuck on so many things because you don’t know hardly anything. I don’t know hardly nothing is what we should all wake up. When I interview people to work in any one of the various companies that I’ve done over time, Time being one of those really big concepts now. 40 years, right?
(10:43):
One of the things that I tell them in the interview, well, I tell them first, you wouldn’t be talking to me if you weren’t qualified for the job, so I have no interest in hearing about your qualifications. And they usually are a little shocked. It’s like, look, I have people to do that. If you’re not qualified, you’re not talking to me. So now you are talking to me. So the purpose of this conversation is to allow you to have a clear picture of what kind of horror show you might be joining.
(11:11):
So I want to just put out a couple of things for you. One is we’re probably going to fail. That’s a starting point. Because if this were something where you’re probably going to succeed, we wouldn’t be doing it. Others would’ve already done it. So everything that is worth trying that might be a very high value, is high likelihood of failure.
(11:31):
So first, you have to get happy with the idea that you’re joining up with likely failure. Think about that. Secondly is you’re likely to find out when you come here that you’re wrong most of the time. This isn’t because we’re mean people who like to point out that other people are wrong. It’s because we recognize we’re all wrong almost all of the time. And the trick is to stay enthusiastic when you’re wrong. And the way you stay enthusiastic is you treat being wrong as an opportunity to learn rather than opportunity to cover up.
(12:05):
And a lot of folks kind of look at it like, whoa, that’s doesn’t sound that great to me. And it’s maybe a third of the candidates come through the interview and decide to join. And I always just say, “It’s up to you. It’s not up to me.” You want to join up at a place where you come to work naked every day, where we just know we’re wrong, we know we’re wrong from the get go, we will learn little things. We don’t make sales in order to get folks money, we make sales to have an opportunity to learn from the experience of being in a customer relationship with somebody rather than a prospect or stranger relationship because we’re trying to help them. We’ll find out, Hey, we’re wrong. We have to improve. That’s how we’re going to learn. So we’ll be stimulated to learn, as the customer’s problem is the wolf at our door. And when the wolf is at your door, well, you do something. You don’t just sit there, right? What do you do in this case? You try to learn.
(12:55):
So I think that there’s a safe place to go, assuming you’re in flow. Faking flow is really common. Folks love to fake flow. I’m going to do today what I did yesterday. I’m comfortable doing it, it doesn’t matter how dumb it is. It’s like, I am going to tend my beach side garden during the tsunami siren. Well, it’s a bad idea.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
We’ll be back in a moment after a quick break.
(13:27):
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(14:06):
And we’re back with Corey and Chris
Chris (14:16):
During the tsunami siren, it’s a good idea to think, what do I know about tsunamis? I better learn pretty quick. Oh, I’ve heard they can only go so far uphill. I think I’ll start going uphill, then get in flow going uphill, right? Tending your beach side garden because you did it yesterday and the day before and the day before and the day before, and your mom did it and your dad did it, and your dog did it and everybody did it. And it’s a tsunami morning, my friend. It’s time to leave the beach side garden alone to see if it can fend for itself for a day while you get yourself uphill. Because getting tsunamied is not that great, right?
Corey (14:51):
No.
Chris (14:51):
Waiting is a bad place to go also, by default. And some people do that. That’s considered to be conservative by a lot of folks. That’s like, we’ll just wait and see. Wait and see is considered to be a conservative phrase. Wait and see is like radical risk taking. After all, if you’re waiting, you have spare resource, you may as well use it to learn. Learning always reduces risk incrementally and sometimes exposes value, opportunity. So in general, you should let the winds of change buff at you, but you should fall into the hole of stuck every chance you get.
Corey (15:31):
Okay. I think we had said in one of our episodes from a few years ago, so I’m going to paraphrase you to you, right? All great breakthroughs in business happen when you’re stuck. Did I say that correctly?
Chris (15:43):
Yeah. Yeah. When you’re in flow, nothing happens other than you make progress. Folks love progress, right? It’s like, oh, here’s my progress report. It’s like, you should write a stuck report.
Corey (15:54):
Write a stuck…
Chris (15:57):
Progress is like, that would’ve happened anyway. Who cares?
Corey (16:00):
Let’s talk about a little bit more into our good friend, Dr. Eli Goldratt. And again, you talk about the book, The Goal. That came out in the mid-early eighties, I believe, right? And it was meant for manufacturing. But what we at The Market Dominance Guys, with your leadership, Chris, we’ve, I think, perpetuated that theory of constraints across business and inside sales beyond just the traditional supply chain, reducing lead time, et cetera. So hopefully that continues to prevail.
(16:30):
By thinking about the theory constraints, and maybe I have this wrong, but if I have a constraint, let’s say I’m a sales VP and sales are down, maybe meetings are down, maybe whatever the symptoms are that come to you as the doctor, what’s the disadvantage of working on all the things in my business. So I talk with my counterpart in finance, my counterpart in marketing, my counterpart in HR. If everybody collectively works on what they think is their constraint, is that good for the business? Is that not good for the business? What are some of the repercussions if I do that? Because to me, that’s just naturally what I should be doing.
Chris (17:09):
Yeah. Everybody wants to pull, right? Everybody wants to pull their weight. Well, you pull your weight, you’ll snap the traces. I mean, there’s a weak link somewhere in there. You don’t know where it is. So if everybody pulls, you’ll break the weak link. And now you’re in a world of hurt. And now you no longer have a system. Now you have two broken parts of systems that have got to be put back together, and that’s really, really hard to do. It’s hard enough to find the weak link. It’s hard enough to characterize it. It’s hard enough to understand its investability.
(17:43):
I love the picture of the chain with the paperclip in the middle of it. But once you identify the paperclip, there’s a lot of things you could do. Here’s a non-obvious thing. Get 50 more paperclips and add them to that paperclip. Now you might have a weird looking link, but at least it’s strong, right? There’s stuff like that that can be done, but it can’t be done until you say, we’re all looking at the paperclip. Because then the question from finance is, do we have enough capital to afford 50 paperclips because that’s what it’s going to take here. Or then we might go off the operations folks and say, 50 paperclips showed up on the dock. Could we actually get them in here? And how do you put one more on? And then you go engineering and say, well, if we were to modify the paperclip a little bit so that it was already somewhat open, is it okay? Is it still strong enough if we bend it and they’ll do some engineering stuff, right?
(18:34):
You can do all of those things with everybody once you’ve identified the one thing that’s worth paying attention to, and thank goodness it’s easy. I mean constraints, it’s easy in manufacturing, it’s harder in other disciplines. And if you’re going to read Goldratt, make sure you read Critical Chain, not just the manufacturing books, the project books, because most of the time… The project book, right? Critical chain is about application of theory of constraints to projects. And in projects, the constraint is the entire critical path of the project. And the basic rule is critical path is there, it’s step by step, step step. It’s linear, but it has feeders, it depends on things happening. So feed early, build inventory early, and make sure that the feeder doesn’t end up delaying the progress along the critical path.
(19:31):
And then as you plan, don’t buffer the steps, only buffer the final outcome. So add a buffer. If it’s going to take two months to do something, add a buffer one month to the end. But if it’s going to take a week to do something, two weeks to do something else, and they’re all lined up, don’t add buffers in between them. If you divide a project up into enough small pieces, then the buffers themselves will stretch the project out to the point where you shouldn’t do it, even if it works.
(19:59):
And this is common in software development. It’s common in sales. It’s common actually in a whole bunch of disciplines that are not manufacturing. Manufacturing is funny because it has these stable, intermediate outputs. When I make a part that’s going to go into the next part of a process, it can sit in a bin for a hell of a long time before it becomes crap. This is not true in sales. When you put something a bin in sales, every moment it sits in that bin, it’s like a drop of water on a hot griddle, man, that thing is going somewhere. It’s jumping around and it’s getting smaller.
(20:32):
So you’ve got to pay attention to time in a different way in projects. And sales is always a project, always a project. We can manufacture intermediate results like this. I talk to you, you go on my follow-up list. As long as you are not interesting now, you are actually a stable part of my future system. Right?
Corey (20:51):
That’s right. That’s right.
Chris (20:53):
As soon as you’re interesting now you’re within the quarter, the period of consideration. Now you’re inside of a project with timelines, we have to figure out what is the critical path for us to move forward together to a potential resolution in one of the feeders, and we have to invest in the feeders early. I mean, it’s kind of funny because some folks disdain formal education when it comes to real business, right? Real business people here, we don’t do things. But this part of one’s formal education should not be neglected, which is understanding the application of the theory of constraints to projects and then understanding the most fundamental thing about theory of constraints, which is what not to do and what not to do, is to do everything. What to do is to go into stuck mode and say, “Well, we don’t know where the constraint is,” and we are going to go find it together. We’re going to learn.
Corey (21:48):
Yeah, it’s just a couple days after July 4th, and it made me think of somebody who has busted through, the Roger Banister, if you will, of competitive eating, and it’s the Joey Chestnut. But even before Joey Chestnut, there was this young man named Kobe who went to university in Japan, and he lived with his girlfriend, who signed him up for an eating competition because the first prize was $5,000 or something like that. And without telling him, signed him up and he entered. It was a contest where you had four stages, you had boiled potatoes, and then you had a seafood bowl and maybe a Mongolian bowl and then noodles. And he watched previous years and he tried to think, how could I outthink the competition? And so long story short, what he did was just ate just enough to get to the next round. And then the final round after he conserved a lot of his energy and his stomach capacity, he would win.
(22:57):
And then, having taste a little bit of success, this is where I think our friend Dr. Eli and Dr. Beall come in, is he wanted to go pro, and he did the Nathan’s famous 4th of July hotdog eating contest, which rained out for a little bit, but I think it just happened in… I think the winner was 62 hotdog, I think it was. But in 2001, when Kobayashi decided to enter the contest, the record stood at 25 and a half, in 12 minutes, 10, 12 minutes. And so for months, he trained in obscurity and he arrived at Coney Island as this… I mean, he’s five eight, he’s very slight. He’s skinny. And one of the contestants mocked him and said, “Your legs are thinner than my arms.”
(23:40):
So how did he do? In his first Coney Island competition, this is in Think Like a Freak, they talk about this. He smoked the field and set a new world record. He did 50. This 20-something-year-old skinny Kobayashi essentially doubled the world record. And so everybody thought, okay, are you cheating? Are you using stones to expand your stomach? What are you doing? Why was he so much better? But he observed and he learned, and he said that most of the eaters had a similar strategy. Think of this, how most callers have a similar strategy, most sales organizations have a similar strategy. And it’s really just a speed it up version of how an average person eats a hotdog at a barbecue. You pick it up, you cram the dog in and the bun into the mouth. You chew from end to end, maybe you chug some water. And he said, there’s got to be a better way.
(24:32):
Nowhere was it written, for instance, that the hot dog must be eaten end to end. What would happen if he broke the dog and the bun in half? And this gave much more options for chewing and loading. And then he said, okay, the bun itself is a problem. What if I dunk the bun in my free hand and I squeeze all the water out of it and I eat that as well as the bunless dog broken in half. So he systematically broke down, it sounds like he was listening to some of our Market Dominance Guys or reading some Dr. Eli.
(25:05):
But what are your thoughts on stuff like that? Because you see that in business over the time where too many sales reps are trying to eat the bun like a backyard barbecue, and you have the VPs who are saying, I want more and more and more meetings, for instance. When Kobayashi went through a different process, not how do I get more meetings, I want more meetings, but how do I get better meetings faster? By being more efficient.
Chris (25:29):
Yeah. I think there’s a great principle… I love that story. I mean, he identified the constraint essentially as saliva production, and he faked the saliva. And you’re eating the bun, you’ve got to wet it down with what comes out of you. And he goes, ah, I just dunk it.
Corey (25:44):
Yeah, yeah.
Chris (25:45):
Get rid of that problem. And the other thing, I can basically almost swallow hole if I can get a couple of chomps into it. So I mean, that’s a brilliant application of theory of constraints.
Corey (25:53):
How do I make hotdog easier to eat versus just eating more hot dogs?
Chris (25:57):
Exactly. Well, we have the same problem in our company. So for years, we offer this thing called an intensive test drive. And the test drive was a breakthrough. It was an accidental breakthrough, like so many good breakthroughs. There was a customer, name’s Melody. Melody wanted to talk to me a lot. And I finally said, “I never want to speak with you again, because we will go to our graves, both of us having never done business together, having a lot of enjoyable conversations under our belt, so to speak. How about if I get on a plane tomorrow, fly across the continent, and we’ll actually use our product in production with your team, one person, 20 people, whatever, live, no demo, no conversations, no nothing, just do it. Your rep will have conversations. We’re just going to watch, we’re going to enjoy.” It’s like, “Oh, okay.” So we did that, right?
Corey (26:45):
Yep. Yep.
Chris (26:46):
So we thought we were so brilliant. We had this… The intensive test drive we call them ITVs now. It’s so important, we shorten the name and they do marvelous things. No demos, just use product and production. Woohoo. Well, we wanted to make sure that when we did that. Early on, we’re being conservative,. So you have to sign a little contract. Yeah, it’s $0, but it’s DocuSign. How hard can this be?
(27:12):
Well, it turns out after seven years, seven years? Eight years of doing these intensive test drives, I started to think the constraint of our entire sales system, this machine that we’ve built, is getting that little $0 contract signed. And if we just said, let’s just do the test drive, we’ll sign all contracts later after the test drive should we decide to go commercial together. If we just did that, we’d be dunking our hot dog. So divide it into two pieces, change the order of operations and dunk the hot dog.
Corey (27:49):
I love that.
Chris (27:50):
We increased the flow rate of test drives on the books, just signed, by a factor of two in one day with exactly the same staff. That is from a Friday to a Monday, just by changing the policy. No contract required. Suddenly, just an NDA, simple little NDA, everybody signs NDAs, nobody’s ever enforced one in the history of NDAs. So they’re willing to sign a simple NDA. We won’t steal your stuff, you don’t steal our stuff, right? It’s kind of it. And suddenly we doubled the flow rate of the one thing that was constraining the entire growth of the company.
(28:31):
Now, that is separating out the bun from the dog and dog from the bun, right? Reducing friction. And it’s interesting to me how often the big breakthroughs are, and I shouldn’t say it like this, but I’ll say it like this, nothing more than breaking something that was one thing into two parts, and then reversing the sequence in which the two parts would’ve been used or interacted with or consumed within your process.
(29:02):
And if you kind of go into your stuck situation with this paradigm, which is, can I break this into two parts? And if you ever say anything like that, you’ll get every sacred cow response known to mankind, all of which come back to, we’ve always done it like this, which is the desire to stay in flow and tend the seaside garden, beachside garden in the tsunami warning. That’s what it is. But it’s like, but the garden, look, in the past, the garden’s always been great. Yes, but there’s a tsunami coming. How are we sure it’s a tsunami? It hasn’t been a tsunami before. Why, I heard something that sounded like that siren once, and it was nothing. I think they were just testing the tsunami siren, et cetera, et cetera, right? You will get the most strong negative reaction from the thing that you should most strongly consider as action.
Corey (29:56):
Really. So that’s how you’re over the target?
Chris (29:57):
That’s how you know you’re over the target.
Corey (30:02):
The other thing that Kobayashi did, Chris, which you’re talking about, is they said that he would make more room in his stomach by jumping and wriggling while he ate. Something that no one would think of, because you’re hunched over, you’re eating, you’re doing everything else. But what you’re saying about getting the meetings and how you have to ask the questions is, here’s an idea. If you stand up and we talk about this, certainly what you advise in flight school, is when you stand up, you talk with your hands, you’re emotionally comfortable, you’re going to sound more conversational and authentic.
(30:34):
Well, I tell you what, Chris, we’ve done almost 200 of these, and it’s really a joy to do them with you. This one should come with maybe a parental advisory warning for explicit truths or explicit lyrics for sales professionals and folks, because I don’t think that you can read the goal nearly enough. I have a buddy of mine who we know, Robert Vera, who reads it every year just to keep himself sharp and certainly Think Like a Freak and Freakonomics are ways to help us all think like children, which we don’t do enough of, which is asking the small questions. What if we dot, dot, dot, as opposed to trying to stay in flow state, try to always maintain, cover our ass, ignore the tsunami siren that is blaring, we seek not to hear it. And just by those things alone, we don’t need to spend any more money on tech stack tools or hire any more folks or add any new magical CRM snap ins to radically improve our business.
Chris (31:33):
Yeah, it’s extremely rare that you’re in a situation where you can’t double your business by simply finding the constraint, breaking it in two, and changing the order of operations.
Corey (31:44):
Yeah, that’s beautiful. That’s beautiful. Well, we are up against the clock. We have market dominance things to do to pay the market dominance bills. So Chris, final thoughts on our revisiting yet again, our good friend Dr. Goldratt.
Chris (31:58):
Here’s a thought. My thought is, whenever you find yourself doing something that you’re comfortable doing, and you’re doing it because you’re comfortable doing it, ask yourself this question. Am I just covering up for being stuck? Because that’s what we do. When we’re stuck, we pretend to know the answers. And the more rigidly we do what we did yesterday, the more certainly we can be characterized as needing to go learn something new.
Corey (32:30):
Or as our good friend, Uncle Zig Ziglar said, feed your family or feed your ego. You can’t do both, right?
Chris (32:35):
You can’t do both.
Corey (32:37):
Can’t do both. Well, that’s a great mini summer edition, post honeymoon, one year anniversary edition of the Market Dominance Guys for Chris Beall. This is Corey Frank. Until next time.