Fining Your Frequency hosted by Ryan Treasure
Finding Your Frequency goes old school to chat about ConnectAndSell and how cold calling works in today’s society. Join Host Ryan Treasure and Chris Beall from ConnectAndSell as they discuss the current landscape and how problems are solved.
Here is the full transcript from this episode:
Speaker 7 (00:30):
This is Finding Your Frequency with your hosts, Jeff Spenard and Ryan Treasure. It’s time to speak up, share your voice and hear from the thought leaders.
Ryan Treasure (00:41):
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to a fantastic episode of Finding Your Frequency. I’m your host, Ryan Treasure. I want to welcome you guys all to the program and also give all the listeners a shout out and a big thank you for listening to the show for the last five years now. We appreciate all of you guys tuning in and hope we’re bringing you some fantastic content. If you want to get ahold of us here at the show, you can email info@voiceamerica.com. Let us know if you have any ideas for guests, topics and that type of thing, and we appreciate you guys.
Ryan Treasure (01:12):
And of course, so you can listen to this on any place where podcasts are at. And then we’re live every Friday at noon Pacific Time, 3:00 PM Eastern on the VoiceAmerica variety channel. So make sure you check us there.
Ryan Treasure (01:25):
And hey, you guys, it’s 2021. We’ve got a new year, right? Things are moving and shaking. Listening to the news this morning and here in Arizona they said that we’ve recovered about 90% of lost jobs due to the pandemic, so celebrating that. It’s really great to hear the people are getting back to work and being able to sustain and do what they do. And of course, we always love to talk about entrepreneurship here and all that fun stuff, and business and technology.
Ryan Treasure (01:55):
And I hear a lot of great news with people who are leveraging great opportunities during the pandemic and entrepreneurial spirit is ripe and rough and ready to go here in the United States. A lot of people using the pandemic to create cool tools of technology and different pieces that have been helpful for people. If you guys are listening to the show, you’re starting your own thing, you know what? Kudos to you, keep on rocking and rolling.
Ryan Treasure (02:19):
We’ve got a really good show for you guys today. We’re going to keep with our theme and talk about technology and business and some of those types of things. We got a great guest today, his name is Chris Beall. Chris Beall has been in software development for 30 years. He’s participated in startups and the founder of very early stage of development. His focus has consistently been on creating and taking to market simple products that can be used successfully the first time they’re touched without having to take a course or read a manual.
Ryan Treasure (02:51):
That is so funny. I always tell people that when you’re doing software development and creating something, you need to make sure that it’s very easy to use, whether you’re eight or whether you’re 80. And so I love that idea.
Ryan Treasure (03:05):
Chris has been in the software field for such a long time, he’s done some great stuff. He loves the idea of freeing up human potential, which is fantastic, and we’ll definitely get into some of that and what human potential is. And he’s been involved in some pretty cool technology stuff with GXS, Epiance, Qlip Media, Aptara, Cadis, Sun Microsystems and Unisyn. And he’s currently the CEO of ConnectAndSell based in Silicon Valley.
Ryan Treasure (03:35):
Chris, welcome to the show.
Chris Beall (03:37):
Hey, great to be here.
Ryan Treasure (03:40):
I hope I didn’t butcher your bio too bad, but I wanted to just lay the groundwork for the listing audience to get an understanding of your background and the breadth of your knowledge. And of course, we want to talk to you about how you found your frequency in life and in business, and being involved in startups at an early stage in your career. You’ve definitely got that entrepreneurial spirit.
Ryan Treasure (04:07):
And so we want to hear a little bit about Chris Beall and how you found your frequency in life and in business and how you got where you are.
Chris Beall (04:15):
Sure, Absolutely. Thanks so much. You didn’t butcher it at all. It was much better than I would have been able to do. My version of my bio was, my family moved to the desert, close to where you are back in 1957 and I grew up without very many people around. Way out in the desert in north Scottsdale, so my friends were mostly animals. We had five horses or six horses, depending, and a couple of goats. At one point I think we had 16 dogs, we had five cats, we had a ground squirrel, we had a skunk.
Chris Beall (04:47):
And then I would go catch wild animals and turn them into pets. And I actually think that was a huge part of what made me who I am, because it’s funny, I’m into sales technology now, ConnectAndSell. And I think almost everything I learned about selling, I learned from having to convince an animal to do what I wanted it to do without having the benefit of language. And what I concluded, I think internally as a kid without thinking about it too much, but later is, if you can’t interact with somebody at the most basic level, you’re probably not going to do very well with them at a more intellectual level.
Chris Beall (05:23):
And once you get to language, there’s a lot of confusion, so you need to… If you really want to be successful, and it depends on other people to be successful, you’re going to have to learn to interact with them at a lower level than the words themselves. That was a big formative thing for me. Another was, my house was full of books. My dad was getting a master’s at Arizona State and he is a very quiet man, he read a lot.
Chris Beall (05:49):
I found a manifesto that he wrote back when he was, I think, 26 years old, I found it the day after he died in his 80s. And it basically said, “I’m going to read all the best that has ever been written and learn from those people.” And he had a secret project for all those years, for 60 years of reading the best books in the world. And that’s why my house was full of the best books in the world and these great business books.
Chris Beall (06:15):
I didn’t have any hesitation, but reading, I was an early reader, so I read all that stuff. I was reading Peter Drucker when I was eight years old. And I didn’t know you weren’t supposed to read that stuff. So my worldview was formed around what these curated library, my dad’s had to say to me much more than the regular kid stuff I might’ve been able to access. And then a little bit later, fast forward, I had a lucky event. Doesn’t sound lucky, but it was very lucky.
Chris Beall (06:46):
I fell down a mountain when I was 14, in the Sierras, I fell about 800 feet. And it’s a focusing experience, let me tell you. When you fall to your certain death, there’s something that happens during that long slow process, which seems to take hours, or months, or centuries. I came out of that a little bit different feeling lucky and mostly feeling lucky about the opportunity to do things for other people.
Chris Beall (07:14):
My dad used to say to me, “You can only sleep in a bed that’s so soft and eat food that’s so good.” And if you can come by that easily because you’re talented and you have the willingness to work, then you have a lot of excess, what are you going to do with it? And I wasn’t thinking money, I was just thinking, what can you do for people? So that was a big, big change to me.
Chris Beall (07:32):
And I think that’s where this entrepreneurial kind of thing comes from, that and I’m very impatient. People who know me think I’m laid back, they have no idea what’s going on inside. There’s a pretty fast motor that doesn’t like delay, and I think that’s actually the big driver for entrepreneurship in general is, if you don’t like sitting around, waiting to be told what to do by somebody else.
Chris Beall (07:57):
If you don’t like going through a long, slow process of climbing some corporate ladder, you just want to cut to the chase. And I was told to become an entrepreneur by my high school physics teacher, not when I was in high school at Saguaro High, right there in Scottsdale Arizona, but years later when I came back to student teach. I wanted to be a schoolteacher. I wanted to teach and I wanted to teach physics at my own high school, where I went to school.
Chris Beall (08:23):
That was my whole idea of a career. And I would teach in the school year and travel and write books the rest of the time. And she took me aside one day before we were going to pull the trigger on me taking her job. She was going to retire suddenly and leave me in the lurch. And she said, “I basically forbid you to do this.” She said, “I track my students. I stack rank them by entrepreneurial capability and you’re at the top of the list for my last 40 years. I want you to go start companies.”
Chris Beall (08:53):
And so she basically booted me out and she didn’t tell me how to do it. She said, “Basically, go get a job somewhere in some industry that’s got a lot of potential. You’ll hate something so fast you’ll want to solve some problem because you’re so impatient, you don’t like anything very much. And you’ll know, hearing from me that the right thing to do is to figure out how to start a company to fix that thing.”
Chris Beall (09:16):
And I think that’s just guided me ever since this… Some things drive me nuts, and so I start companies to get it going. Now, this company I’m with right now, ConnectAndSell, I didn’t start this, I stumbled across it. That was just luck. I was going to move down to Tucson and run a solar energy company down there that’s very exotic, physics-oriented kind of thing. Ran into this guy, Shawn McLaren, was introduced to him. He was the CEO of ConnectAndSell.
Chris Beall (09:45):
And he told me a story, and the story in five minutes made me just stop and say, “Are you telling me that you have reinvented the business telephone to call a list instead of a person?” And the consequence of that mathematically is 10 times more conversations between relevant parties. And he said, “Yeah.” And I said, “I’m in.” And he said, “What if I’m not hiring?” And I said, “It’s a free country. I can work for whomever I want. You can choose to pay me or not.”
Ryan Treasure (10:22):
That’s a good story. Oh wow.
Ryan Treasure (11:10):
Finding Your Frequency is excited to offer our listeners a new way to interact. Join us every Friday at 2:00 PM Pacific Time for a live show on the Stereo app. You can download the free Stereo app and select Finding Your Frequency. We’re verified right there on Stereo, so you can connect with us whenever we’re live. Stay tuned for more details on how to engage with us on Stereo at the end of today’s episode. Go to www.stereo.com/radioryan1. Again, www.stereo.com/radioryan1.
Ryan Treasure (11:42):
Once you get in there, make sure you start following me. You’ll start to check it out. And again, we’ve got the shows that we’re going to be doing every Friday at two o’clock Pacific Time on the Stereo app.
Ryan Treasure (11:52):
So much that you’ve done in your lifetime and I like that whole premise of, you have an access to all those books when you were younger. I can’t help but think about my seven-year-old daughter who I’m constantly like, “Let’s read some books.” And with the way technology is today, smart speakers, and phones, and tablets, and computers, and all that kind of stuff, it makes it really hard to get a kid to really get to enjoy reading and that method of absorbing knowledge.
Ryan Treasure (12:30):
And so what a unique opportunity that you had over there in north Scottsdale in the desert. I had a chuckle when you said, “north Scottsdale, in the desert,” and I’m thinking, North Scottsdale is not the desert anymore. There’s been so much growth over there and same for when I grew up in Phoenix. I remember if you went… I lived in central Phoenix or Metro Phoenix, near Metro center, 35th Avenue in Glendale. And I remember that if you went north of Cactus, it was the middle of the desert back then when I was growing up.
Ryan Treasure (13:07):
And so what growth Arizona has seen and what a life-changing experience falling down a mountain. I can only imagine what an exercise in patience that you might’ve learned during that particular time, in that recovery and all that kind of stuff. And fixing companies or starting companies to fix problems, that’s I think really the true entrepreneurial spirit. What was the first company that you started and what was the first problem that you solved on your entrepreneurial journey?
Chris Beall (13:46):
The first company I started, I was 11 years old, and my friend, Danny Stevens and I decided we needed to raise some funds to make a tackling dummy so we could become better football players. So we started a company, went door to door, and the problems we were solving are people don’t like to go outside and do the hard stuff. So we’ve just got to look, what’s something that you got around here that you want to get done and you just haven’t been able to bring yourself to do it? We’ll do it for you.
Chris Beall (14:14):
And that was it. This is simple as that, but it was a successful company. We were profitable. We made our goals, and that was a funny start. The place that I actually, I think I got like a boost was actually not starting a company. It was being in a situation where I needed money fast. My first wife had had a miscarriage and I was in Arizona moving to Colorado to be closer to her family. And we had medical bills from the miscarriage.
Chris Beall (14:46):
Back then it wasn’t huge, but it was something and it needed to be taken care of right away. So I got a job the next day as a Fuller Brushman, knocking on doors in Phoenix in August. And you can imagine what that’s like, right? You open that door-
Ryan Treasure (15:00):
I’ve done it.
Chris Beall (15:00):
… that’s $5 an hour there.
Ryan Treasure (15:01):
Oh, I’ve done it. I’ve done it. That’s funny that you say that. One of my very first jobs when I was younger, I was probably 16 years old. And I would get done with school one, two o’clock in the afternoon, and then of course on the weekends. And I would go to this place where they would give me different products, lotions and little electronic devices and that kind of stuff, and throw them in a duffle bag and drive over to an area and walk door to door, business to business, trying to sell these items to people.
Ryan Treasure (15:38):
We used to play a fun game, because some places that had the sign that they didn’t want anybody bothering them or any salespeople going in there. I wanted to make money and I knew that if I could get into a building that had a whole bunch of little office spaces in it, it would be more efficient for me than walking the block, door to door. So we used to play this little game of, don’t let the security guard in the building catch you.
Ryan Treasure (16:04):
And I remember going into the medical building over there off of like 23rd Avenue in Thomas, big, giant building that’s like, I don’t know, 13, 14 stories high. And we used to take the elevator to the top, and then the middle, and go to the different offices. That used to be my little sweet spot for selling lotion baskets to the medical workers that were at the little doctor’s offices inside there.
Ryan Treasure (16:30):
And yeah, I’m telling you, running around with a duffle bag with products in it, in the middle of the summertime in Phoenix, that’ll that’ll definitely teach you to hustle because you’re like, “I want to get this bag sold as quickly as possible so I could get into the air conditioning.”
Chris Beall (16:47):
Right. Exactly, exactly. I think it’s experiences like that make us much more, maybe even at the companies that we start. Starting a company is a simple thing, there’s really nothing to it. The formalities are easy. I had a company once where we used to start companies, not for other people, but for ourselves because our business structure required that we start a bunch. We started 23 companies in the first year and they were all… That part’s easy.
Chris Beall (17:16):
What’s really challenging, I think is two things. One is, finding a problem worth solving for real that’s not just in your head. And I think you’ve got to get out and sell it like today. Sell it before you have it, sell it before you build it and find out if it’s real. Because if you can’t sell it, it’s not real. And I still to this day believe that, and at ConnectAndSell, we help our customers do that.
Chris Beall (17:38):
We help them get out there, whether they have a product or not, because you always have a message and you always have the desire for a meeting. And that will tell you the conversion rate or that message to a meeting, for a particular target audience, will tell you a lot about whether you should go forward. So dealing with reality, I think is a big part of starting companies, and you do it by doing the hard part first, which is selling that. But the part that gives you the most information.
Chris Beall (18:05):
But you’ve got to know how to sell, and I think you learn how to sell by selling in difficult circumstances. Selling door to door, I think is the very, very best for me. It taught me what I call the double tap. So I thought about Fuller Brush and I thought, I don’t know these products. And I know something about these people, which is they’re people, that’s all I know.
Chris Beall (18:27):
So I knock on the door and I’d say… It’s usually a woman who had answered in the middle of the day and I’d say, “Hi, I’m Chris Beall. I’m your new Fuller Brushman. You probably don’t know what Fuller Brush is, I sure don’t.” And they would give me this funny look, and then they’d say, “How can I help you?” It’s like, “We’re done.” And I’d say, “I’ve heard that Fuller Brush has got products that you can’t buy in stores that are good around the house and that are really unusual.
Chris Beall (19:01):
And if I were to go find one or two of those that I think would really make a difference in your life, do I have your permission to come back and waste five minutes of your time and share that with you?” Everybody said yes, everybody. So instead of selling on the spot, which you get resistance, I realized, why fight the resistance, just break it into two pieces. And I was the most successful Fuller Brush person, I think in Arizona ever very, very fast.
Chris Beall (19:29):
Everybody bought from me, everybody, but I only sold 14 products. Out of that huge product line, I sold two products to each of seven demographics, and that was it.
Ryan Treasure (19:41):
No, that’s interesting. That’s funny. I totally agree with you, learning how to sell. I think that experience that I had, door to door also, especially when I was only 16 years old and I’m doing this. I had always had the gift of gab, and so that’s always really helpful too, if you can… Like you were mentioning earlier, just connect with people as people because that’s all all of us are, we’re all people and our commonality is our humanism.
Ryan Treasure (20:16):
And being able to talk to that is definitely helpful when breaking the ice. I remember, I used to work in a phone room just before I went into the military. We were selling Colorado state police… You get a sticker, and you get the newsletter, and you’re supporting the Colorado police. And so we’re calling all these folks in Colorado. And I think straight cold calling at a company MPI back in the ’90s.
Ryan Treasure (20:50):
And I thought that, same thing, it was like, okay, I’m not going to try to just jump in and start selling these people, even though they had the script that came up in a monitor with an auto dialer and all that fun stuff. And I was really successful at selling those. So successful in fact that they gave me an office to go work in. I’m like 17 years old, waiting for me to go to MEPS so I can go into the Navy.
Ryan Treasure (21:17):
This was my job and they’re like, “Man, how do you sell so many of those?” And I’m like, “I’m not selling them. I’m telling them what the Colorado police, and the highway patrol, and the police union, what do they do for their community. I’m giving them an explanation of what’s happening in the community. And as a by-product, when they feel compelled, then they’re purchasing the product.”
Ryan Treasure (21:48):
And so, that was one of the differences between reading the script and being robotic. It was like, “Before I can even get into the script, I need to know how these folks feel about their particular community, their area.” And so it was similar to what you were breaking it into two parts. I kind of did the same thing, but it was in the same phone call, because I had to auto dial, which is funny.
Ryan Treasure (22:17):
Now auto dial is AI robots that just call numbers. I get the same phone call every day from a different phone number telling me that my car warranty has expired and that they would like to sell me a new one. And the funny part is, I have a brand new truck that’s under warranty, so why are they trying to sell me a warranty? I feel like times have changed. I get cold calls from people sometimes too and from that aspect and they just boom, they jump right into the script.
Ryan Treasure (22:51):
They don’t even say, “Hi, how are you doing today?” Or any kind of human element. It’s just that they jump right in. I immediately go, “Hey, hey, hey, just get off your script for just a second. This isn’t going to work for you, number one, and I’m not interested in what you’re selling, because you’re trying to sell. You don’t even know who I am, you didn’t ask me if I’m busy right now or, ‘Do you have time to speak?’ None of those types of things.”
Ryan Treasure (23:16):
And so I find it comical when I get those cold calls sometimes. I also try to remind them that it’s 2020 or 2021 and there’s a better way of doing things.
Chris Beall (23:31):
There always has been, that’s the deal is that… What you were doing when you were calling, when you were 17 was very sophisticated, actually, and it’s what we teach people to do. So at ConnectAndSell, we let folks have lots of first conversations, cold calls, lots of cold calls. They’re having them generally with senior decision makers in businesses. And what their first problem is, they don’t know how to get the call started in a way that creates trust. That lets somebody cross that trust barrier.
Chris Beall (24:02):
I asked Chris Voss, the author of Never Split the Difference one night. He’s FBI hostage negotiator for a long time for international hostage deals. World’s hardest product to sell. You sell 20-year jail sentences to people. And here’s my product. Lotion is one thing, 20-year jail sentence was, “Would you like to go to jail for 20 years? Here’s my deal.” So I asked him one night, I said, “How long do we have to get somebody to trust us in a cold call? That is, how far do you go before it’s too late?”
Chris Beall (24:33):
And he said, “Seven seconds.” And I said, “That’s interesting. Our research says eight seconds.” And he said, “Your research is wrong? It’s seven seconds.” And I thought, okay, so he’s pretty sure of this. They’ve done a huge amount of research over at the FBI and working with other academic institutions and their own laboratories. Cold call is a very important part of the hostage negotiation. You’ve got to get that part right and you’ve got to get trust.
Chris Beall (24:58):
So I got lucky and I asked him a follow-up question, which is, “What do we have to do in those seven seconds?” And he said, “Oh, that’s easy.” And I’m thinking, this guy really is out of his mind, that can’t be easy. He said, “No, all we have to do is this, we just have to show the other person we see the world through their eyes. We call it tactical empathy. And then we need to demonstrate to them that we are competent to solve a problem they have right now.”
Chris Beall (25:25):
And I thought about it for a second. I said, “When I cold call somebody, aren’t I the problem that they have right now?” And he said, “Yeah, exactly. So offer a solution to yourself.” I said, “We teach people to say this, but we don’t know why it works. We teach them to say, ‘I know I’m an interruption. Can I have 27 seconds to tell you why I called?'” And he thinks about it for a little bit and he says, “Huh?”
Chris Beall (25:50):
He says, “It’s perfect. When you say, ‘I know I’m an interruption,’ in that hard flat voice, hammering the word, know, you’re throwing yourself under the bus. You’re indicting yourself. And that is how they see you. That’s how they see the world. And when you offer a solution, ‘Can I have 27 seconds to tell you why I called?’ And you do it in that playful, curious voice, they’re going to come along with you, they trust you.”
Chris Beall (26:17):
I asked him, “What percentage of the time will they trust me if I do that just right?” He said, “100%. No matter what the outcome, 100% they’ll trust you.” I said, “Wow. So we can change our whole idea of how to go to market from sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, to pave the entire market with trust, and then harvest that over the three years of a replacement cycle for your category of product.” And that’s it, that’s all you have to do.
Chris Beall (26:45):
And so I’m writing a book on that subject and I have a podcast. We’re about episode 67 called Market Dominance Guys. And all we do is break down how to dominate markets by covering the market with trust, using live human conversations, starting with a known problem, which is yourself.
Ryan Treasure (27:09):
Wow. That’s that’s so well said, so well thought out. That’s amazing stuff.
Ryan Treasure (29:15):
If someone’s starting a company and they have a product and they’re trying to take it to market, I highly urge you guys to pay attention to this knowledge that Chris just gave us, because you’re 100% on so many points. I know you guys have done so much research, and in seven seconds to get somebody’s trust, that that takes some creativity to be able to think of a way to get into the door, so to speak or get past the gatekeepers.
Ryan Treasure (29:49):
Cold calling, for a long time, when you talk to marketing folks that are young hip, up and coming marketers, they’ll tell you that cold calling is dead. That’s not the way that you can do business. You have to email marketing, and click funnels, and all those kind of different technology-based marketing platforms. I want your take on that idea, what I would call the old school versus the new school.
Ryan Treasure (30:23):
In the old school, sales people were constantly cold calling people for selling their product or whatever the case may be. And now, there’s kind of a shift, there’s social media. You can drop ads on there and it’s more of a, let me show you who I am and what I’m doing, and hopefully you will come. Or thought leadership where you’re talking about what problems you’re solving and those types of things where you’re not really selling.
Ryan Treasure (30:53):
And then the hope is, if I put out some articles or if I create some content around what we do, people will come to trust me and then they will just come to me. Give me your take on those scenarios of that old school methodology of banging the phone for as many contacts as you can get. Which I know from my telemarketing days, it’s really sometimes in the case of trust, but it’s also a numbers game too.
Ryan Treasure (31:29):
You have to have a certain number of conversations or a certain number of nos in order to get to the yes. And that was that old school way. So tell us about those differences and how maybe you see either one is better than the other, or how do they play nicely together.
Chris Beall (31:49):
I think everything plays nicely together if you’re smart enough to make it play nicely together. But you got to start with the human being and you have to start with their emotions. I don’t seek sales. I’ve never sought sales. I think sales is a foolish thing to seek when you’re taking a company to market or taking a product to market. What you want to seek is market dominance. You want to dominate a market, because if you fail to somebody else will.
Chris Beall (32:17):
So the only competitive question in the world is, are you going to dominate the market? Smaller or large. Because if you’re not number one, you will assume be number of 10,000, because you just exist at the whim of the dominant player in the market. They keep you around as their chew toy to throw you the crappy deals so that you can found around those while they take the good stuff. And that’s just how markets work and that’s because that’s how people buy.
Chris Beall (32:42):
Folks like to buy from market leaders, they like to buy from the dominant player. And if you’re not dominant, ultimately you’re toast. I have a podcast episode that’s entitled All Dead Companies are Equally Uninteresting. They’re equally uninteresting, whether they’re dead yet or not. You can figure they’re either on their way to being dead, or they’re already dead, or they’re on their way to being dominant, or they’re already dominant.
Chris Beall (33:06):
So then it comes down to the fact that when it comes to relationships, it’s a zero sum game. There’s no way that if somebody trusts you, and therefore by implication or by transitive property, they trust your offering, that they’re going to equally trust the next guy that comes along. That is if you want to get somebody to not trust somebody, all you have to do is have them come and tell that person not to trust someone that they already trust. This is how politics works, this is how tribalism works.
Chris Beall (33:38):
This is why people root for their team rather than the other team, is because when somebody says something bad about your team or about the person that you trust, anything that implies you shouldn’t trust them, you trust them more. So trust is a one-way street, it’s a mouse trap. Once it’s snapped, it’s done, the mouse is dead. Now the question is, who can build the most trust? And when you come to digital means the problem with digital is, it doesn’t speak directly to the trust centers way inside of a person’s brain.
Chris Beall (34:09):
Those are wired up quite precisely and directly to your ears and to a lesser degree to your eyes. So to your ears in that all human beings who are hearing-capable and don’t have some other particular disorder can evaluate whether they should trust somebody, whether they do trust somebody unconsciously within seven seconds. Now that’s the only question really is, can you get the market to trust you?
Chris Beall (34:37):
Who’s going to be first to win the race to trust with the relevant portion of the market that’s going to buy today and the other portion of the market that’s going to buy next quarter? Because by the way, timing is real, you can’t force somebody to buy something. If you just bought a Tesla yesterday, I’m not going to get you to buy a competing, whatever it is the next day, it’s just not going to happen. You got your Tesla, you’ll probably have it for three years.
Chris Beall (35:01):
So that’s in business to business even more true because business purchases are very scary. When I buy for my business, I’m much more cautious than when I buy for myself. When I buy for myself, I put my money at risk, when I buy for my business, I put my career at risk. It’s a much, much different game. So I’ve got to get to the point of trusting somebody so much that I’ll put my career at risk. How much is that? That’s more than I trust myself. That’s how much it is. Right? And that’s a high bar.
Ryan Treasure (35:33):
Yeah, really high.
Chris Beall (35:34):
So how do we get there? And the answer is, we get there in those first seven seconds and we actually can’t make the first move digitally and win the risk to trust. We can make the second move digitally. If I speak with you, you trust me and I send you a follow-up email. You’ll open the email, you’ll read the email and you might take action on the email. In fact, for the rest of my life, I can send you emails, I can do social outreach. I can offer to meet you at a conference, when those happen again.
Chris Beall (36:05):
All those things, I have the inside track with you because we’ve spoken and I’m on the outside looking in before we speak. It’s as simple as that. And it really doesn’t matter what’s cheap. Digital is cheap, which sounds great, except for one thing, it’s cheap for everybody. So it’s cheap. I do something, you copy it. I do something else, you copy that. I do something else, you copy that. Thought leadership, who knows who the leader is? Copy.
Chris Beall (36:37):
There’s no shortage of fake thought leadership. That’s just copy. But you can’t copy the first experience somebody has speaking with somebody else. That is an uncopiable one-time event that changes the world.
Ryan Treasure (36:52):
That’s very well said. Man, I just love your philosophy on those single first interactions with people. And to speak to what you said about that trust and once it’s attained, it’s like it stays there for a long time and is viable. I have some former clients of VoiceAmerica who had done radio show with us. We’re in our 21st year of business and VoiceAmerica was started to solve a problem. The founders of the company were working in terrestrial, regular radio and they’re going, “Wait a minute, we’re limited to this geographic area of the FM or AM tower and how far that signal can go.”
Ryan Treasure (37:42):
This was 1998 and the internet was really starting to become a big thing and they go, “Why can’t we do what we’re doing right now on the internet so we can be global?” And thus that was a problem that they were solving, It was interesting because back in those days in radio, when I was coming up, we had phone rooms for radio advertising. And the only job of those folks were calling businesses and business owners, local ones and gaining their trust, so that way they would feel comfortable with buying ads and having those ads run on the radio programming at the time I worked at an AM station.
Ryan Treasure (38:27):
Which was actually my first introduction to working in radio. Wasn’t the technical side and all of the things that I know now 20 some odd years later. It was sitting at a table with a telephone going through the phone book and looking through the yellow pages, and looking for the ads that were the full page ads, knowing that, if this business is spending money on the full page ad, they are really looking for some exposure of some sort. And so those would be the first businesses that we called.
Ryan Treasure (38:59):
“How did you find us?” “You know what? I was in the yellow pages. Your ad was great. You had all this stuff and…” I’m not really selling anything, I’m complimenting them on their ad that they put together. That was where we were gaining trust in the beginning as we were cold calling for advertising sales. Ultimately, I got so infatuated with buttons, knobs, faders, all of those kinds of things that I ended up going to college to get my associates degree in media arts and then several certifications from different places.
Ryan Treasure (39:35):
But still to this day, my entry into the world of just business in general always started with the person to person, face-to-face, the cold calling, all of those things until I had this obsession with knobs, and faders, and buttons, and electronics. I was that kid that used to disassemble my mom’s VCR just to see how it worked. And then we’d have to put it back together. And every now and again, I would try to put something back together and it didn’t work again. I disassembled it and forgot how to put it back together.
Ryan Treasure (40:11):
But it was those lessons, those things that I learned during those times that I think have been really helpful for just being a communicator in general and having conversations with folks. When you talk about that seven seconds and gaining that trust, some of those clients that we’ve been in contact with over the years for radio, even though some of them may not be doing business with us right now, because their marketing needs, our business stuff has changed over time.
Ryan Treasure (40:40):
But we’re still total friends. They still have a trust in me as a person, they still have trust in the company. And when they run into something, or a person, or whatever the case may be that needs a service like we provide, because we have that trust and we have that longevity with them, the first thing they say is, “Hey, called my friends over at VoiceAmerica. You need that done, these guys do that. They’re good at that. They did that for me.”
Ryan Treasure (41:06):
That’s one of the reasons we’ve been in business for 21 years, because we have some trust in the marketplace, and also, like you said, market dominance. At the time the VoiceAmerica launched, we were the first and only online internet talk radio. There was the us, and I think at the time AOL had something called Boombox, which was the first music service through AOL with streaming music online. That’s what you had, you had VoiceAmerica and Boombox from AOL.
Ryan Treasure (41:38):
Fun stuff and going through all of those pieces, I think have been really helpful and gaining that trust. So when you talk about trust, I feel that that’s a really important thing in business, is having trust. And the same thing, like you said with like the vendors, when we’re spending money for the company. There’s got to be a high level of trust. And I totally agree as the VP of operations for VoiceAmerica, when I’m vetting a new vendor for something, I’m totally putting my career on the line when I go to the CEO of the company and I say, “Here’s my recommendation on something.”
Ryan Treasure (42:12):
So yeah, you got to make sure that you do your due diligence and be ready to go. And then of course, being a good communicator and having that ability to speak to people is also helpful from a leadership position when you’re being a leader and you have people underneath you that you are charged with taking care of. And understanding that you can’t speak to everybody the same way. You got to maybe shift your way around a little bit based on the person and the reaction of how you maybe open up your first dialogue, right?
Chris Beall (42:45):
Yeah. You got to be it… Basically as a leader, and you do it and I do it, a lot of other people do it for a living, in addition to everything else, we do people. And we’re effectively selling [inaudible 00:42:57] every day. We’re selling ourselves as the product that they should buy because they’re putting their lives on the line. They’re making a big bet staying with us and following us.
Ryan Treasure (43:07):
Yeah.
Chris Beall (43:08):
That’s probably the biggest purchase anybody makes in their life, is to follow somebody in business. That’d be the biggest investment you will ever make and the one that has the biggest downside risk. So yeah, they should be paying attention and we should be spelling through transparency, but also being adaptable to meet them where they are and speak in a way that makes sense to them.
Ryan Treasure (43:33):
I love the idea of being adaptable. I think that’s-
Chris Beall (43:37):
It’s so crucial.
Ryan Treasure (43:38):
It’s important. I do karate and that’s one of the things… I was in class on Wednesday and we were doing some drills, and my sensei was talking about the practical application of karate. You have forms that you do that are same all the time. But in a practical application like you just got off work, your mind is thinking about the five or six emails that maybe you didn’t have time to get to that day, and you feel bad.
Ryan Treasure (44:09):
Because I’m the guy that’s like, I love to clear my inbox and those tasks every day, so that way, nothing piles up. The thing I hate the worst is being behind on doing work. When I talk about adaptability, it’s like you get off work, okay, I’m going to stop at the convenience store. I’m going to get myself Dr. Pepper and maybe I like to have a beer every now and again after work. So I’m grabbing a beer, I’m taking that home.
Ryan Treasure (44:38):
And all of a sudden, I’m walking to my car and some guy tries to attack me or something like that. It’s like, you got to be adaptable, and the same thing with business, it’s like in karate, it’s like, you got to practice your skills in multiple situations. And that’s why I love role-playing and those types of things when you’re working on training representatives of the company. And putting them into different scenarios where you’re forcing them to be adaptable.
Ryan Treasure (45:12):
We have some really cool recordings of phone calls and cold calls that we’ve curated over the many years that we’ve been in business where it’s like, “Here’s seven different entry points that we’ve recorded and seven different responses to those.” And then role-playing those with new folks and getting them exposed to the different ways that people tell you. And being adaptable to get around that.
Chris Beall (45:40):
We teach a thing called flight school. That really speaks to something that’s become important in our business. So at ConnectAndSell, what we do is we let a rep talk to 30 or 40 or 50 people a day. No gatekeepers, no voicemail, no nothing. So it’s just simple and it’s no excuses as a result. If you can push a button and talk to somebody on your list, and it happens 100% of the time, and it happens with you doing nothing. You just push the button and then you go about your business.
Chris Beall (46:07):
Then turn on your ear, pops up on the screen, shows you who you’re talking with. Then suddenly, the arena is inside the conversation. That’s where the action moves. And now you get to role play, you get to learn through coach the live fire. Because you can actually be making money while you’re being trained, which is quite something. So we’ve put that together in something we call flight school, where we’ll take folks through four sessions of two hours of really blitz and coach.
Chris Beall (46:37):
Where in those two hours, they’ll talk to maybe 15, 18 people, to all decision makers and they’ll run the script. The script is easy, but the tone is hard. And then they got to handle the situation with just all the different objections. So the first session, we believe this is so important, and the first session of two hours, we coach on only the first seven seconds of the conversation. They’re all live conversations, they all go all the way through, they’re all trying to set a meeting.
Chris Beall (47:08):
But the only thing we’ll coach is the first seven seconds. And then the second session, we’ll coach what we call the 27 seconds, the value portion. And then the next one, we’ll coach how to ask for the meeting. And then the next one we’ll coach what we call turbulence. So it’s takeoff, free flight, landing, and turbulence. And it’s amazing when folks get to practice under pressure, but knowing that they’re with the team, because the team’s taken flight school together, their boss is coaching them, but we’re coaching the boss on how to coach. We coach the manager on how to coach alive.
Chris Beall (47:39):
There is no, “Remember what happened last Tuesday?” It’s like, this conversation just happened right now. And by the way, when you said, “Hey, Chris here from ConnectAndSell,” your voice went up and it should have gone down. It should have been, “Hey, Chris here from ConnectAndSell. Huge difference. Try it again next time.” When you’re getting that level of detailed coaching, then quality shows up, but also confidence shows up.
Chris Beall (48:05):
And then the willingness to really just help the other person see the wisdom of taking the meeting. I have a customer right now who’s a big insurance brokerage. And their chief sales officer jumps on through these blitz and coach sessions himself. And he goes like five for five. He sent me a text message yesterday of a leaderboard of just him on it, five conversations, five meetings.
Chris Beall (48:31):
I asked him the first time after he did this, I said, “Scott, how do you do this.” And he said, “I believe in the value of that meeting so much for that person, I insist they take the meeting.” That’s it. He believes in the value of a real product, which is the meeting, not what they might buy from the company afterwards, because they may or may not buy. And it’s that level of belief you can get to when your role-play is done live and coached.
Chris Beall (48:59):
You can get to that level of actually sincerely, like you pre-adapt to the situation along two dimensions. One is, this other person’s a human being and I’ve ambushed them. So that’s the circumstances I’ve ambushed them. And the other is, I truly believe in that potential value of the meeting I’m offering for this human being in the downside case where we’ll never do business together. I still believe the meeting has value.
Chris Beall (49:28):
And then you can sell the universal product of business, which is the meeting. And this is the key to market dominance. Key to market dominance is to get all the meetings before the other guy gets any of them, and continue to build trust, and then weight out all the timing, because the timing is the timing.
Ryan Treasure (49:46):
No, that’s 100%. The timing is funny. We get that a lot when we’re talking about our products. “Hey, we’re in the middle of a big, giant project. We love what you guys do, we’re just not ready to do it with you right now.” I have no problem with those conversations, because that person is still engaged. And in the 30 days that they asked us to wait before we have our next conversation, because they’re not able to physically or mentally process whatever we’re doing, they still have us top of mind.
Ryan Treasure (50:28):
They’re thinking of that phone call, they’re thinking of that engagement. And many times when we come back, the 30 days they’ve been like, “Man, you know what? I’ve been listening to your guys’ radio programs on VoiceAmerica. And I’ve been looking into some of the people that you guys work with, and some of the businesses and things that they do. I really love this one show on the business channel,” or, “I really love this one show on the health and wellness channel. My yoga practice has been doing blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”
Ryan Treasure (50:56):
Then it’s you get to have these really cool conversations with people about how our product can help solve some problem that they’ve been having in getting for themselves market dominance. Whether it be locally, or nationally, or globally, or whatever the case may be. That’s one of the fun things I love about just working with people in general is we’re in a constant state of solving somebody’s problems in one way or another, which is really fun. It’s like really drives us, so I love that idea.
Ryan Treasure (51:26):
Chris, thank you so much for being on the show today. It’s been absolutely wonderful. Tell our listeners where people can get ahold of you and find out more about ConnectAndSell.
Chris Beall (51:36):
Sure. The company’s website ConnectAndSell.com, all one word ConnectAndSell, A-N-D in the middle. My podcast, Market Dominance Guys that I do with Corey Frank, I think has got the most interesting information about what we really do, which is we help companies dominate markets. And then out there on LinkedIn, I’m pretty active. chris8649, hard to miss. Irritating on occasion. I posted once that if cold calling is dead, the zombies have these conversations, so that kind of thing.
Ryan Treasure (52:10):
No, I love it. I’m totally going to share this episode of Finding Your Frequency with our executive producers and, and, and senior executive producer teams, because I think a lot of the stuff that we talked about would be really good for them to hear. And if you guys are listening to this and you’re thinking about doing selling or starting that company, this is great con content.
Ryan Treasure (52:34):
And I think if you’re looking for some assistance with your startup and maybe some coaching and training on that sell on market dominance, make sure you guys give Chris a call. He really knows what he’s doing. I can tell because this conversation has been great. I’ve been in those scenarios and absolutely loved the conversation.
Ryan Treasure (52:52):
Chris, we appreciate you being on Finding Your Frequency. Ladies and gentlemen, you can always listen to the show live or on demand on voiceamerica.com variety channel. And of course you can also tune in on anywhere that podcasts are found. So make sure you guys check us out and we appreciate it again. You can reach us at info@voiceamerica.com and keep doing what you’re doing.
Ryan Treasure (53:15):
If you’re going to go walk the plank of entrepreneurship and jump into the void, make sure you tune into the show because we’ve had a lot of great knowledge workers on the show and a lot of people that can give you some of their insights on some of these topics around business and technology. And we appreciate everybody tuning in to Finding Your Frequency. I’m your host, Ryan Treasure. Until next time, make sure that you guys are rocking it.
Ryan Treasure (53:41):
Hey, what’s up everybody. So glad you tuned into the show today. What a great show it is. Like I said earlier in the show at the end, I was going to give you some more information on our live Stereo session on the Stereo app. Stereo app users can engage with the platform to listen in, seek out topics and join conversations about issues and ideas that interest them. There is no lack of content on that application.
Ryan Treasure (54:03):
You can flip through many conversations, ask questions, join ones, make your own, wide-ranging topics on Stereo. Comedy, pop culture, lifestyle, sports, business, technology. The app can be downloaded for free by Apple and Android users. Once users download the app, they’ll be able to create an avatar and a profile. I had so much fun making my avatar, it was super cool. Users can submit the audio messages to hosts of conversations to join those conversations in real time.
Ryan Treasure (54:33):
Finding Your Frequency will have a live audience interactive episode on Stereo. We’re going to be doing this every Friday at 2:00 PM Pacific Time on the Stereo app. Again, Finding Your Frequency is going to be having a live audience interactive episode every week, Friday at 2:00 PM Pacific Time. We’re going to do question and answers, and we’re going to talk about technology, we’re going to talk about business, we’re going to talk about marketing.
Ryan Treasure (54:55):
We’re going to talk about how people found that frequency in life and in business, and why they decided to do what they do. And take questions from people that are listening to the show and allow you guys to engage with us, and I really hope to see you on Stereo. Again, stereo.com/radioryan1 live every Friday at 2:00 PM Pacific Time. So again, come to stereo.com/radioryan1. Once you get in there, follow me and make sure you guys tune into the show. Thanks for listening.
