How to Warm Up a Cold Communication

Over the years, how salespeople make an initial contact for a sale has changed. In these modern times, it has come down to a choice between making a cold phone call or sending a cold email. It seems to be a matter of choice. However, if you’re trying to break through a prospect’s initial fear of being sold to so that you can engender that level of trust necessary to set a meeting or make a sale, which approach should you put YOUR trust in? The human voice? Or a digital communication?

Today, our Market Dominance Guy, Chris Beall, talks with podcast producer Susan Finch about this very question. As CEO of ConnectAndSell, Chris is an impassioned believer in phone conversations first as the most successful tool for setting appointments. Why? Because with your voice, you can employ timbre, tone, pacing, and emotion. In a one-on-one conversation, you can pause for a response, share humor when appropriate, or convey that you understand the other person’s situation. However carefully crafted, an email message can never do as a good a job at interacting with another human being. In pursuing the all-important goal of engendering trust with a prospect, initial phone conversations win, hands down! Listen in to today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode as Chris shares his well-honed opinions on “How to Warm Up a Cold Communication.”

Here is the full transcript for this episode:

Susan Finch (00:06):

Hey everybody, Susan Finch here. I am the Producer for Market Dominance Guys, and I was invited by Chris Beall to join him on today’s episode. Chris, what are we going to talk about?

Chris Beall (01:00):

Well, let’s talk about something we’ve never talked about, which in 70 episodes or whatever is a little bit hard to find but this turned out to be easy to find. So I’ve been doing some radio advertising recently and we’ve been doing a lot more work with what we call talk to send, which is sending an email after each conversation and talk to sequence and talk to cadence or whatever people call these things in case it’s not just an email that might be triggering a sequence. And I thought it might be interesting to talk about how does a conversation-first approach work with all of the other media, all the other ways of having information flow between you and your prospects. I thought that might be kind of fun.

Susan Finch (01:46):

It is. It’s dizzy you know. And new players and new shiny things, as you brought up clubhouse earlier today, are coming into our spectrum of time sucks and we don’t know whether they’re effective or not. And we don’t know where they’re playing or where they’re hanging there or invest in time over there is really worth the time. And how do we measure it all?

Chris Beall (02:11):

Yeah, there you go. So I think measuring it is really, really, really hard. But I think there’s a principle we can apply that’s really simple. There’s only two kinds of communication we can have with somebody; one is communication with somebody we have no relationship with and the other is communication with somebody we have a relationship with as I often say. And sometimes derided for, that’s just math, right? In fact, it’s a branch of math called Logic which is not that popular here in our country, but every once in a while somebody takes it up for a few minutes and they get some good out of it. So it’s just two possibilities. And what’s so interesting to me is that when you divide the world of communication with prospects and customers into those two categories instead of into other categories, you find something out really quickly.

You may not get it at first, most of us don’t, but it works like this, all communication of a digital form with somebody we don’t have a relationship with is open loop and doesn’t produce trust. And that’s really interesting because in the world of business to business, we only get information back when it’s closed loop. So say I send you an email and say you retired from your company five months ago but your company keeps your email alive so that they can make sure that should somebody send an email to you, a very important senior or vice president of whatever, that email gets proper attention will come back to me as you opened that email. That’s it because email is fundamentally open loop. And even if I put little tricksy things in it little pixels or pixies or whatever they happen to be, they’re going to notice and they’re going to send something back and say, “Oh, they opened it.”

Or even if I’m looking at bounce rates. In both cases, it’s not going to bounce, and the pixies and the pixels and all that are going to say it was opened. And then what will happen? Well, say you’re a data seller like, I don’t know, Zoom info, you’re going to report to the world that this person works at this company still even though they left five months ago. And in fact, there’s a great mystery among the data sellers and people who buy data and actually use it like we do and our customers do to call people, talk to people. It’s like, “Huh, why are there so many retired people in this dataset?” And it’s because email is open loop. It sometimes tries to be closed-loop and people put fancy things in it to try to make it closed loop but it’s open loop. And so we can’t really trust the information that comes back. And then the other part is, it doesn’t matter if it’s email, if it’s social if it’s whatever, billboards which are actually analog, digital media open loop, we can’t build trust through digital communications alone.

There’s not enough data. And everybody thinks there’s enough data cycle. It’s digital. It must have more data, but there’s almost no data in a digital communication that gets through. Maybe a picture quickly forgotten.

Susan Finch (05:26):

You remind me of somebody that I respect a lot, Linda Zimmer. And she is into data security and speaks on it throughout the world. But she always reminds me that data is not truth, but it is sold as truth.

Chris Beall (05:41):

Oh yes. Yes. And oddly enough to get to truth takes a lot more data than the amount of data that tends to be sold as truth. That is, the data that’s important for building trust is data that speaks to parts of ourselves we’re not aware of. That’s why they’re called unconscious and subconscious parts of the mind. Those are just fancy names for, oh, Sigmund Freud wanted to say something. Although Sigmund Freud was kind of a weird guy, wanted to say some things, right? Not all of which were that savory, but it’s just simple which is, there are things that go on inside of our noggins and our bodies that we’re not aware of that are really important when it comes to us making decisions. And in fact, when we make the big decision, the biggest decision we ever make, do I trust this person?

That’s the biggest decision because when we screw it up and we get it wrong, it can be fatal. So here we have this really big decision, a blood decision, and we make it based on lots of data, lots of information actually, going into our unconscious and subconscious parts of our brains and our bodies. And that data, that information just isn’t available in digital media. We just can’t get there from here. Email, 5,000 bits roughly in an email, conversation, 20,000 bits in one second of that conversation, in one second, it’s for emails. So now we’re into a world where well, how many seconds does it take to get trust? Chris Voss, FBI’s hostage negotiator for many years, I think the world’s foremost expert on getting trust in a sales conversation. I asked him once, “How long do we have to get trust in a cold call?”

And a cold call is just a name for an initial voice interaction. We haven’t spoken before and I’m the ambusher. So I’m the ambusher, how long do I have to get trust from you? And he just looked me in the eye and said seven seconds. And when I playfully said, “Really? Our research says eight seconds.” He said, “Your research is wrong. It’s seven seconds.” At which point, I was pretty sure that his research was research and mine wasn’t. And I asked him, “What do we have to do in those seven seconds?” He says, “Oh, that’s easy. All we have to do is demonstrate to this person that we see the world through their eyes and show them that we’re competent to solve a problem they have right now.” I said, “Well, that’s a lot to do in seven seconds.”

Susan Finch (08:25):

You guys have talked about this a lot, the seven-second rule and how long and what has to be packed into that time. And I played through in my head, so many people that are not customers of ConnectAndSell and some of your reputable competitors. But what I see is, four of those seconds gets wasted as that transfer happens, that hello, hello, hello. And the seconds tick away and you’re almost done before you even heard a voice and what a waste.

Chris Beall (09:01):

Exactly. And then when you, yes, the time goes by. And then, by the way, most reps just waste the time that they have. So they say, “So Susan, how are you today?” And I was like, “Okay.” So now you talk for six or seven seconds and we’re done. And that’s not enough to get the job done because we didn’t show the person that we see their world through their eyes. “Hi, how are you today?” Is not seeing the world through their eyes. “Did I catch you at a bad time?” It’s a little bit closer because you referred to a bad time and it is a bad time because it’s always a bad time but they did answer the phone. So it was probably a good time actually for a conversation, just not with you.

Susan Finch (09:44):

My time is so precious that how much time do I want to allot to something unexpected, a stranger, or an annoyance in general. Because me might even know the annoyance and they may have called us before and how much time are we willing to devote to that to actually pick up the phone? My time super precious. I won’t do that many times.

Chris Beall (10:05):

Yeah. And what you will do in general is you’ll trade a little certainty. I’m off this call in 27 seconds, thank God, in exchange for a little courtesy. Yeah, I’ll listen to why you called. That exchange is very, very easy to sell. That’s one of the easiest sells in the world. I know I’m an interruption. “Can I have 27 seconds to tell you why I’ve called?” And if I say that, you might decide that your self-image is so robust that you’re just going to say no. Or you might decide you’re so afraid of me or afraid of your own tendency to go along with what people say to you that you will say, “No, not right now. I’m busy.” Which is kind of silly because you did answer the phone. You aren’t that busy. You were expecting something that was going to take, oh, maybe 27 seconds.

But for the most part, people would chuckle and go, “Sure, go ahead.” And the reason they chuckle is that people chuckle and they laugh when their fear is relieved. That’s how jokes work. Jokes make us nervous about a particular way it could go and then when it goes another way, that thing called the punchline, we’re relieved and we laugh. Laughter is a way of expressing relief and the departure of fear. So when we get called, we’re afraid. Why are we afraid? An invisible stranger just ambushed us. That’s pretty scary. And how do we express our fear? Annoyance and desire to get out of the room, so to speak. But what is our constraint? Oh, darn. It’s an interaction with another human being and if I treat them too badly, my own self-image will be harmed. I’ll hurt myself. So I don’t want to do that so I’m a little bit stuck.

Oh, you’re so kind. You offer me a way out. I know I’m an interruption. “Can I have 27 seconds to tell you why I call?” Said playfully. And sounds like a deal. Now what’s funny about this is, right there you’ve accomplished the purpose of a cold call. You’re done. You have trust. Oddly enough, fear is a great foundation for building trust because by relieving fear, you’ll always build trust. Not sometimes but always. And if you just left it at that and you didn’t actually fulfill the 27-second promise, then you’d have trust that got eroded because you didn’t fulfill your promise. But if you fulfill your promise and tell him why you called and then let them go if they want to go, they’ll trust you and you can talk to them again. However, and this is the big point, then you can also send them an email. Then you can send them an email which they will open and read because you can say in the subject line of that email, thanks for our conversation just now.

And that’s a completely different email because it’s within a trust relationship that actually exists and is very fresh. And so when you look at digital media, and podcasts are like this too by the way. Somebody might be amused by us in our podcast, right? And they might learn something. Sometimes they’ll reach out to me and say, “This changed my life.” I’m getting a fair amount of that, but they actually won’t quite trust us yet. Not Corey, not me, but if we have a conversation with them. So say I have a conversation with somebody. I had a conversation with a very senior sales enablement head from 3M today. And by the end of that conversation, which was longer than 27 seconds, it was actually 17 minutes and 38 seconds, I could send this person an email and this person is going to open that email and actually read it and probably reply to it and say thank you for the information you provided, blah, blah, blah and here’s how I’d like to proceed or something like that, right?

That same person, a cold email would have gone right over into the cold email trash file where cold emails go and I’d have to then resort to a clever subject line. Oh, did alligators eat your toenails? Or some nonsense like that which people do in hopes of raising themselves up above the sea of noise called email. It’s not really a sea of noise. It’s trusted email from people. I know you sent me a house warming gifts to Helen and I via email.

I didn’t see it because it was in a sea of untrusted email and somehow it just slipped by me but when you reminded me of it, I went right over there and opened it, forwarded it to my fiance, and voila, we’re grateful, we’re happy to have a house warming gift. Thank you so very much. We really do love our new house and all that is good. Had you just been some stranger sending me a housewarming gift, first of all, it would have been weird. Secondly, I would have been suspicious of it as like, what are you trying to sell me? And thirdly, I missed this one. I would have missed that one forever one.

Susan Finch (15:01):

You definitely wouldn’t trust the click.

Chris Beall (15:04):

I wouldn’t trust the click and you wouldn’t be able to know.

Susan Finch (15:08):

No, but you-

Chris Beall (15:09):

You wouldn’t know what had happened to it.

Susan Finch (15:12):

But you’re coming back to something. With that subject that you said about the alligators. With the piece that you brought up earlier about a joke and a punchline, there is a piece to building these relationships. And maybe it’s just me because I appreciate a good sense of humor, but I find when people have a good sense of humor and know how to fine-tune, it’s, this is normally done, this is why I talking to GoDaddy for a hosting company as opposed to some of the other competitors of theirs because it’s so sexist. The guys answer, the guys have a sense of humor.

The guys get any humor I have. And there’s a report immediately because you get me. You find me funny. And if you find me funny, I’m probably going to hang out with you a little bit more and trust you more especially when I have a stupid joke to say. And I want to talk a little bit, I know these 27 seconds are so valuable, but even from that moment and in that little space, there are ways to drop those disarming pieces of humor, of relatability, of vulnerability. How important is that?

Chris Beall (16:19):

I think it’s crucially important in discovery, crucially important. I think it’s also crucially important in your voice when somebody accepts your 27 seconds because you can say you can actually just chuckle along with them. You don’t have to say anything about it. It’s just funny. Can I have 27 seconds tell you why I called? It’s kind of funny. Listen to James Thornburg say it some time out there on his many, many, many LinkedIn videos that he makes of himself cold calling using that opener. And you look at his face and he’s ready for humor, for action, right? But for humor action, for humorous interaction. I think humor when shared is, that’s the first dish we share with somebody that shows that we trust them. We’ll find what they said that is intended to be funny funny. That’s trust. That’s why comedians make a lot of money because they can stand up on stage with an audience that doesn’t trust them to start with, that’s why they’re heckled also, is to test their ability to punch all the way through to the other side and get to the trust regime.

And it’s why when they bomb, they call it dying, died up there on stage. And I don’t know if you’ve ever done standup. All of us who’ve done classroom teaching have done lots and lots of standup. I’ve spent thousands of hours stand up. And the number one rule is until the class laughs with you and at you a little bit, you’re just not there. You’re just not there. But once they do, you’re probably pretty good. So it’s also true that follow-up email. So self-deprecating humor in a cold email is incredibly dangerous. You actually don’t even know who you’re making fun of, them, you, somebody else. It’s very dangerous. But on a follow-up email, it’s really easy. It’s really easy.

You can say, “Oh, about that conversation we had today.” Ambushed again, and I know it was awkward, ambushed again, it’s kind of funny so people don’t think of ambush. Unexpected word makes you nervous. The punchline is it was really something that they understand. There’s a million ways to tell a joke, right? One word, two words, any words, no words. But in a trust relationship, the joke is understood or attempted to be understood. People will laugh at your jokes when they trust you even if they don’t get the joke.

Susan Finch (18:56):

I agree. We were just having this conversation in our house last night, my daughter’s pledging a sorority and they want her in the sorority because they think she’s hilarious while the other three of us in the house that are funnier than she is disagreed, which she didn’t appreciate it. We all agreed who is the funniest and it’s my son but she said, “You don’t understand. I’m really funny.” She said, “You don’t understand. My friends think I’m the funniest person they know and I tell them they need to up their game with their friends then. If I’m as good as they have, they need somebody better.”

Chris Beall (19:33):

I’ll make some interest. Well, at least she’s funny enough.

Susan Finch (19:36):

She is.

Chris Beall (19:38):

And actually, this brings up another point. It’s a point I call above threshold. We haven’t really talked about it on Market Dominance Guys. Once you’re above threshold, within some element of a relationship that’s sufficient to allow you to advance the relationship then it doesn’t make sense to keep pushing that particular dimension of the relationship. And this is the classic failure mode of all salespeople. It’s called selling after the close. But most people think the close is when the deal is signed. That’s actually not the close. The first close is, did they chuckle at your 27 seconds? The second close is, did they actually listen to you when you set the next part? Really listen. The third is, do they come back and say something to you? Now you’ve had three closes.

The fourth is, did they agree to take the meeting or did they tell you the truth about their situation? Now in an ambush, nobody will really tell you quite the truth. There are very few people with the plum to do that. It just is tough, right? So in sales, we’re always doing these little tiny closes and what a close means is that’s done, it’s okay to move on. That’s actually what it means. That’s done. And people who can’t close have an emotional issue concerning their confidence in the relationships they build. So a closer such as say, myself, and I’m a pretty well-known closer, right? Not a deal closer. I do close deals, but that’s not… What’s interesting it’s like, once we get to point X, if I think we’re there and you act like we’re there, we’re there and we’re moving on.

This is why I can propose to somebody two days after meeting them, which had happened in the case of this particular fiance and me and why I can be confident doing it because we were there and it was okay for me to say it and then I didn’t have to keep going back and saying it. There are three things that I said. I’m not going to repeat them here but they were really important and then we could move on to the next part, which was me going back to my hotel. So it’s really fascinating, when you watch great salespeople, they will close 30, 40 times in a discovery conversation in little tiny ways.

Susan Finch (22:07):

Yes.

Chris Beall (22:08):

And it’s because, having built trust, it’s okay to risk the relationship by moving forward as long as you have reasonable confidence, that you’ll be told that you’re being inappropriate, which happened by moving forward. And so he says, “Hang on a second.” And that’s great, you go, “Okay, wait a minute. We weren’t really close.” But that’s called a false positive on the close, that you got the false positive. It wasn’t actually an okay situation to close in but you have enough trust that the other person is going to catch the false positive and they’re going to give it back to you as information and this is what you can’t do in digital media. You can’t catch the failure to close. In fact, you can’t detect the micro close. It’s not there. Where am I going to detect it? Between the first sentence, second sentence, third sentence of the email.

I don’t know what’s going on in you. But if I see you and hear you and then you trust me enough to tell me when I’ve screwed up, then we can collaborate and move forward. And this is the essence of all sales, people who learn it, have fun, and make a lot of money. And people who don’t learn it drive the rest of us because it’s like-

Susan Finch (23:17):

They make their family crazy and their friends crazy. They make everybody crazy because it carries through. If you don’t see where you have been given permission and encouragement to go to the next thing and you can’t recognize that and you do stay stuck in those same; you’ve met the people at parties. They say the same stories every time. When you see them at the same party, they’re telling the same stories every time and they never are able to move on or out of the past or out of the college days or out of, the one time they met a celebrity 55 years ago. They’re still talking about that because nothing’s come up since or they haven’t learned how to move it forward. It’s embarrassing.

Chris Beall (23:56):

Yes. Or they don’t have the confidence. Because there’s a funny thing, what we do when we’re closing and it’s a really, really awkward thing. It’s the hardest thing in the world. We’re potentially sacrificing the relationship for the collaboration. As a pure socializer and some people are pure socializers, were I up here socializer and all I value that was the relationship, I could never get a deal. Because I have to come to a point of saying, “But the purpose of these conversations was to collaborate on doing something together that we can’t do alone and we can’t do separately so I have to take the risk of sacrificing the relationship and trust you that you are going to catch me when I fall and I moved too fast.” And that’s where the trust ends up being a two-way street. You have to trust me to have your best interests at heart.

And you have to believe that I know more than you do about what it is that we’re trying to do otherwise I wouldn’t have ambushed you, you would have ambushed me. I have to trust you to correct me when I’m moving too soon in a deal, too soon to the next step of collaboration, whatever it turns out to be. And that’s the trust that the non-close of the socializer never has. They don’t trust the other person to keep them from blowing the relationship up so they stick on this point and just keep hammering it.

Susan Finch (25:25):

It’s like my husband on his computer when it’s not doing what he wants, he just keeps clicking. He’s like, “Stop. Stop it.” It can’t even catch up with what you’re doing to move on and do the next thing because you keep clicking. Stop clicking.

Chris Beall (25:37):

Oh, that’s a good one. It’s the same thing. It’s the same thing. And of course, it is really hard to trust technology. But the point of all, this is, look, there’s an easy way and a hard way. The easy way is also the most awkward way which is you have to ambush somebody because it puts them in a state where you can build trust quickly in seven seconds and therefore you have a foundation for all future interactions; verbal, digital, billboard put outside their office, sending them a note in the mail, offering them a gift. All that stuff within a trust relationship is actually trivially easy to do well and hard to blow. And so if you do the awkward thing, that’s awkward, it’s really awkward to throw yourself under the bus. It’s really awkward to say I’m a bad thing, but you must because you are. You’ve ambushed them. You’re bad. So just own up to it. It’s really awkward to do it fast enough. I know I’m an interruption. So I’m so glad that I caught you. Now I’ll be brief. I know I’m an interruption. It’s like, boom, done, dead. Boom, dead.

Susan Finch (26:49):

What’s that phrase? I’m so glad I caught you. I feel like a prisoner already.

Chris Beall (26:54):

I caught you-

Susan Finch (26:55):

Like a tiger [crosstalk 00:26:56].

Chris Beall (26:55):

You didn’t catch me at all.

Susan Finch (27:00):

Right.

Chris Beall (27:00):

You haven’t caught me. What are you talking about? But if you told me you know you’re an interruption, I hear the bus go over you like this, tha-thump, tha-thump, tha-thump. And I’m good. I don’t have to back the bus up. I don’t need six more thumps, tha-thump, tha-thump, tha-thump, tha-thump, tha-thump, tha-thump. I’m good. Thank goodness you ran yourself over. Now if you fake it, if you say, “I know I’m a bit of an interruption.” That means I didn’t really mean it. I got near the bus and when you couldn’t see, I pretended I was run over by the bus but actually I just squealed and jumped back and now I’m just another faker in the world and you’re not going to trust me. And so it’s a subtle business. This is very subtle, but if you’re willing to do it, digital media open up, including advertising.

Interestingly enough, it’s a delight to see an ad for a company where you just talk to somebody that you now trust about what they do. That’s fun. Oh, look, I just saw their ad. I just talked to that guy this morning, that gal this morning. That’s really interesting. What a coincidence. So suddenly retargeting is different. I talked to you. I can retarget everybody around you, including you. And most of them, it just goes, eh, whatever. But somebody might say, “Have you seen that ad?” And it’s like, “Yeah. I talked to those people yesterday. You know, it was really actually an interesting conversation.” Boom, everything’s different. Same with social outreach. I reach out to you on LinkedIn after talking with you. Thanks for taking the time to talk with me today. I know we didn’t have a lot of time and I guarantee you I will never pitch you on anything on LinkedIn. That would be an exception to the current rule which is, everybody, pitches everybody all the time, because-

Chris Beall (29:28):

Clubhouse is fascinating. I think clubhouse is the most interesting thing going on in the world today because it’s basically this, social media where you can’t be rude.

Susan Finch (29:37):

And you can’t be recorded and you can be reshared. People figure it out how to but for the most part, yeah.

Chris Beall (29:43):

Yeah.

Susan Finch (29:44):

And the bios, have you seen the bios and what people do in there? Their bios are about nine inches high and it’s filled with every keyword phrase, offer, pitch, discount, every possible link, where to find them with emojis and little this and little that. It’s the most decorated. It would make somebody who builds professional resumes just cringe because it looks like a four-year-old had a party with emojis and just blasted them all over anything incredible about you.

Chris Beall (30:17):

It’s like a four-year-old had a party with emojis that were served as sushi and they got sick, threw up all over that thing. It’s like emoji vomit.

Susan Finch (30:28):

It really is. So it’s an interesting thing, and I find myself attracted to the smaller rooms because I like deeper conversations. I like collaborative conversations rather than the grandstanding from the larger rooms and the bigger names where they’re pontificating on stuff that I’ve already heard them say everywhere else. So it is an interesting venue, but I do agree with you, my experience so far has been, it’s been a very gracious kind venue at this point.

Chris Beall (30:57):

And it will stay that way because we actually don’t have mechanisms in us that allow us to be rude with our voice when we have been identified, especially to a group. That’s why panel discussions are such frankly pablum. When I’m invited to be on a panel I always say, “You realize I’m actually going to speak my mind.”

Susan Finch (31:22):

Yeah. That happens to me too.

Chris Beall (31:26):

But I’m not going to be mean to anybody. I’m just going to act they’re not there, but I will recognize them and say like they said, I’m actually going to be much more polite to the panelists if they’re were up on the panel with me than, I don’t know if we were just having a private conversation at a bar. Why? Because I don’t want to embarrass them and I don’t want to embarrass myself and so we’re built to be polite in voice conversations, especially in groups.

Susan Finch (31:52):

You’re not because you’re just not capable of it. You get kicked out or muted. So it’s okay.

Chris Beall (31:57):

Exactly. It’s got the appropriate controls and the appropriate hands. I think clubhouse is fascinating and it tells us two things; I think one, text-based communication or pictures, unsolicited, whatever tends to be noisy because it’s cheap to do, cheap to reproduce, cheap to copy. And therefore everybody does it for nothing and it’s not working so well. And it’s actually even worse with work from home where you’re already agitated about your kids, your dog, I love your dog, but your dog, whatever. And then on the other side, this video thing is oddly wearing and people are trying to figure out, it’s wearing enough that it has a name, Zoom fatigue.

And here’s this little slice that’s actually the biggest field of all, which is the human voice. The thing that speaks to our insides, that it borders on song that lets us sing to the other person. But somebody once said to me after I came out of a board meeting and it was funny, it was one of my direct reports. He was invited to the board meeting. He said, “What did you do in there?” I said, “What do you mean?” He says, “You saying to that board of directors, it was done with the voice, it was done with the tone, it was done with the cadence and the note and they gave you three million dollars.” And I said, “Well, singers make a lot of money.”

Susan Finch (33:21):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (33:21):

They do, if you heard. Rockstar means something man, it means something. And the human voice has got this amazing deep ancient range. We just discovered by analysis of the skulls of Neanderthals that they heard the same way that our ancestors and we here, including being able to distinguish certain sounds the sound t from shh from ss from k is really, really hard for most animals to distinguish because of the way their ears and their skulls are constructed.

Susan Finch (34:00):

Right.

Chris Beall (34:01):

But here we have these two branches and we have the [inaudible 00:34:06], we have all these other branches of our family tree that we’re finding and language goes back at least that far because that’s what that difficult to attain bunch of shaped bones allow us to do is to make these distinctions that are peculiar to language and not very relevant in the worlds of natural sounds. You don’t really need this tell at from a k from a shh from a ss out there in the woods, but you better be able to tell the difference between sit. You know what I mean?

Susan Finch (34:46):

Oh, man. You did a post a couple of weeks ago where we were participating in one about spontaneous phone calls and people picking up the phone and being irritated by people that actually call and don’t set an appointment to make a phone call first and what has been lost so much in communication. And I think, yeah, we just talked about it with clubhouse and the value of conversation and the gifts that you get from that, that you can’t get from data, that you can’t get from email from other things because there is no replacement for a conversation and the time that it saves to have a 30-second conversation as opposed to 15 emails to say the same thing.

Chris Beall (35:29):

Or to fail to say the same thing.

Susan Finch (35:30):

Yes.

Chris Beall (35:32):

That’s really what the issue comes down to as I read these email threads cut back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and I ask, “Okay. So what is this the equivalent of in a conversation?” And normally it’s 30 seconds in which there are five interactions, two of which are corrective, one of which is expansive, and one of which makes a fine distinction that needed to be made in order to get to where you got to go.

That’s what we do with each other. We correct each other. No, no, that’s not what I meant. Imagine that in an email. No, that’s not what I meant. Oh, now you’re insulting me. Whereas in the live conversation, that’s polite. It’s like, “No, no, no. That’s not what I meant.” And there’s a big difference between no in an email and no, no, no, that’s not what I meant. No, no, no means I’m trying to help you now.

Susan Finch (36:28):

Right.

Chris Beall (36:28):

I’m working with you, right? They’re totally different concepts. Even though one of them has three nos it has a lot less no in it than one no in an email. So this stuff’s magic and to abandon the magic in favor of cheap reproduction and absentee landlordism, I don’t want to be there. I don’t want to have to actually do the dishes. I just want somebody else to take care of everything. So you take care of delivering it and they’ll take care of reading and I don’t have to do anything and I’m going to go write another one. No, I’m not even going to do that. I’m going to use a template. I’m not even going to do that. I’m going to have a sequence. My sequence knows more than I do.

In fact, somebody is AB tested every sequence in the world. “Really? How many would that be?” “Well, do the math. There’s more interesting sequences of emails you could send them. There are oh, Adams in the universe. It turns out.” So I don’t think they’ve all been tested. Pretty sure, but everything in conversation has been tested. It’s been tested over tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years. It’s all been tested. When I say it’s all been tested, I’m saying something very different from, it’s all been tested. Those are very different things because that’s been tested.

Susan Finch (37:50):

Correct. And when I think back, you were just covering that. How many emails are always restating something, finding something, telling somebody where to find it, where you already told them where to find it, where to look for it. I can’t think of three conversations in the past month that I’ve had to have it corrective, and definitely not on video. I haven’t had to backtrack on anything. And if I do, it was so not memorable because it was so minor and quickly resolved, it doesn’t stick in my head.

Chris Beall (38:23):

Exactly. Because we’re urged on the insight to do the correction in real-time.

Susan Finch (38:28):

Yes.

Chris Beall (38:30):

It’s a closing. Every correction is a little mini closing and we do them all the time. We do. We have catchphrases for them. We all know how to do it. Well actually what I was trying to say, right? We say that. That’s a known phrase. I can go look it up on Google, actually what I was trying to say. But if I looked it up on Google, I find a little bit. But if I looked it up in the transcripts of every conversation, if I had them all that had been had in the last day, I’d find 100 million. Actually what I was trying to say.

Susan Finch (39:06):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (39:06):

You know, now that I think of it, it seems to me, huh?

Susan Finch (39:12):

That just reminded me.

Chris Beall (39:12):

That’s another one. Just reminded me. Well, at the end of the day, we have these phrases-

Susan Finch (39:20):

[crosstalk 00:39:20] not that. Anything but that.

Chris Beall (39:22):

And it’s a bad one, right? But these phrases, even the overused ones, they’re ways of saying, this isn’t going exactly as I expect it to where I understand it at this point. We need to back up a little bit. Let’s back up. Let’s slow down. Let’s get this right before we go to the next thing and let’s do it without any rancor because we need the relationship. So we’re just about to break the relationship through a misunderstanding. Let’s not do that. Let’s let it be a little rubber band, snap it back gently, and then we’ll fix it up. Get on the same page. How funny that the one thing we can’t do with text is get on the same page.

Susan Finch (40:04):

No.

Chris Beall (40:05):

In a conversation, we get on the same page easily. We got to make sure we got on the same page so we got off the email where the pages were and we went to the conversation where there’s no pages. I think that’s a church reference by the way. That’s referring to singing the same hymn as everybody else, I think get on the same page because everybody did that. It was a community activity where you needed to be on this or people start doing it, I suppose. Yes, exactly. So let’s get on the same page. This stuff to me is fascinating and what’s really fascinating is the entire innovation economy depends utterly on it being mastered by salespeople.

Susan Finch (40:45):

Yes.

Chris Beall (40:46):

We have nothing. We have nothing in terms of our ability to move forward unless salespeople master all of this stuff, which thank goodness they mastered 98% of it just by being humans and learning to speak.

Susan Finch (41:01):

So I think this is a great place to wrap up this episode.

Chris Beall (41:03):

I love it. Let’s do it.

Susan Finch (41:04):

All right.

Chris Beall (41:06):

Oh. We’re closing everybody. We’re closing. We’re moving on.

Susan Finch (41:11):

We’re going to wrap up this episode of Market Dominance Guys and I’m acting like I’m the host. We don’t know who the host was today. We just know we were on it together. We had a great conversation and you can find out more at marketdominanceguys.com. You can also find this show in any podcast venue that you favor, and you can check Chris Beall out, he’s over on clubhouse. Look for it when he’s there. Set up those alerts. Follow him so you know when he’s participating in something. You may want to hear some bonus materials or give him one of your burning questions and let him answer it. Maybe he’ll have one for you. We will talk to you all soon.