Modern Sales is a Collaborative Exercise in Search.

The sales lead discernment process is similar to search results. The ones that come up on the first page are the ones you interact with. It’s like a discovery call. A discovery call’s purpose isn’t to say, “I’m going to buy.” One of the biggest mistakes sales trainers make is relying on role-playing as the method to gain confidence. Role-playing is not designed to get you calm and confident. It’s a “gotcha” setup. Rehearsal and practice are a better training method to allow the salespeople to get comfortable enough they don’t have to think about how they might fail. You need to have it be a reflex to get to the underlying emotion. The underlying emotion that needs to come through is curiosity.

As for the introverted sales pros we talked about in an earlier episode, public Rah Rah adulation is of little value. Giving these professionals a private rah rah is more effective in keeping them motivated. Get these and more insights in this episode of Market Dominance Guys: Sales is a Collaborative Exercise in Search.

Chris Beall (00:41):

When teaching the golf swing the way I do it anyway, and I’ve had a lot of success with this in 15 minutes, somebody goes from never having swung a golf club to hitting little 100 yards, right to left seven irons with one hand. And the reason that they can do that is that the impediment is their desire to make the club move fast and get the ball the way,their mind tells them it needs to happen. And by taking the ability to execute on that desire away, they have a chance of feeling what it’s really like just swinging golf club, or have a golf club swing now. And I think in sales, the way we do this is pretty simple. One is the script. The script is really important because it gives us a chance to practice our way into the emotional state that we need to begin and to do it without the scary part there, which is the other person.

So a huge mistake that I see sales leaders make is that they think that the sales conversation is a contest between the seller and the buyer. And this is actually fairly commonly taught that buyers are liars and all these kinds of things are out there as concepts that folks have been told as though what you’re in is a little war with the buyer. And when you win they buy. And in fact, modern sales is the opposite. It’s a collaborative exercise where you start with search, you’re searching for somebody who potentially has the ability to get value from what you do or what you provide. So that’s all that cold calling and prospecting stuff as a form of search and the search results. When you do a Google search, right? The search results that come up on the first page are the ones you might interact with. The interaction equivalent is the discovery call.

And the discovery calls purpose, just like when you click through a link on a Google query, isn’t to say, I’m going to buy. You don’t do a query. I did a query yesterday, trying to find a particular hotel up in Birch Bay that happens to be associated with the timeshare that I own, right? I wasn’t simply going to click through and buy it. I was going to click through and check to see if the dates they had available, matched up with what I’d like to do in the first week of September. The idea that I need to qualify beyond the fact that they showed up on the first page of the search is kind of ridiculous, right? I need to look into things a little bit further, and it’s good that I’ve practiced, searching and go. That I practiced clicking. I didn’t have to spend 15 minutes girding up my loins to be able to click on a link.

I know that it’s pretty safe, right? But I’ve got to practice the safe stuff in a way that gives me a chance of succeeding in the micro, in the moment. And then I need a teacher to say, “Hey, that was good.” Even when the result isn’t there. And that’s the real key. It’s the key to the golf swing is the key to anything. If you want to learn something complex, you need a teacher to be there to tell you when it’s working before it’s producing results. So there’s two huge errors that people make in managing sales teams. And if they just stopped them, life would be much better for everybody. One is role play. Role playing is not designed to get you calm and confident. It’s a gotcha situation. We’re going to role-play. And we’re going to show where we can trip you up, where you should have done this, where you should have done that, where don’t do this. Don’t do that.

All that does is it gets you all knotted up. So when you go into the real conversation, your mind is going, should I have done that? Should I have done that? I shouldn’t do this. I shouldn’t do that. And then there you go, waters on the left, you’ve hooked another shot out of balance, right? And then the other thing that needs to happen is in the practice, replace role-play with practice, just practice, just rehearsal. Rehearsal is needed in order to make the sounds come out of you automatically so that you’re free to express the underlying emotion. And the underlying emotion is actually curiosity. So you’re curious, can I have 27 seconds tell you why I called? So you are showing that you’re competent to solve a problem this person has right now, that is you, the invisible stranger, the scary beast in the dark, but you’re also saying it in a playful, curious tone. Notice how quickly curiosity enters in the relationship in the second sentence, it enters into the relationship.

So if you’re curious, you’re naturally relaxed. When you’re curious, you’re waiting for information to come through to you. You stimulate it. And then you’re waiting. It’s like waiting for the golf smile, waiting for the club to get down, to get to the top before it comes back around, you just have to be relaxed in order to do that. You get relaxed by practicing the thing that works, not the thing that doesn’t work. And you need the teacher to tell you, “Hey, that was good.” Not, “Oh, look at that. You whiffed it.” It’s like in the golf swing, it’s like half an inch lower. That thing would have been beautiful. You did everything right. Let’s do it again.

Corey Frank (05:29):

As an instructor, as a mentor, as a teacher, you need to be able to give guidance. And as a student, you need to have a teacher that can tell you that something is working, even when you may not feel that it’s working in the wild just yet.

Chris Beall (05:46):

Yes. And when you’re listening to the conversation. So the way we run our flight school is like this. So we run this thing at ConnectAndSell called flight school and flight school takes pretty much any human being and turns them into a top 5% in the world, cold call, and does it in four sessions of two hours each. So step zero is to develop the message. And we’ve been through all of that, walking into the bar, sit to the left of the person who’s your ideal customer and ask them, how’s your day. We listened to how their day went. We come up with three things out of that. One of them is we’ll call it economic. One of them is emotional and one of them is strategic. We put them in a very simple sentence. I believe we’ve discovered a breakthrough that completely eliminates the bad thing, the bad thing and the other bad thing.

Or maybe it’s got some other variations in it. And then we move forward and we avoid a couple of things there. Okay. All that’s great. We’ve got to have that. Now, how do we become great at it? Well, first we’ve got to get great at the first seven seconds. It’s like a prizefight. If I go into the ring and I get knocked out in the first seven seconds, it really doesn’t matter how good I would have been. Right? It just doesn’t matter. Flat on my back on the canvas is the same and almost every cold call is lost in the first seven seconds. And the reason it’s lost in the first seven seconds, is the voice doesn’t support the concepts that are in the script. The idea, the flow of emotions in the script are not supported by the voice. So I play a little bit of piano, as you might know, and many people think I’m much, much better than I am.

I’m actually a very poor piano player. I would rank myself among people who play the piano regularly in the bottom 20% easily, but I’m quite capable of playing freely the emotions that I feel in any piece. And then what did I do to do that? I took my left hand out of the equation, so I don’t have any mechanics associated with it. And I simplified things. So I can express myself in the melody of my right hand. It’s actually the same as the golf swing. Take the part that doesn’t work so well out. Do the part that does work and then getting encouragement for the stuff that is working before it’s producing results. And so in flight school, what we do is you do a two-hour session with ConnectAndSell. That’s like 15 to 20 conversations, all hot, all live, all live fire.

In those conversations, there’s going to be a coach listening to you, and you’re going to get coached not after everyone, but after most of them. In session one, you get coached only on the first seven seconds, because that’s the important part. That is, it’s what you need to get before you can go on. And then afterwards, there’s a listening session. We go around the classroom and everybody gets to listen to their best. Why do we listen to their best? Because you want to know what you did right. And you want the encouragement from the teacher that says, “Yeah, that was great.” Don’t worry that they hung up. The guy hung up, so what? The lady sounded pissed. So what? You sounded perfect. Let’s listen to your voice again. Listen to that playful, curious, listen to your voice go up twice. That was great. Then in the second session we do what we call the breakthrough part.

So we call it Flight School because the first session, the first two hours is takeoff. And then there’s freight flight. We’re in the middle of it. We’re going somewhere, right? It’s the, I believe we’ve discovered a breakthrough at the completely eliminates whatever it is. And it’s their message. And they’ve had time to practice it and rehearse it. And again, can they get the tone right? I believe we’ve discovered a breakthrough. Does the breakthrough sound like the hero and the hero’s journey? Do they believe the breakthrough is an actor? Is doing something? Does the breakthrough slay the three dragons in their little story? Does it sound like a story? Does it sound like a pitch? Coaching us on that. That’s session number two. Session, number three, we’ve got to land the airplane, right? It’s flight school. You got to learn how to get it back on the ground.

So we have to ask for the meeting. It’s very simple. The way to ask for the meeting, we just say, the reason I reached out to you today, was to get 15 minutes on your calendar, share this breakthrough. I haven’t rehearsed every single. So you got to get that part right. You got to land the plane and then you got to deal with turbulence. The objections, they’re inevitable. How do you handle, they tell me more objection? The Venus fly trap? What do you do? You’ve got to practice that the most awkward of handles in the world. And the most honest, which is we’ve learned the hard way that an ambush conversation like this, just isn’t a fair setting to talk about something that’s important. You a morning person? How’s your Wednesday? Getting that stuff right is a matter of practicing with the teacher, paying attention and getting encouraged when you do it right.

Getting feedback that says you did it right. Especially when it didn’t deliver results. And then occasionally you’ll hook one up with results and you’ll see that works too. But there is an element of faith in all of this. And the element of faith is you actually have got to go into learning, to be great at anything believing in your teacher. If you believe you’re the teacher, then the teacher’s not the teacher. Somebody got to be the teacher. It’s just the way it is. And so in the same way that we shouldn’t bring our ideas too deeply into discovery, we shouldn’t bring our ideas too deeply into learning something as delicate and chilling as cold calling. It’s like when I learned to drive a race car, I got in that car and I tried to forget everything I knew about driving and just let my eyes take me where I was going to go. And instead of responding to the screaming of the guy in the right seat, telling you what to do, is responding, don’t tell me what to do.

I really tried to just do what he said, brake hard, brake hard, brake hard. Meant stomp on the brake, as hard as I can. And then his feedback was great. It was a young guy and he gave me incredible feedback. So the first time I did it right, which was on the third lap, turn one, we’re going in. And finally I wait long enough and I brake hard enough. And guess what? We kind of spin out a little bit. We don’t quite lose the car, but almost lose the car.

Corey Frank (11:58):

[inaudible 00:11:58].

Chris Beall (11:58):

Completely. Oh, the way race cars work. It’s like, [crosstalk 00:12:01].

Corey Frank (12:02):

But there’s the fighter flight. You want to disavow everything he’s saying, because you, who are a residential driver driving 11.2 miles over the speed limit, right? Who’s been doing this since 15, 16 years old. You want to resist that feedback. So how do you trust that teacher? Right? Even though you’re in the same environment you thought you were in before at driving to the racetrack, but now everything is accelerated. You don’t have to have a conversation as a person. How is it different than having a conversation as a salesperson?

Chris Beall (13:23):

That’s really good. That’s exactly the equivalent. And it’s up to the student to come with an open mind. It’s up to the teacher to coach the actions or elements of performance that next can lead to success without getting ahead of themselves, without coaching the next part, don’t teach the part after this part, just teach this part and just paying attention to whether it was done correctly. Not the result. It’s really quite simple when you come right down to it. And in sales, we have this conceit. I see it all the time out there on LinkedIn. Whereas some, for instance, I’ll post some numbers, right? You know how I am. I like to post the numbers about number dials, which are done for the reps and the number of conversations and the number of meetings, which are the wins and all that good stuff. There will often be somebody that comes in and says, “Yeah.” But what about the revenue? What about the closed one?

Well, so what, right? Unless we get the meetings, there’s not going to be any closed one. I mean, these are all small percentages, mostly working against us. So I’m not going to win a lot of races in that Ferrari, probably take me 20 years and having nobody show up for me to win one, but I can learn that I really do go all the way up to that cone before I break. And I really do break as part as I physically compress on that pedal. And I really do just aim the car at the apex. And I know it feels really weird, but I do it. And my instructor was great. When I came out of almost losing the car on turn one on left three, there was a straightaway. And so we had a little bit of time and he ignored the fact that I forgot to shift it to sixth gear on the straightaway.

He just ignored that, which would have been a natural thing for him to pay attention to. That’s the next thing, what he said was, “Great job.” That’s what he said. Great job. And I thought, okay, I did that right. And then the next time I did it right, but with a little more awareness of this other little piece he told me, which was kind of be a little bit more gentle as I changed the direction of the car, going to the apex in the turn.

Corey Frank (15:29):

[inaudible 00:15:29].

Chris Beall (15:29):

So yeah, I mean, there’s a sort of a thing that does a little physics in there somewhere. So I think our sales managers really, really need to be great teachers. We talk about coaching all the time and I think coaching is correct. I think that’s what we’re really doing, but I’ll make this warning. A lot of people in sales came out of the world of athletics and there are two elements of coaching. There’s a teaching element, learning to execute, the thing you need to execute to perform. And then there is sort of an energy motivation level of coaching, getting folks up, keeping them up, keeping their spirits up and all that. And I think that’s the one people remember having been coached and they think their job as a coach is to go all rah-rah or to go all yell at you, to go all Vince Lombardi to say winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing, whatever he said. Right?

And it’s just not the case. I mean, when you’re coaching NFL players, you can say that they’re all really, really good. Every one of them already knows how to execute all of the moves through all that stuff. But guess what? They still get taught and get taught. Tom Brady actually gets feedback on technique, not just whether he was in a good frame of mind, whether it was a hopped up on excitement on adrenaline or whatever. And I think that coaching often sounds like let’s do some rah-rah. Rah-rahs have such little value in sales. It’s just a such little value, including celebrating the wins. There are certain personality types that need to do that. Go ahead, let them do it, right? Introverts who make the best sellers tend not to be encouraged or they like a private rah-rah. If you’re the leader of a company and you have an introverted salesperson, especially at the top of the funnel, recognize their good day privately at the end of the day, do that.

Corey Frank (17:24):

That’s great. So I think we had talked, when I was in the Uber and we were chatting about something else the other day about reps and today’s generation on this career cycle to eventually become CEOs. And what is the ideal career track, right? To be CEO development program, workout regimen, if you will, over the years to be a next-generation CEO? And similar to what I’ve heard you say here in the last 30 minutes or so Chris, is that if you have a great teacher, as a rep, you are naturally going to learn how to teach from your teacher, which will contribute to your skills as a great CEO. You are going to learn how to evoke a curious nature in a conversation, which as a CEO is, you clearly need, you’re going to have empathy, which we had talked about in several episodes already, and you’re going to learn presentation skills, but we’re also going to learn metrics.

And you had said something to me the other day that the CEOs of today, can’t just sit at the top of the food chain. They have to get intimate with the inner workings of every silo of their business. And it seems to me that what we’re talking about here is that if you have a solid rep BDR development program, as an organization, you are setting your organization up for much success that will trickle into every department, or trickle up, if you will, if you want to use a hierarchical example, your SDR/BDR team will trickle up a level of success and it should not be an afterthought. It should not be a place where they get residual marketing or sales training dollars. It should be at the front lines and be treated as such because of, I think the reciprocal effect of doing that really, really well from not just a numbers perspective, of course, but from a leadership development perspective throughout that organization,

Chris Beall (19:23):

I think this is a really big deal. Well, first of all, there’s two ideas in here. One is what is a modern and future CEO like? And they’ve got to have two characteristics. Big time. One is they have to be systems thinkers. They have to be able to see a system as a whole and understand how that system interacts with its environment. When you run a company, a company is a system and it’s a system that at that moment is designed in order to help some folks in database and companies do things more cheaply or do things more effectively or conveniently than they can do for themselves. So that’s what a firm is. That’s why we make companies. We specialize in something that others might need, but they don’t need it to the degree of becoming it. So we get to be it and concentrate that specialization.

And we create this system called the company. And if you don’t know how a system is put together in the inside and how it works, it’s very, very hard to reason about where it could go next. And in particular, where it might be breaking down. The systems break down easily and small things inside of systems can become big things. We had a small thing recently in our system at ConnectAndSell, unfortunately, we test extensively on ourselves as Guinea pigs, before we let anything out in the wild and the very small thing that we’d changed, created a very small delay in not transferring to the user of ConnectAndSell, but transferring to the agent who is navigating. And that very small delay caused a misunderstanding, kind of at a statistical level by agents of what they were hearing in voicemail greeting, and whether it really belonged to that person.

Corey Frank (21:01):

Really?

Chris Beall (21:01):

And that caused a miss marking of some of the phone numbers that we were calling as being main numbers instead of direct numbers. And that caused a miss execution. So we polluted our own data, but we didn’t intend to, we did everything as designed and in a lot of companies, I would assure you that a quarter second delay causing what looks on the surface like, “Oh my God, where do our direct numbers go?” Would have created a witch hunt to go out and find who’s responsible for the bad data. And the bad data actually grew like scum on a pond. Nobody was responsible for it. We just let the temperature of the pond get half a degree too warm. And it grew scum. And we caught it in a day and fixed it and went back and fixed the data and did all that. But that’s the CPR. [crosstalk 00:21:53]

Corey Frank (21:53):

And I think it, you caught it because you just happen in the course of your day as a CEO. One of the things that you do is you just look, almost like a beautiful mind. You look at 100 different KPIs and metrics and maybe it just takes a couple of seconds. Yeah. It’s on track. Yeah. That’s on track. And you said that you noticed something a little bit peculiar, which led to a deeper dive, a deeper dive, a deeper dive. And that’s how you found it from the systems type thinking. So you work from backwards up because you knew what the metrics were going to be. And when they’re off slightly, that’s where it’s time to dive in.

Chris Beall (22:30):

Exactly. And I didn’t diagnose the, what’s going on under the covers, but I could smell something was going on under the covers. And it was in one set of numbers. And it was simply the order of the outcomes. The most popular outcome is voicemail reached for after navigation. The second, most popular is voicemail reach direct number, call a direct number, which was third is gatekeeper as target, but not available. The number two and number three were flipped. That was it. And they were flipped day after day after day, starting on a particular day. To me as a systems kind of person, I look at that and go the odds of that happening spontaneously statistically are zero, right? So as a CEO, you also have to understand the nature of probability and all that. Then there’s this other job which has got to talk to people.

I mainly listen to them and kind of move things ahead. But without presuming that you know all the answers and I believe the best place to learn that is as a cold caller. So I look at cold calling like what you guys are doing at Youngblood Works. As truly finishing school for business graduates, where they’ve learned a whole bunch of things. Maybe even learn some things about teaching from their best professor. Why do we go to college? Because one of our professors will be so good. We’ll learn about teaching. And maybe we’ll do some of that ourselves later in life. It’s not the content. It’s the actual experience of being taught effectively. And if you go to a college, there’s enough teachers. Eventually one of them is going to be good enough that you’ll go [inaudible 00:23:54] I work for me. Right? And then you might want to learn more about that.

But I think what you guys are doing at Youngblood Works where you’re taking these very, very talented people, high ambition folks who are coming out of a program or still in a program, interested in business, probably have CEO in their minds, somewhere in their future. And the natural finishing school. Back in Victorian times, you had to learn how to dance certain dances, or you were toast in society, right? In Victoria, in England, if you couldn’t dance these dances, I mean, you couldn’t go, you couldn’t do anything. You couldn’t hold conversations with people because you had to do it out on the dance floor. Right?

And so how do you learn the dances of the future, which happened in conversations? Well, you got to go to a dancing master and you got to do it on the real ballroom floor. And that means talking to real people with real coaching going on. Because if you take the emotions away, the fear emotions, you’ll never find out if you’re performing right. So I just see that there’s a way of looking at the SDR/BDR role that folks are not quite getting. They think they’re preparing future AEs and getting them to that as fast as possible.

Corey Frank (25:06):

Exactly. Exactly.

Chris Beall (25:06):

Makes no sense. They should be looking at this as the best way to bring anybody into their organization. Even engineers, is to have them come in and sit in the seat. Anybody can learn the script. Anybody can learn to believe in the potential value of the meeting for the human being they’re talking with, regardless of outcome, anybody can get their voice to go up and down in the right places. Anybody can be coached to silence. And these things are very straightforward, right? They just have to believe it’s worth their while. Well, do you want to be a CEO someday, including a CEO of your own life? Learn to have conversations with invisible strangers. [inaudible 00:25:46]

Corey Frank (25:46):

I know a lot of Marines in my life and I work with some and my son is becoming one. And the John Darby who works with me at Youngblood had said, “Listen, as a Marine veteran, you’re taught that whether you’re a cook or you’re a attorney, or whether you’re in logistics, you are a rifleman first, a Marine is a rifleman first.” And it sounds like if you’re an engineer in an organization, you’re a CEO, you’re a VP of technology. This new world order of starting out as a biz dev as an SDR, learning how to script from the ground up is everybody needs to learn these traits of curiosity, these traits of empathy, the systems backwards and forwards to be a true contributor to that organization. I know where we’re running up against the clock here for this episode, but I think that we still have a lot. I have a lot to milk from you. Certainly. I think we can cover this topic next time on the traits of a CEO. I know we’ve touched on it in a few episodes here.

Chris Beall (26:49):

Yeah. I’m glad that we’ve hit this one. I think that this is sort of the big deal that we have a lot going on in our society right now with the pandemic and all that we have, a lot of folks are looking around and asking, what am I going to do? Well, what you’re going to do is going to be limited by what you’re capable of doing and what you’re capable of doing will have a lot to do with what you’ve learned how to do, right? You’ve got to go explore. And I would recommend anybody who wants to check out their future CEO ness, go ahead and become a cold caller. But by the way, don’t become a cold caller who spends all day, not talking to people it’s much better to talk to 30 or 40.