LifeBlood from Money Savage hosted by George Grombacher – 10x Your Sales

On this show, they talked about the power and necessity of an organized sales process, how you need to see your prospects through their eyes, and how the right language can make all the difference with Chris Beall.  Listen to learn how to 10x your sales opportunities!

For the Difference Making Tip, scan ahead to 17:05!

Here is the full transcript for this episode:

George Grombacher (00:11):

Welcome to Money Savage, a savage approach to personal finance. This is George Grombacher and the time is right. Welcome today’s guest, strong and powerful Chris Beall. Chris, are you ready to do this?

Chris Beall (00:21):

George, never more ready than now.

George Grombacher (00:23):

I love it. Let’s do this. Chris is the CEO of ConnectAndSell, they are a technology getting salespeople 10 times more live conversations with qualified prospects every day. Excited to have you on. Chris, tell us a little bit about your personal life, some more about your work, and why you do what you do.

Chris Beall (00:41):

Sure. Personal life. Well, I’ve been doing this stuff a long time, so I guess my personal life includes being old, which is a wonderful, wonderful thing. And I’m a desert rat who grew up all alone out in the desert with books and animals. Books taught me that people have other kinds of voices that you just don’t get around town, and the animals taught me how to sell without being able to talk because they don’t really listen to you that carefully in terms of the words, but they will listen to your tone and how you relate to them. So that’s how I grew up.

Chris Beall (01:14):

Physics, math kind of guy. Used to take those math contests, national ones and stuff like that, and fell in the world of software because that’s where the money is. I think Willie Sutton said that about banks, right? Why do you rob banks? That’s where the money is. So wanted to make a living for my young family and switched from physics to software, and the rest is one startup after another. First startup in 1983, and been doing them ever since.

George Grombacher (01:42):

Nice. I appreciate that. Why do bank robbers rob banks? Because that’s where the money is. That is one of my favorites. I’ve not heard it in a little while.

Chris Beall (01:53):

It’s the truth. And it’s kind of funny, everybody has something they’re naturally good at, and it turned out software was it for me, but then I got really, really tired of people not selling my stuff. Even when it wasn’t my stuff. At NCR, I remember sitting there demoing a system, and I got done with the demo, I look at the sales guy and he’s like a stone. And I’m thinking, “No, no, no. I’m Fuller Brush man. I used to sell door-to-door. I tell you, this is closing time.” So I just turned to the prospect, which happened to be NBI, an early word processing company, and asked him for the order. And $985,000 later, we were done with that deal. And I’m still thinking at that point, “Huh, maybe not all salespeople are created equal.”

Chris Beall (02:36):

And ever since then, one of my little things is if I make something, I’m going to sell it in addition to bringing other people in to sell it over time. Because until you sell something, I take to the Velveteen Rabbit theory of business, which is … you know the Velveteen Rabbit story if you’ve ever had kids, basically it’s this toy rabbit that gets thrown in the ash heap in the garbage and then kind of comes back, is a little reconstituted because somebody loves it and it brings it back to life. And products are like that. Until somebody loves them, that means they spend money on them, they’re not really alive. So making your product live means you’ve got to get out there and sell it, people got to pay for it, and then it comes to life and you’ve got something real.

George Grombacher (03:20):

Nice. It sounds so simple when you say it like that, Chris. Why do people complicate it so much, or what is so hard about selling normally?

Chris Beall (03:30):

I think it’s pretty simple. I think the number one challenge of selling is we get into our own heads. We have a very hard time getting into somebody else’s emotions. And we think that they’re buying because of all the things we say. They’re mostly not buying because they didn’t have the ability to get to trust us very early, especially B2B sales. B2B sales, and in business, when you’re the buyer, you’re risking your career. So you’re naturally very, very cautious. And if you’re a B2B salesperson, your biggest obstacle is the fact that you start selling before you get trust. Somebody taught you at one point, “You’ve got to get value or give value before you get trust. You have to earn trust.” That’s just not true. You earn trust by not earning trust.

Chris Beall (04:13):

That is, all you have to do is show that other person that you see the world through their eyes, and then you have to show them you’re competent to solve a problem they have right now, which probably is you. You’re more likely to be the problem than their business problem because you probably ambushed them. That’s how you have first conversations with people. And in B2B, you just have to get over it. You’ve got to get over the fact that, A, you’re the problem, and B, they’re not really buying all those features and all that stuff. They’re buying your expertise and your goodwill and the fact that you’re on their side, and they’ll continue to go along with you as long as they believe you’re an expert and they believe you’re on their side.

Chris Beall (04:52):

So yes, at some point you’ve got to close, but it’s not as early or as aggressively or in such a tricky fashion as so many sellers try to do. Tips and tricks in sales are worthless, except in some way that they might give you a little confidence so you can be yourself.

George Grombacher (05:13):

Lots of good stuff there. So you have to get over the fact that you ambushed them, so that means that I need to get over the fact as the salesperson that I’ve interrupted this person and sort of inserted myself in their life and their day?

Chris Beall (05:29):

Exactly. Exactly. It’s simple to do. All you have to say is this, “George, I know I’m an interruption. Can I have 27 seconds to tell you why I called?” And Chris Voss, the FBI Guy, Never Split the Difference, you know that fabulous book? If somebody hasn’t read that, I’d go get it right now and read it, read it again, and then listen to it after that. So he told me at dinner one night, he said, “Look, as long as you can tell that person or show that person you see the world through their eyes,” So think about it. Through their eyes, I’m a bad person. I’m an invisible stranger who just interrupted them.

Chris Beall (06:03):

So I got to take accountability for that. I got to show them, “I see the world your way. I know I’m an interruption,” not, “I realize that I’m interrupting your day.” That’s an excuse. “I know I’m an interruption.” And then you got to ask them whether they want to come along and play with you a little bit so you switch your voice to playful, curious, and you give them a little moment just to kind of feel that, “Hey, we’re going to do something that’s probably a little bit of fun,” and I’m going to let you save face and say, “Yeah, go ahead,” instead of fighting me right now. And you know what? They’ll trust you. They just do. It’s involuntary.

George Grombacher (06:35):

Nice. Appreciate that. All right. And then it’s a matter of demonstrating your expertise or positioning your expertise, and demonstrating or showing them that you’re on their side?

Chris Beall (06:47):

Yeah. First off, you’ve got to show them that you can solve a problem they have right now and you are the problem, so offer a way to solve a problem. Their problem is that they’re trying to get out of this conversation with their self-image intact. So they don’t want to be a jerk and don’t make them be a jerk. Offer them a way to stay in the conversation but get out of it a little bit later, and do it in a way that they’ll remember. 27 seconds is easy to remember, it’s different. 30 seconds probably is a lie. And then of course you’ve got to keep your promise. That’s your first promise. You made it, you’ve got to keep it.

Chris Beall (07:22):

And then you got to get them curious. And actually, it’s interesting. In a first conversation, they’re not going to accept you as an expert, but they can accept that you know something that’s worth being curious about. So if you say something along these lines, and this is what we teach our own people to say and we teach other folks to say something similar, “I believe we’ve discovered a breakthrough.” If you just say that, there’s a lot to be curious about in there. “Why did you say, ‘I believe’? That’s a weird thing to say. Who’s we? ‘We’ve discovered’? Who’s that? People Magazine’s all about we. Paparazzi all about we.”

Chris Beall (07:58):

People in the United States, believe it or not, George, you won’t believe this, are actually … some people, actually interested in the lives of the British Royal Family. This seems impossible.

George Grombacher (08:10):

Preposterous.

Chris Beall (08:11):

We kind of separated from them in, I don’t know, 1776, so a little while ago, and yet still fascination with the lives of the Royals. Why? Well, they’re people we don’t get to know everything about so we’re curious. It’s kind of self-fulfilling. And so people are curious about people, and they’re also curious about discoveries. And they really don’t like it when you say something great about yourself, so you have to avoid saying great stuff about yourself because they just push back. Called psychological reactance.

Chris Beall (08:41):

Remember in the third grade you’d have this discussion out in the playground with another kid? They’d say, “My daddy’s smarter than your daddy,” and you say, “No, he’s not,” and they say, “Yes, he is.” And then that leads to pushing and shoving, and then finally a teacher comes and separates you, and you all get to stand at the corner or whatever for a while. People do that as adults. If you say, “I’m great. We serve the top companies in the world providing blah, blah, blah,” they’re just going to push back on you. They’re just going to push back because they’re going, “I don’t know if you’re so great yet.”

Chris Beall (09:16):

But if you say you’re discovering something, that you discovered something, then you’re just saying you’re lucky. And people like lucky people. They just do. I used to be a professional blackjack player and I wasn’t actually lucky, but I sure looked lucky with that big pile of chips. And people liked to sidle up next to me and kind of hope the luck would rub off. So then you can kind of move ahead and say something else about curiosity. “I believe we’ve discovered a breakthrough that completely eliminates,” and then named three bad things in plain language.

Chris Beall (09:49):

One of them got to be economic. Risk, money, time. One of them probably emotional. Frustration is the standard in business. And one of them strategic, like, “Where are you trying to go? You’re probably blocked. So ours is this at ConnectAndSell,” we teach our reps to say this, “I believe we’ve discovered a breakthrough that completely eliminates the waste and frustration that keeps your best sales reps from being effective on the phone or even using the phone at all.” That’s three things to be curious about. None of them say, “We’re great.” We just make some bad things go away, but they’re kind of weird. Like, “How do you do that?” “Well, you’ve got to take the meeting. Want to find out? You’ve got to take the meeting.”

George Grombacher (10:30):

Talk for 27 seconds? Or was it 29?

Chris Beall (10:33):

27.

George Grombacher (10:34):

27. And that was enough time to get that out.

Chris Beall (10:37):

That was 19 right there.

George Grombacher (10:38):

Nice.

Chris Beall (10:39):

That was 19 seconds.

George Grombacher (10:41):

This episode is brought to you by Money Alignment Academy. If you are looking for a financial wellness platform for your company, your organization, and your employees, check out MoneyAlignmentAcademy.com or click on a link in the notes of the show.

George Grombacher (10:59):

I love it. How long did it take you to refine this process?

Chris Beall (11:05):

Well, let’s see. Forever. We’re like the slowest guys on Earth, it’s really sad. So we started doing this ConnectAndSell thing, we being not even me, in 2007. I got picked up as a product guy in 2011. The first two sentences there were heard on the floor, guy named Jordan Dufour was using them, outperformed everybody all the way through closing, and we couldn’t figure out why. So finally we figured, “Oh, there’s something going on in those two sentences.” We didn’t know why until December of 2018, when Chris Voss set me straight over a couple bourbons. So that’s a long road. That’s 2007 to 2018, which to me though, 10 years is about as long as it takes to do anything or figure out anything in the world. You got to go work with customers, solve problems, get paid, do stuff, and then about year 10, you start going, “Huh, I wonder if we’ve learned something here that we can actually apply?”

George Grombacher (12:06):

That speaks to the power of language, doesn’t it? Just the power of the right words put together, even though you don’t necessarily know why until Mr. Voss told you why you had 10 years of success just using it.

Chris Beall (12:19):

Yeah, exactly. And the power of desperation. There was a guy named Noah Blumenthal. Was, he still is a wonderful guy, and I was trying to help him out with his business. And I told him, “You got to sell by yourself as a CEO. You can’t just hire salespeople and hope for the best, that’s a failing strategy. That’s not testing whether your product’s going to succeed, that’s testing whether you can hire salespeople, which we know you can’t because you never have.” And so, “Dumb test, so let’s test something real, which is whether, in this case, chief operating officers and equivalent at Fortune 2000 companies will take a meeting with you.”

Chris Beall (12:57):

So he came up with a script for himself, and that’s where, “I believe we’ve discovered a breakthrough,” came from. So that was several years later, so I think in 2016 or 17, and so these pieces come together and come together. Our mechanism at ConnectAndSell is kind of a nothing, except it’s something. All we do is let a rep push a button and talk to somebody on their list in about four minutes. That’s it. That’s all we do. Think of it as, I don’t know, Uber for sales conversations. Instead of having a car come, conversation with somebody you want to talk to comes. That’s it.

Chris Beall (13:35):

So then the question is, well, what do you do with 10 times more conversations? And the answer is you amplify suck. Right off the bat, however much you suck, you’re now going to suck 10 times more.

George Grombacher (13:50):

Nice. Okay. So you’re going to amplify … it’s kind of like how people talk about if you give somebody a ton of money, it’s just going to amplify whoever they currently were or whoever they were before the money. So you give somebody 10 times more sales opportunities or leads or swings, however you want to describe it, it’s going to bring out where it is that they suck, and so that’s going to help them to refine their process?

Chris Beall (14:18):

Yeah, exactly. And that’s why finally, talk about slow bunnies, we are the slowest of the slow. So we finally realized, “You know what? We’d better offer actual training in cold calling because it’s not happening by itself.” And you got to have a good first conversation, even if you have a system like ours that lets you have second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, whatever conversations over time, but that first one is the one that sets everything up. So how should you hold that first conversation? So we came up with this thing we call Flight School, and what Flight School is … and again, we didn’t want to be in the training business.

Chris Beall (14:52):

Manny Medina, the CEO/founder over at Outreach, heavily funded, wonderful company out there doing things in the sales tech space, he said to me once over … again, it was a couple of bourbons. People are always trying to get me to drink bourbon. I’m a scotch guy myself.

George Grombacher (15:06):

Ah.

Chris Beall (15:07):

But anyway, he’s talking to me and he says, “Will you just start a training company to teach people how to cold call? Because it’s holding our business back.” He says, “Everybody sucks and they won’t even dial, so how are we going to get people to go beyond email?” So I said, “No, no, no. We don’t want to be a training company. It’s not us. We’re like a tech company with this thing and blah, blah, blah.”

Chris Beall (15:31):

So finally, we started this thing called Flight School. We’re just offering it. In fact, we’re launching it this week. And it’s four sessions, blitz and coach, carefully coach, and then get this. The first two-hour session, the only thing that gets coached is the first seven seconds of the call for two hours. You do the whole conversation, all 35 seconds of it, but then you get coached immediately on your first seven seconds. “Hey, your voice went up where it should have gone down right here. You said, ‘I know I’m an interruption?’ Nah, you got to say, ‘I know I’m an interruption.’ You’ve got to hammer the word know just like that, go back. Next call, give that a try.”

Chris Beall (16:09):

So we take them through eight hours of instruction. Students tend to end up in the top 5% of all cold callers in the world in terms of competence and confidence, and they love it. Whoever knew people could love cold calling?

George Grombacher (16:22):

Who knew?

Chris Beall (16:23):

Who knew? So anyway, we finally gave up and we’re offering that thing. We offer it cheap. It’s like $9,500 for six students for four sessions. But it’s necessary because amplifying suck sucks.

George Grombacher (16:38):

Amplifying suck does suck, so I appreciate that very much. Nice. So much good stuff to get into, Chris. We’re going to have to have you back on, we’re going to have to talk more about your career as a professional blackjack player, we’re going to have to talk more about the sales training and all that good stuff. But for the remainder of today, sir, Savage nation is ready for your difference-making tip. What do you have for them?

Chris Beall (17:06):

This is a long difference-making tip, but it’s one that I think everybody should take to heart. A lot of people are looking for where they’re going to go, what they’re going to do career-wise and start with who, and by who, I mean a company you admire. If you’re not going to start your own company as the first move in your career, start by picking a company in a space you’re interested in, the company you admire the most, and force your way into it. And by force your way in, I mean take any job that will get you into that company because there’s only two states, you’re outside or you’re inside. And then once you’re inside, here’s my piece of sub-advice. Never think for one minute about being fired. Never. Just do stuff that makes a difference.

George Grombacher (17:53):

Well, I think that that is great stuff. That definitely gets a come on.

Announcer (17:56):

Come on.

George Grombacher (17:57):

Chris, thank you so much for coming on. Where can Savage nation learn more about you? How can people engage with ConnectAndSell?

Chris Beall (18:04):

Well, ConnectAndSell is easy, www.ConnectAndSell.com. My podcast is a curiosity for many people, it’s called Market Dominance Guys. I do it with the inestimable Corey Frank, and the greatest inside sales leader I’ve ever met in my life. And so it started as a book, accidentally became a podcast. We apologize for it every day, but there it is on episode 68 or whatever. And we explore a conversation-first approach to market dominance. And then lastly, I suppose out there on LinkedIn I’m pretty active. I’m Chris8649 or just CEO of ConnectAndSell. You have to connect to me, I’m not allowed to connect to you.

George Grombacher (18:47):

Perfect. Well, Savage nation, if you enjoyed this as much as I did, show Chris your appreciation and share today’s show with a friend who also appreciates good ideas. Go to ConnectAndSell.com, check out how Chris is helping salespeople have 10 times more conversations. Check out the Market Dominance Guys podcast, it’s at MarketDominanceGuys.com?

Chris Beall (19:10):

It is.

George Grombacher (19:11):

Or wherever you listen to podcasts, obviously, and then find Chris on LinkedIn as well and connect with him. Thanks again, Chris.

Chris Beall (19:18):

Thanks, George.

George Grombacher (19:19):

And until next time, keep fighting the good fight because we are all in this together.