People Are Repulsed By Your Tech with Ned Phillips

Here is the full transcript from this episode:

Chris (00:00):

So the number one thing you have to do in sales is to get a switch to occur from you approaching them, to them approaching you, to them willing to come to you. And to do that, you need to get them to be curious. So your goal is to get to curiosity. Oddly, the easiest way and the most reliable way to get to curiosity is through trust.

Announcer (00:24):

Hey, everyone. Welcome to WealthTech UnWrapped, a podcast where we dive into the ins and outs of the WealthTech industry. Our guest this week is Chris Beall, CEO of Connect and Sale. Him and Ned bond over their love of sales and focus on the importance of sales when it comes to building a tech company. Chris also gives us some awesome sales tips and shares some hard trips. Enjoy.

Ned Phillips (00:44):

Okay. Even though it is 8:30 in the morning in Singapore, bright and early, I am super excited to for our next guest. So I think most of you who listen to this show know I’m a sales guy. I love sales. I think sometimes sales is one of the overlooked topics in building great tech companies.

Ned Phillips (01:06):

The way I love to describe it is, listeners, that phrase, “build it and they will come.” No one’s coming. Nobody. You have to go and get them. And Chris, I know we had a couple of minutes to chat before the call… This is Chris Beall from ConnectAndSell. I think Chris, we both agree on this idea that sales and *** is the missing link.

Chris (01:26):

Yeah, absolutely. And I’m a big advocate of doing something that I don’t think is that popular, but I was taught by [Vankat Mohan 00:00:02], used to work with me… Possible I worked for him, I’m not quite sure. But when he became a venture capitalist, I once asked him, “How do you decide what to invest in?” And he said, “I want to know if they sold it before they built it.”

Ned Phillips (01:48):

Chris…. Oh my God. We could stop the podcast now. And done, I’m happy. We did. I tell people that Chris, and they say to me, “But surely you had to build it first?” So I’d love to hear his… It’s as simple as that. If nobody wants to buy it, why build it?

Chris (02:05):

Well, right. And you don’t know that they want to buy it until they buy it. The biggest chicken and egg problem in business is the question of whether your product is going to cause somebody to buy it or them buying it is going to cause it to come into being. One of them’s much more expensive than the other. Making a product is expensive and a lot of guesswork. Whereas going out and selling something, all you need is a message, a problem that you claim to solve, and you have to be able to answer the question, “how?” sufficiently that somebody would say, “Okay, if you can do that, I’ll pay X for it.” And then you’ve sold it.

Ned Phillips (02:44):

Then why do people get it wrong so often? So we’ve all seen, “Oh, I have no idea.” Or they build an idea, they build a product and then no one buys it and they’re continually surprised. Why is this logic so… Because Chris, I think we both know most people build first and sell later. I’m a hundred percent with you, sell first build later. But why do so many people get it wrong then?

Chris (03:04):

Well, I think it’s the temptation to do what comes naturally. So if you can build products, you’re probably not a natural sales person and you probably haven’t been trained to be a sales person and so you think sales is scary and hard and you’d really rather leave it to somebody else. There are some of us who can build software products with our own little fingers, at least I used to be able to. Think that was 3,300 years ago, but it could have been a little more recently.

Chris (03:31):

Who went through the process of learning to sell sometime before or while they were building products and realized, “Oh, this is the easy part. This is easy and that it’s an expensive. All I have to do is talk to people.” But I think most people who can build products are intimidated by sales.

Ned Phillips (03:52):

It’s the morning in Tucson, Arizona as well. I can see that’s your wake up alarm.

Chris (03:56):

Yeah. What that is, is me going to airplane mode, but not turning my wifi off and being on wifi calling. How about that? [crosstalk 00:04:04] So my airplane was not flying high enough, I can tell you. We had to fix that one. I like that guy a great deal, by the way. But he’s just going to have to wait.

Chris (04:14):

So I actually think it comes down to who, and then it becomes sort of a standard in that community. Which is, “Well, we’re the builders and we love to build. So let’s build something and let the building of it tell us what to build.” And it’ll tell you what to build if you happen to be all of the customers, but you probably aren’t.

Ned Phillips (04:33):

And so you are quite unique, Chris. You said you wrote lines of code 3,300 years ago, or maybe sooner, but the reality is you’re right. So I’m not a tech guy. I’ve been in tech my whole life selling it and I vaguely understand it, but I can sell it. But you’re right. Because clearly, look, just in this five minutes, you understand sales. That’s obvious. Are you a natural sales guy who happened to code or were you a product guy who learned to sell?

Chris (05:02):

I think I was a natural tech guy in that the first time I was exposed to software, it was so dead obvious how to do it that I lost interest fairly quickly. And so in 1968, I started coding on a computer that was pretty far away from my high school in Scottsdale, Arizona. Out in the desert, for whatever reason, some brilliant person decided to give us, get this, a teletype machine.

Ned Phillips (05:28):

Wow.

Chris (05:28):

With an acoustic coupled modem. And we had a time sharing account on a GE 660, I believe it was, computer in Teaneck, New Jersey. Now, Teaneck, New Jersey is one hell of a long ways away from Scottsdale, Arizona. And I found out later it was the same machine, the same year that bill gates was learning to program. He did much better with his programming career than I did, by the way.

Ned Phillips (05:52):

Are you sure?

Chris (05:54):

I think so. I think so. I do believe Bill Gates is one of those guys, however, one of those people, that you could strip him naked and drop them into the streets of Moscow at 1:00 AM on January 3rd, on a cold January 3rd, and he would own most of the town by the end of the week. He’s just one of those guys. He’s a freak of nature and whatever.

Chris (06:17):

But for me, I learned to sell out of necessity. My first wife had a miscarriage. I know this sounds barbaric, but we don’t have health insurance here as a matter of course. And I was not employed. So I had medical bills, whatever those things are. And I had to make some money. So I got a job that I could get literally the next day, which was selling door to door.

Chris (06:43):

I became a Fuller Brush man. And what I realized was that the way they sold couldn’t possibly be optimized. It couldn’t possibly work. They were just too impatient to sell to somebody who opened a door. So I thought it through, and I have a background in physics and math and psychology, and I thought, “Well, the math and the psychology have got to be matched up.” And so I kind of made up my own way of selling door-to-door and it was pretty effective. In fact, I think I became the top Fuller Brush man in the history of Arizona in two weeks. So I discovered that sales is really just math and psychology, and that makes it technical and fun if you think about it. So actually I think sales, in that sense, is more technical than most people think in a… Not in a techie, technical way, but in a mathematical and scientific way. And it interested me.

Ned Phillips (07:42):

So much cool stuff there. Before I dive into the cool stuff, what exactly is a Fuller Brush?

Chris (07:49):

Oh, Fuller Brush is a company. In fact, here’s my pitch. Knock, knock. You answer the door.

Ned Phillips (07:54):

Hello.

Chris (07:55):

And I say… You are not typical, by the way. It was probably a woman. Probably 35, 40 years old with a couple of kids. Just moved to Arizona from Ohio to escape the winters or because somebody got a job or whatever. But I would say, “Hi, I’m Chris Beall. I’m your new Fuller Brush man. You probably don’t know what Fuller Brush is. I sure don’t.” And then I’d stand there. I figured the psychology was such that if somebody said that, then the other person might be likely to say, “Well, how can I help you?” Which is a great place to start in sales.

Ned Phillips (08:36):

It is so fascinating because… So you say it’s a mathematical exercise. The word used often in sales, it’s a numbers game. If you call enough people, you will get sales. And while I completely subscribe to that, the reality is the conversion rate is based on the simple, part of the reality is what you did for that lady from Ohio at 35, she immediately liked you because you were honest. And people buy from people they like and trust. And you stood up and said, “Hey, I don’t know what this is either.” Instead of you jamming the sales pitch because no one likes to be sold. And I think it’s a really interesting mass psychology output. Actually, my first sales job was… And I don’t think we’re meant to swear on this podcast, [Dani 00:09:27], but I’m going to roll with it.

Ned Phillips (09:28):

Selling bags of gardened fertilizer made out of animal shit. And I used to phone up people and actually sell bags of shit over the phone. And what you realize is you can’t call somebody and say, “Hi, would you like to buy a bag of this?” What you would say is, “Hi, our sales guy was just in your neighborhood and we saw that your next door neighbor’s gardens doing great. And we we’re trying to figure out how we can get your garden to be the same.” And talk about the garden and all that type of stuff. So you said in two weeks you’d figured it out? But then I assume pretty quickly you stopped selling brushes and started selling something else.

Chris (10:09):

Well, I had made enough money to depart Arizona and moved to Colorado, which was our goal. All I really did was divided the sales process, which at Fuller Brush was unified into a single call. I just divided it into two parts. One of which was an offer to perform a service for the person. In this case, the service was to find out an answer to this question.

Chris (10:31):

I said, “I really don’t know about Fuller Brush, but I’ve heard that we carry some products that are good around the house that you can’t buy in stores. If I research our products and I find one or two that I really think will change your life, can I have your permission to come back and spend five minutes to share those with you?” So that was what nobody did, just to offer a service. My service was I’ll research the catalog and if I find something I really think is great for you, I’ll come back. And everybody said yes. Not just some people, everybody said yes because it satisfied their need to make me go away. They knew if they said yes I’d go away.

Ned Phillips (11:14):

So I used to live in Indonesia. I live in Singapore. I used to live in Indonesia and on the beach in Singapore… Excuse me. There’s the locals who want you to pay a dollar to use the sunbed. And what they realized was if they accosted you and said, “Please use by sunbed. Please use my sunbed.” You would say no. So they would do what you did, Chris. They would say, if you walk past, they’d say, “Hi, would you like to use my sunbed later?” Well, I’m British so we’re always polite. You’d say, “Oh, maybe. Sure.” Knowing you could walk away. But what they were very clever, when you walked back down the beach, they’d jump out and go, “Oh, you said maybe you’d like the sunbed later. Please jump in.” And you felt, in a way, obligated to-

Chris (11:54):

Yes.

Ned Phillips (11:55):

To use that. Because they hadn’t hard sold you from the beginning.

Chris (11:59):

Exactly. I think the general problem with sales is it has to start somewhere and where it starts is either passively, you just wait for somebody to show up and hope that they want to buy what you have. Or actively, that means you approach somebody. And let’s face it, when you approach a human being they feel ambushed. A hundred percent of the time. So you actually have a great deal to make on the spot. Which is, I’ll go away in exchange for something. And as long as you keep that deal simple enough, you’ll get that something. So I would go away in exchange for the opportunity to come back and share a product. I would always get two products. I came up with 14 for seven different demographics. And one of them you’d buy from me unless you hated me. It was so cheap and so unique that you would buy it unless you hated me.

Chris (12:52):

Well I figured once they’re buying from you, they might buy more. The other one was one you’d buy a lot of, if you thought I wasn’t coming back for a couple of years. And spider spray, when I demonstrate by killing a black widow spider and holding her in my hand and saying, “If this were a standard insect spray, like Raid, this little lady would be sending me to the hospital right now. But I don’t think she’s going to do that. I won’t be back for a couple of years. I have a really big territory. How many cans would you like?”

Ned Phillips (13:20):

Oh my God. I love this, Chris. And for all of you listening out there, I don’t care whether you’re selling software or whatever you think your product is, you’re selling Fuller Brushes or Raid… Or not Raid, excuse me, whatever Chris was selling. Because the reality is, exactly, sales is this concept of nobody actually wants to hang out with a sales guy.

Ned Phillips (13:40):

As much as I love sales and I’m sure you do, Chris, your reality is correct. They want rid of… Of course, if they start to like you, you become their friends, of course. But in that one-to-one sales environment, what you’re trying to do is serve that need. So my theory is sales, once you’ve figured out the code, which you clearly have, you can sell, I’m going to say, anything. But then you started selling a lot of software. Did you have to change how you sold brushes or insect spray or software, or are we basically saying, for all the people out…

Ned Phillips (14:16):

So Chris, you have a lot of listeners. We have a lot of listeners. I get all the time, “I want to build a startup, but I have no idea how to get customers And it’s tech and software.” Are the old skills still the skills? Or what’s changed?

Chris (14:28):

Nothing’s changed. Human beings are still human beings. In business-to-business, they don’t buy from you until they trust you more than they trust themselves because a B2B buy is so scary. You’re risking your career. One thing that people who make products don’t realize is that… Geoffrey Moore was right when he wrote wrote Crossing the Chasm. People are repulsed by your technology. It makes them feel physically, somewhat, ill to even think about it. And the fact that you love it doesn’t make them love it. In fact, it makes them scared of it even more. Now you’re going to ambush them. So here’s a repulsive idea, brought in an ambush.

Ned Phillips (15:09):

Chris, that’s the best… Oh my god, I love that. Somebody said the other… I was in a sales pitch And I was saying, “Oh, the tech’s great.” And at the end of the call, the colleague that was on the call went, “You know they don’t care about your tech? They have no interest. They just want to know if it can make them get promoted or earn more or solve their problem. They don’t want to get fired.” I think you took it to the [inaudible 00:15:32] degree. They’re repulsed by your technology. But the reality is no one really cares about your tech.

Chris (15:37):

Yeah. The reality is they’re repulsed by that. Geoffrey Moore actually got this right. People don’t like new stuff they don’t understand. It’s scary. And if it’s something that if they buy it and it doesn’t deliver, and most tech doesn’t deliver because it’s in a complex value chain and usually there’s at least one piece missing. It’s like, “Some assembly required, and by the way, not all the parts are in the box. So don’t you worry, you’ll be crafting your own screws out of a piece of wood that you cut down in the back in order to actually make this thing work.” Tech is fundamentally complex because it has to work with other things in ways that the makers of it didn’t predict. And so it generally doesn’t work.

Ned Phillips (16:23):

And that’s why people said, “Oh, it’s plug and play.” It’s never plug and play. Of course, when you take your iPhone out the box, that’s why people, in my opinion, loved Apple. Because it actually wasn’t scary. There was no wires. There was no instruction manual. You took it out and it actually worked. The holy grail. Because as you say, tech’s… Oh my God. I remember early in my career, I was like, “Yeah, we have software and it’s easy to install and it works perfectly.” I’m like, “Never. It’s never easy to install and it never works perfectly.” The reality is it’s got to be better than the other stuff out there. Clearly Apple took it to the ends degree. So then if technology is repulsive and if people are scared, how do you sell it?

Chris (17:07):

So humans are humans. And the number one thing about humans is… Well, there’s two things you have to remember. One is that there’s a huge difference between approaching somebody and them approaching you. So the number one thing you have to do in sales is to get a switch to occur. From you approaching them, to them approaching you to them, to them willing to come to you. And to do that, you need to get them to be curious. So your goal is to get to curiosity. Oddly, the easiest way and the most reliable way to get to curiosity is through trust and magically when you ambush somebody and they’re afraid of you… And when you ambush somebody in a cold call they’re definitely afraid of you because you’re an invisible stranger, the worst thing ever. You’re the people from across the river who paint their faces the wrong way and when they show up and are invisible it means it’s nighttime and they’re not here to bring you a Bud Light.

Chris (18:01):

So you got to do something about that, but it turns out it’s a great. It’s not a problem. What you do is you say something like this, here’s something we teach people to say. By the way, we’re now offering training on this whole thing. We call it Flight School because after 15 years of delivering 10 times as many conversations with targets, we realized maybe it’d be a good idea if folks didn’t suck so bad. So in our approach… And there’s many ways to do this, but this one’s real simple. You just say, “Ned, I know I’m an interruption. Can I have 27 seconds to tell you why I called?” And what happens is in that little, “I know I’m an interruption,” I diffuse, in fact reverse, the first situation where you’re afraid of me, but I throw myself under the bus.

Chris (18:47):

So I just threw a scary person under the bus. So you like me a little bit, I just solved the problem for you by throwing myself under the bus. I got rid of a scary thing. And then when I say in a playful, curious voice, “Can I have 27 seconds to tell you why I called?” You’re a little bit curious about why 27. And I didn’t really ask you for something that’s a matter of fact question. Other than, of course you have 27 seconds. You answered the damn phone.

Chris (19:14):

So at that point most people will chuckle and you have actually succeeded in the number one thing you have to do in sales, which is to get somebody to trust you. And the FBI has vetted this particular approach out. They call it tactical empathy, followed by playful, curious. Where the second thing you say demonstrates you can solve a problem. You’re competent to solve a problem that that person has right now. And guess what that problem is? You. It’s great. You own the solution because you are the problem. Most reps can’t stand to do this because they don’t want to be the problem. You are the problem. [crosstalk 00:19:50] Once you do that, it’s pretty easy. It’s just reality. It’s a face.

Ned Phillips (19:56):

Exactly. And I think there’s that statement, “No one likes to get sold.” So why do we go out and sell stuff? And I think that is the key thing I think. I remember as a young sales guy… So out of necessity, I left university, I didn’t get a job. So I got a job selling insurance. So 1989 or 1990 I got a phone book. I was a young eager puppy. And literally there was 26 sales reps in a room and we were all given a phone book and everyone got a letter, A, B, C. I got A. I was given the phone book and in pencil… All these people’s names have already been scratched out because they’d been called once before, but we’ve got to call them again because you just got to keep hustling.

Ned Phillips (20:43):

This place I worked was a bit of a chop shop. Was a bit of, “Just keep calling until we grind them down,” which isn’t the right philosophy. And I’d remember the first guy under A is Mr. Aardvark. And he’s like, “Oh my God, you guys calling me again! Stop this.” And then some guy said, “Look, whatever you do…” Because we had a script and our script was “Hi, I’m Ned from this company.” And we would talk for five minutes and everyone hated us. And some guy, a little bit like you, Chris, came across and said, “Ned, whatever you do, don’t read out that script. Call this guy say, Hey, look, I want to say, I know you’ve been called before. I’m not going to try and sell you anything.” Of course, it’s a little cheesier way of doing it. But I learned early on that if you cannot in the first 10 seconds get some emotional positivity from them to you, it doesn’t really matter what you say next.

Chris (21:34):

It sure doesn’t. I asked Chris Voss, the author of Never Split the Difference. A FBI hostage negotiator who I think had the hardest kind of sales job in the world. Imagine selling 20-year jail sentences. That’s not a great product. You sold bags of shit. He sold 20-year jail sentences. I’ll take bags of shit any day. And so I asked him once, I was fortunate enough to be at a dinner that he was attending, and he was I guess not quick enough to run away from me when I tried to corner him. And I asked him, “How long do we have to get trust in a cold call?” And he said, “Seven seconds.”

Ned Phillips (22:16):

Wow.

Chris (22:17):

I was startled. I got an answer. I said, “Well, what do we have to do in those seven seconds?” And he says, “Oh, that’s easy.” I’m thinking, “This guy’s had too many bourbons.” But it turned out he was right, it is easy. It’s just hard to bring yourself to do it. Just to go ahead and let that person know you see the world through their eyes. That you’re the problem. And then make it clear you can solve a problem they have right now, you are the problem and make a little deal with them. Little, tiny deal. Which is, “Let me tell you why I called and then I’m gone.” Now that’s an easy sale, it turns out and it is a real sale. And it’s the first sale that you want to make, which is, let’s agree that you’re going to listen to me and then we also agree I’m gone.

Ned Phillips (23:10):

The world is different from a year ago. So a year ago I was flying around the world. I am a big believer in in-person meetings. I’m a huge believer in that power of the sale, the emotion. Chris, I don’t think I have as much of the knowledge and skills that you do, but everything you say makes so much sense. I’m always so passionate that it’s an art form that’s being lost.

Ned Phillips (23:36):

I’ve already done three pitches this morning over Zoom. How much does that lack of actual physical interaction matter? Is this work from home going to change how we sell because we’re not knocking on doors anymore. And we may go back to it, but right now today, those in-person meetings are just a lot less. Does that change the equation?

Chris (24:00):

First, let me make a wild surmise as to what’s going to happen in the future. We’re not going to end up knocking on doors because work from home is going to be permanent for many companies in part or in large. Microsoft just published a big study on hybrid work and basically said, “Either work from home or hybrid work is here to stay.” One of the big reasons is that the senior executives who make the decisions about what’s going to happen next at the bigger companies have already moved away from headquarters and they’ve moved to their dream home. So they’ve retired in physicality 10 years before they’ve given up the job. And we actually did that. My fiance and I bought two homes in the last year, both of which were triggered by work from home for Microsoft, not for me. I already could work wherever I wanted.

Chris (24:51):

So there’s nobody’s door to knock on. What are you going to do, knock on their door at home? That’s not going to work very well. So being able to have really, really world-class first conversations with folks over the phone… Because you can’t cold call anybody on Zoom either. That one doesn’t work. It just doesn’t. I remember the CEO of Zoom asked me to integrate Zoom into ConnectAndSell many, many years ago and I was too dumb to figure out that it could have been done at the point where you’re setting the appointment. That would have been great. “Hey, let’s set the appointment using Zoom,” but I was too dumb to figure that out. Failed to say yes. And I said, “Well, no. You can’t use Zoom to cold call people.” I was making the classic mistake of category. I got it all wrong.

Chris (25:36):

I really knew how powerful Zoom was going to be, but whatever. Sorry, Dave. I screwed up. Sorry, shareholders, but the board didn’t fire me immediately. Probably because I didn’t tell them, but maybe cause it didn’t occur to me for two years that I should have said something. But I think the fact is once you get somebody to come to you voluntarily, you fundamentally have the psychology in play it takes to move forward, if it makes sense to move forward. And it doesn’t matter if it’s Zoom or the telephone or in-person, it just doesn’t matter. What matters is that you get away from chasing them and you get them curious to come to you. When I was a kid, I was raised out in the desert, Scottsdale, Arizona. In 1957 my family moved out there. So I’m very, very old.

Chris (26:30):

That’s why I talked about 3,300 years ago. I was youngest of five and we had horses. We had more horses than we had kids, actually. And so I had a horse, of course, because that was a normal thing to do. Bicycles didn’t work so well out there. And so I had to learn to bridle a horse on its terms. So how do you do that? Well, you take the horse from fear, because it’s a prey animal, afraid just like a prospect, to a little bit of trust by disarming yourself. By putting your hands first behind your back and then out to the sides and forward a little bit, but you let it calm down and make it make a choice between one hand and another. Because one of them surely has a carrot hiding in there, but it turns out that both do, but the horse doesn’t know that.

Chris (27:20):

And so curiosity finally overwhelms it and it comes and sniffs your hand, you drop the carrot in the other hand you go up and you stroke the side of its head and you put the part of the pride all over its ear, and now you have a curious horse willing to be bridled. Sales is exactly the same as this. If you don’t go through that process of going from approaching somebody to causing them to be curious enough to approach you, it’s hard. Once you do that, the medium’s totally irrelevant.

Ned Phillips (27:47):

Look, it all makes so much sense. I was looking through your site, and I have it in front of me now, totally agree. You’re talking about ConnectAndSell, 75 to 100 calls a day, six to eight conversions, et cetera. But you’re talking about some technology that lets B2B sales do that at a much higher rate. Obviously, people could go look at ConnectAndSell… I see so much great technology die. Not because it’s not great technology, it’s because what I said at the beginning. People think, “Oh, build it and they will come.” And I was talking to a founder the other day and he said, “I’m so upset.” I’m like, “Well, what’s up man?” He’s like, “I’ve called 30 people in the last month and nobody wants my product.”

Ned Phillips (28:37):

And I’m like, “You mean 30 today?” He’s like, “No, no. 30 in a…” And I’m like, “So you called one person a day?” He’s like, “Yeah.” Because he doesn’t come from sales. I don’t want to be harsh on the guy, but he just didn’t understand that that’s not how it works. I cannot imagine how much great technology died. Perhaps the converse of that, how much repulsive technology sold a lot, because people worked it out. So how do you do it? And maybe the follow-on question, if you truly aren’t making that much call can you sell any technology? But maybe just tell us a little bit more about how you do that. How you scale sales.

Chris (29:24):

Sure. So what we do is really, really simple. We have a system that consists of software, server-based software in the Google Cloud, it turns out. Not that that’s particularly relevant. But a little shout out to my friends over at Sada, who are also our customers, who helped us move to the Google Cloud. And Tony Safoian who’s simply an awesome CEO. But we’re in the Google Cloud and our servers dial. Obviously, something has to dial the phone. They dial our customers’ lists. And instead of dialing one at a time, they dial five at a time. So that’s obvious too. Here’s the part that’s not obvious. We have human beings, roughly 500 of them, who are experts at navigating phone calls, but never speak to targets. So if I were on your list and you were using ConnectAndSell you’d log into our system, which is a regular web application, you’d dial a single phone number in order to hook up to it through voice, through any phone, cell phone or whatever.

Chris (30:19):

And then you’d pick a list. And say I were on your list, so you push the big green go button that says I want to talk to somebody. Just like calling an Uber. Boom, you hit that button. And say I’m your lucky victim, I’m the first person who answers in a business-like way. So I answer, “This is Chris.” And the very next voice I hear is yours. “Hey, Chris. Ned here, blah, blah, blah.” Now what happens on your side is you hear a loop in your ear that says you’re connected to somebody on your list. Never a voicemail, never a gatekeeper, never a phone system, always a target. And that target was actually connected because a human being who worked for ConnectAndSell, heard me say, “This is Chris.” And they hit a button on their computer really, really fast. And that got transferred through the magic of the internet and the magic of telephone systems into your ear and onto your screen. Bloop.

Chris (31:18):

And then it pops up in your screen, says Chris Beall, CEO of ConnectAndSell. The first conversation you might have something about me there that you think is important. It’s not, by the way. Anything you know about me, other than what you ask, is irrelevant. And you shouldn’t ask much in a first conversation, but whatever. If it’s a second conversation, follow-up, then you’ll have what we call a follow-up teleprompter. [inaudible 00:31:39] say, “Hey, Chris, when we spoke back on whatever you said X… You said you were walking into a board meeting. Is now a better time.” So that’s how it works from the user perspective. You push a button, you wait, and you talk to somebody. The magic is you don’t wait that long. I’m looking at my reps right now. So Rob Arnold, he’s one of my inside sales guys who sets meetings for other people. Here’s his day. He used ConnectAndSell for six hours, 34 minutes, and 12 seconds today. During that time he had 68 conversations with decision-makers. [crosstalk 00:32:15].

Ned Phillips (32:15):

Nice.

Chris (32:16):

Yeah. So that would be… According to the standards that the bridge group has discovered through massive surveying, 68 would be as many conversations as the average rep has dials in a day. So he had that many conversations, real conversations. He set four meetings, he set 39 follow-ups. That is, the timing wasn’t right or they’re too busy or whatever and he’s going to use ConnectAndSell to get them later and know what to say. He got one referral. It took 18 dials navigated by somebody to get one conversation. He had to wait for three minutes and 24 seconds after he pushed the button, on average. Sometimes shorter, sometimes longer. Here’s what he didn’t do. He did not dial the phone or navigate phone systems 1,283 times today. This is just today.

Ned Phillips (33:08):

Oh my God. Chris, oh my God. I could talk to you all day long, man. Sales is a losing art form. I go to all these Fintech conferences and we talk about AI and data… And it’s all important. I’m not out there bashing any data or AI. How often do people in Fintech talk about sales? Yet, when we go to VCs, who, I love all you VCs out there, but you all want revenue. And I get that and that’s what I want to. I feel pretty lucky that I come from a sales background. But to hear you talk these numbers, 1,238, 68 calls, coming back to that person I spoke to, he had 30 calls in a month. Your guy had 68 in a day, he set four meetings. It’s pretty magical that whole sales process. And the reality is, the logic of it, the technology’s changed. So when you were out in the 60s selling brushes, it was one-to-one. But your guy, Rob Armstrong, got through 68 calls from 1,000 dials. It’s crazy more people don’t do it this way.

Ned Phillips (34:20):

Is it just that it’s scary and people just hide from it? Why do so many people not get it?

Chris (34:28):

I think it is scary until you experience… Also, nowadays it’s frustrating. So if you have to dial manually, imagine my guy Rob Arnold dialing manually. So 18 dials navigating phone systems going to voicemail in order to get one conversation. So he has two conversations an hour. That’s not very fun. So we’ve taken the fun out of it. It was fun back in the 70s and 80s, when you’d do four dials. What you generally did back then is you talked to gatekeepers and if you were any good you’d form relationships with them and you got to senior people. Senior people don’t have gatekeepers much anymore. I’m going to look at another report just for my folks today. It’s called the outcome report. We were just so full of data. It’s a little bit sickening actually, but I kind of like it.

Chris (35:13):

And if I look at this, we were told by either a system or a person that the target was not available 1,857 times out of 8,974 dials today for my team. My team is very small, by the way. We reached voicemail 3,112 times after navigating a phone system. What a waste. It’s just so frustrating. If my reps had to do that-

Ned Phillips (35:42):

They’d go crazy.

Chris (35:45):

[crosstalk 00:35:45]They pushed a button. Collectively my 16, I think 17 today, sales reps pushed a button 345 times. Some of these are people who call a lot. Some of them are big quota carriers who if I look at that team, I can look at my sales team, my account executives, rather than my inside sales folks. And just say, “Well, how much did they use this today?” Because this is another conceit that’s modern that’s really, really crazy.

Chris (36:16):

Which is only SDRs or BDRs should ever do outbound calling. That is so nuts it’s just beyond belief.

Ned Phillips (36:23):

Absolutely.

Chris (36:24):

My 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, AEs, my eight account executives. Here’s one of them, Seth Weinstock. So Seth carries a couple million dollar quota. He used ConnectAndSell for 48 minutes and 48 seconds today. The system did 160 dials for him, which he didn’t have to do. Navigated them all, took care of all that. He had 11 conversations. He didn’t set a meeting, but he got 10 follow-ups. He’s that much closer. And during that time, by the way, you had to wait for three minutes and 12 seconds and he could do something else. He could do anything he wanted to do.

Ned Phillips (37:03):

The Arthur C. Clarke’s quote, which I love, is that “Any great technology indistinguishable from magic.” Guys, for everyone listening out here, if you’re a startup founder, these are the numbers. These are the numbers. 8,000 calls, 68 meetings. These are gold dust. When I first started in sales, I… Of course, Chris, you’ve seen Glengarry Glen Ross and Alec Baldwin’s completely cliched character, but you watch it. And I walked into a sales room and he was this guy. He had modeled himself after Alec Baldwin’s character. A.B.C, we know that coffee’s for closers, everything. He had the whole shtick. But the one thing that sticks in my mind, this is 1990, he picked up a phone and he picked up the receiver of it and he shook it. And he said, “Do you see that?” And we were looking him like, “What?” “Hands up, who sees it.”

Ned Phillips (37:57):

And one smart ass in the room said, “Oh, I see it. What is it?” He said, “That’s money coming out of the phone when you shake it, right?” He’s like, “Absolutely. You pick up this phone enough and you do it right, money will come out the other end.”

Ned Phillips (38:10):

What you’ve done is take that to a level that is… Technology makes it magic. If somebody had said, “Hey, can you make 68 meetings or calls?” You just can’t do that. So Chris, we are approaching our timing. I have two final questions I always ask. But maybe to wrap up, what’s a couple of takeaways for people who listen to this thinking about sales, they’re tech people, they have a B2B sales. They’re not selling as much as they should. What are the couple of key takeaways that we should tell them?

Chris (38:46):

Well, one is that I believe you have a fiduciary obligation to dominate at least one target market. Otherwise, basically you’re letting your shareholders down yourself, your customers down. And the only way to do that, that I know of, is to build trust faster than the alternative. Whatever else they might get, you’ve got to get there first. So that means first to converse, get that seven seconds. Pave your markets with trust and then drive over those smooth roads and harvest all the deals over the next three years. That’s the only takeaway. Except for one, there’s only one way to build trust with a human being, it takes about 600,000 bits of information to do that. And the only way to get 600,000 bits to go back and forth is in a real conversation. That’s going to take you about 27 seconds.

Ned Phillips (39:35):

Absolute gold. Chris, how long have you had ConnectAndSell for?

Chris (39:40):

Well, we’ve been around for 15 years. I’ve been with the company for just coming up on 10. Been CEO for seven. I think seven? Yeah, for seven years. And no good deed goes unpunished, I guess.

Ned Phillips (39:53):

Absolutely. And by the sounds of it, I tell everybody, “I’m going to be selling until I’m 100.” Sounds like you’re about the same, right?

Chris (40:01):

Yeah, I don’t know when you stop doing this. I guess you stop selling when you stop thinking you have anything of value to offer.

Ned Phillips (40:09):

I hear you. Well, Chris, this has been an absolute… Honestly, I can’t tell you how rarely I get to speak to people who’ve thought as deeply about sales as you have. So awesome. So I finish up with a couple of completely random questions, which have nothing to do with the topic. So one that I’ve used previously that I’m interested in, if Elon gave you a free ticket to Mars for a holiday, would you go?

Chris (40:38):

No.

Ned Phillips (40:39):

Why not?

Chris (40:40):

Well, I’m an old rock climber, mountaineer, big wall climber. And when Elon says that if you go to Mars you’re going to die, I believe him.

Ned Phillips (40:50):

No, but I mean when it’s safe. Let’s say he says in five years it’s safe or 10 years… I think you said on Joe Rogan the other day, it was maybe 10 years it would be ready? You don’t have to be the first ship. You could be the second or third, would you go?

Chris (41:08):

No, not unless I got to take the right people with me. And that’s an awful lot of people. So no.

Ned Phillips (41:13):

Wow.

Chris (41:14):

I wouldn’t do it. I’m an adventure, but that’s not an adventure to me. That’s being a sack of potatoes.

Ned Phillips (41:18):

Fair enough. Awesome. Did you say you are a big wall climber or you’re not?

Chris (41:23):

I’m not anymore, but I used to be. I used to be a very serious big wall climber.

Ned Phillips (41:27):

What! Oh my God. How did we not talk about this? So my passion in adventure sports runs from surfing. I used to be a climber, a skier, I’m a long-distance runner. But I’ve spent quite a bit of time climbing, so maybe this will be the question. Maybe it’s a double barrel question. What is the best route you’ve ever done as a big wall climber and what is the greatest climb from someone else you’ve ever seen?

Chris (41:52):

Oh, that’s interesting. The most fun and interesting route I ever did was the Direct North Buttress of Middle Cathedral Rock. It’s not exactly a [inaudible 00:42:04] run.

Ned Phillips (42:04):

In Yosemite?

Chris (42:05):

In Yosemite. It was an interesting, multi-day climb that had some interesting qualities to it that I took a lot out of. My number one partner was not able to leave because he had an allergy to the bay bushes that were in bloom. When you lead 18 out of 22 pitches in a multi-day climb, you really got to find stuff inside yourself you might not known that you were looking for. And it’s very different from soloing because you have this feeling of responsibility for the other people that you’re with. In this case, it was two folks. So I really enjoyed that.

Ned Phillips (42:39):

That’s awesome. Wow. Separate time, Chris. When the world returns, I would love to sit and share a beer and talk about that. If you think about other amazing climbs, whether they’re big wall or mountaineering… I have two that I’m going to mention because I’m very passionate about this topic as well, but if you could mention one or two of great climbs of history, what would they be?

Chris (43:03):

Reinhold Messner soloing Everest without oxygen. That was just… [crosstalk 00:43:08] Are you kidding me?

Ned Phillips (43:10):

Seriously, I’m not shitting you, I was going to say… So Reinhold Messner’s… And I’ve read his book about that. Back then you just couldn’t do that and he went and did it. It was crazy.

Chris (43:24):

It’s so mind blowing. It’s just so completely mind blowing that a human being could do that and would do that.

Ned Phillips (43:32):

The other one of more modern times is Tommy Caldwell’s Dawn wall. Partly because we could watch it in there, but I don’t know if you’ve seen that documentary.

Chris (43:45):

I have. It took me two years to bring myself to watch it. But yes, I watched it.

Ned Phillips (43:48):

Why did it take two years to bring yourself to watch it?

Chris (43:50):

I don’t even know. I just didn’t want to have those… It’s like, you’re on an airplane who needs sweaty palms. I didn’t want to condition myself to be afraid of airplanes. That’s the only time [inaudible 00:44:01]. I loved it [inaudible 00:44:02] watched it.

Ned Phillips (44:02):

Yeah. The difference with… Honnold’s clearly was too sweaty for me a little bit, but the greatest bit about Tommy Caldwell’s was when he made it across that gap and his partner couldn’t and he waited for him for two or three days. That’s climbing. Because he could have gone on, that blank piece of wall they had to navigate with his partner, that was amazing.

Ned Phillips (44:29):

Well Chris, this has been a total pleasure. Thank you for your time. And I will be contacting you about ConnectAndSell.

Chris (44:38):

All right. Come take our test drive. It’s as much fun as you can possibly have. It really is. It should be illegal, but I offer it for free.

Ned Phillips (44:47):

Awesome. Chris, it was a pleasure. Take care. Thank you so much.

Chris (44:51):

Thanks, Ned.