Prospecting Excuse Eliminitor on Sales Development Podcast Hosted by David Dulany of tenbound
The Sales Development Podcast is a place for practitioners in the trenches getting it done every day, whether they are called SDRs, BDRs, ADR’s or others, its the team charged with creating pipeline out of inbound lead activities and outbound approaches. Hosted by David Dulany of tenbound. David’s kind intro explains, “Chris Beall and his company ConnectAndSell have created the ultimate excuse eliminator with their power dialing product. Instead of spending all day researching, calling switchboards, sending pointless emails, and generally not talking to anyone, SDRs can now just press a button and get conversations delivered to them instantly. How do they do it? It all starts with clean data, loaded to their system, where their program does the work to deliver you teed up conversations with qualified prospects. What could be better?”
Tune in this week as we explore the metholdology and how you can use these principles to accelerate your success.
Here is the full transcript from this episode:
Chris Beall and his company ConnectAndSell have created the ultimate excuse eliminator with their power dialing product. Instead of spending all day researching, calling switchboards, sending pointless emails and generally not talking to anyone, SDRs can now just press a button and get conversations delivered to them instantly. How do they do it? It all starts with clean data, loaded to their system, where their program does the work to deliver you teed up conversations with qualified prospects. What could be better? Tune in this week as we explore the methodology and how you can use these principles to accelerate your success.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to the Sales Development Podcast, your trusted resource for the latest strategies, tactics, and tips on running a high-performance sales development program.
Sales Development has grown to become a critical part of the success of high growth companies. And we dive in each week on how to specifically make your program successful and accelerate your career advancement. Subscribe in iTunes, YouTube, and jump on the newsletter over at tenbound.com, to make sure you never miss an episode.
David Dulany (00:33):
Hello, hello, hello, everybody. Welcome to another edition of the Sales Development Podcast. I am joined today by … It’s almost like a Professor Emeritus. It’s a highly distinguished guest, who’s well-known in our community here. Mr. Chris Beall, the CEO of ConnectAndSell, winner of the National Math Award and former door-to-door salesman, could be the only person that’s ever actually achieved that. Mr. Chris Beall, how are you doing today, Sir?
Chris Beall (01:03):
I’m doing great today, David. It is an honor to be on your show.
David Dulany (01:06):
Oh, I mean, ConnectAndSell is such an integral part of the sales development world, you are a renowned thought leader and have worked with more sales development programs than people can imagine. So, I’m just excited to tap into your wisdom here and get you on the show. How did you get to be the CEO of ConnectAndSell? And then, for the two people out there who don’t know what you do there, how does that benefit SDR programs?
Chris Beall (01:37):
Sure. Well, the story is actually kind of a funny story. I was poised, I would say, to join a very leading edge solar energy tech company in Tucson, Arizona, to run that company. And a former employee, salesperson, called me up and said, “Right, I’m about to push the button.” I said, “All right.” He calls me and says, “Hey, Chris, you can look at my company.”
So, I opened my computer. I’m sitting out my backyard, looking up in the mountains, and open the computer, and look up, ConnectAndSell. And I said, “Ken, do you have any idea what the phrase holy uninterested means?”
David Dulany (02:15):
Okay.
Chris Beall (02:15):
And there was a long pause. And he said, “Yeah, but you got to meet my boss, man. The CEO, Shawn McLaren.” I said, “Well, he’s famous. I’ll go meet him.” He’s like the inventor for the IBM mainframe storage industry back in the like, ’70s and ’80s. But rumor is he’s dead, but I’ll meet a dead guy anytime. You line them up, I’ll go [inaudible 00:02:37] with a dead guy.
So, next morning, I’m up at the Rosewood Hotel up there in kind of near Palo Alto. And this guy tells me a story, Shawn McLaren tells me story after elbow bumping me. He was years ahead of his time on the elbow bump. And in five minutes, I just said, “Hey, Shawn, let me see if I got this, right.”
“You’ve reinvented the business telephone they call list kind of, all at once, or multiple numbers at the same time with humans navigating those phone calls. And the mathematical result of that is a 10 times increase, and the only thing that counts in business, which is conversations between somebody who might have a problem and somebody who might have a solution to that problem. Are you saying this is real?” And he said, “Yeah.” I said, “I’m in.”
He says, “What if I’m not hiring,” I said, “Well, it’s a free country, I can work for whomever I want. I recommend you pay me, it stabilizes the relationship.” So, that’s how I joined. I did not join as CEO. I joined to sell the products. I have had every job in the company, except running sales. How’s that for irony? So, I’ve been the CMO. I’ve been the Head of Products. I’ve been the CTO. I’ve been the CMO, whatever that is, all these different jobs.
I mean being a CFO is a weird job. So, I had to get rid of that and get a competent person in. And at some point in this whole process, kind of like, no good deed goes unpunished. They asked me if I wanted to be CEO. And it was either that or I go back out on the golf course, and see if I could hit that shot that I was never able to hit. So, I said, “Sure.”
David Dulany (04:16):
Okay. What was it with you, after being in the business world for a while and you realize that these conversations were the key? What was it that made you go, “Okay, I’m going to go and invest in this company versus the solar company, which is probably a great opportunity,” especially in Tucson based on the weather, right?
Chris Beall (04:38):
Yeah, yeah. It’s quite an interesting play, the solar one. You know, it’s just from doing startups. I’ve been doing startup companies in tech and software since 1983. And every single one of them was bottlenecked at the beginning, at the middle, and at the end on exactly the same business process, which was getting conversations with people who might be worth talking to, and might want to buy our product someday.
And we didn’t talk about sales development back then. But we did it. And if you started a company, and I started a bunch of them, you realize immediately your big problem isn’t your tech and it’s not your talent. You’re just not talking to enough prospective customers to even understand whether you’re solving a problem, much less to find some who might pay some money.
So, I’ve been kind of obsessed with this for a long time. And I’ve also always believed that, and maybe as a door-to-door salesman, I learned this, that the human voice is magic in business. So, business is a scary business as anybody knows. When you’re buying stuff in a business, you’re concerned about your reputation, you’re concerned about your career. You make a bad purchase as a consumer, so what? Right?
So, I bought a Tesla, and then two weeks later, I decided that I hate Teslas, or I’m afraid of electricity, or something like that. Then, I sell the Tesla and maybe I’m out 10,000 bucks, so what? I can make that money up over time. But if I buy that same Tesla for my company, and it’s really a bad idea, and it does chases our customers away, and I don’t know why.
If it does harm to the company, which most B2B products are capable of doing, because after all, if they’re important, they can hurt also. That’s my reputation, that’s my career, that’s my kid’s college education.
So, the B2B buyer is a cautious beast. And as a result, they need to be approached in a different way from the B2C buyer, and you’ve got to work on the trust angle immediately, like within seconds of the first encounter. And you just get it, there’s no practical way to do that, except to use the magic of the human voice.
And so, I personally used to study a lot of psychology to go along with my physics because they both started with P. Why not? Choose your subjects wisely. I knew from a bunch of psychology of perception work that I had done back in the ’70s, that the human voice is essentially magical. It’s a magic trick that we do with each other, where we’re kind of doing brain surgery on the other person without their permission from the first second that we speak with them.
And so, then, this thing comes along, and it’s like, “Oh, look, a way to apply the human voice at pace and scale to create trust relationships in seconds.” And if you get trust, maybe you can keep trust and build on it because eventually, that buyer is got to trust you more than they trust themselves,” because that’s the threshold for action in B2B.
When the buyer trusts one of the sellers, more than they trust themselves on that particular topic, because the seller is an expert, and the buyer is not. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be the buyer.
So, how do you get to that point? And by the way, that also explains why most sales situations, most pursuits as we might call them, fail. They end with no purchase whatsoever, because none of the sellers exceed that threshold of trust with the buyer. They don’t become more trusted than the buyer trust themselves.
I’ve always been obsessed with this. I never knew what to do about it, except use the phone, and then the phone became kind of a dead instrument in 2004, 2005, when voicemail became ubiquitous. And so, folks are letting their calls, incoming calls, go to voicemail, because once you had caller ID and voicemail, why would you do otherwise?
And then, the habit of answering voicemails and listening to them kind of went away. That went down 30% a year from 2004 to 2007. And ConnectAndSell was born in 2007 to solve the … When you call people that goes to voicemail, back then, it was 10 out of 11 times. Now, it’s 24 out of 25.
David Dulany (08:57):
Got it. Okay. And this is so interesting because it seems the trends in just society in general is more digital, typing, texting, sending, snaps or whatever. I don’t know what the kids are doing these days but it’s much more digital. But that human connection, especially now during this time period is so important. So, where do you see the gap in the sales development world right now between folks focusing on just that typing and texting and stuff like that versus actually having conversations with people?
Chris Beall (09:35):
Well, it’s a chasm, it’s huge. The challenge is this. The human voice carries about 20,000 bits of information per second. And an email, a whole email, has about 5,000 bits. So, it takes four emails to be the equivalent of one second of a conversation with regard to information. And it takes information, lots of it, before we trust somebody, because we’re smart.
David Dulany (10:00):
Right.
Chris Beall (10:00):
We’re not going to just trust somebody on what’s in an email. We got to hit more. And it turns out, it takes about seven seconds of a conversation, which is the equivalent of seven times four, 28 emails to get somebody to begin to trust you.
So, who’s going to read 28 emails? I mean, really? I don’t think anybody does that. So, when you look at the problem of sales development, not as I made you answer my email, but you look at it instead as, among all the competitive offerings, especially do nothing, which is the big winner in business is the status quo, how do I become the most trusted? And how do I do it before my competitor does?
If you see that as the problem, if that is what sales development needs to do, then the gap is pretty simple. Sales development reps aren’t talking to enough people. And when they do talk to them, they’re talking to them incorrectly. They’re not talking to them with an intention of building trust. They’re talking to them with an intention to get them to take a meeting. Or worse, they’re talking to them about a product, which is, if you want to do the worst thing you can do in sales development, call somebody up and tell them that you have a solution to a problem that they have.
You have a product that solves a problem they have, because you’ve just insulted them. You just called somebody up who’s supposedly competent and diligent and said, “Hey, David, did you realize you are waiting for a salesperson to tell you how to do your job?”
David Dulany (11:33):
Okay. So, that’s one of the big misses, yeah.
Chris Beall (11:37):
It’s a big one, right?
David Dulany (11:42):
Not having enough conversations. And then, finally, when you do get a conversation, not leading with the trust, just going through your scripts, basically.
Chris Beall (11:46):
Exactly. And the script actually is what’s needed. This is the great irony of the whole thing is, my analogy for, this is for people who live in coastal areas where they have waves in the waters warm enough to surf in or anybody who’s ever watched surfing, like a surfing movie.
So, here’s my analogy. The script is just like a surfboard. Surfers generally don’t shake their own surfboard. Experts do that. People who know how surfboards behave in the water when somebody is standing on them doing the right thing, right? So, it takes what? It’s taking decades for people to figure this up, go look at the old surfboards, big plank of wood. And a modern surfboard is a very sophisticated piece of physics, embodied in some floaty material.
So, if the script when you’re speaking to somebody needs to be crafted by an expert in how the human mind works, and specifically how it works with the human voice. Because if your goal is to get trust, you’ve got to say something in a way that causes somebody to trust you. First, you need to understand their psychological starting point.
Thank goodness, when you cold call somebody. Their starting point is always the same, fear. They’re afraid of you. It’s fabulous. It’s just incredible. How can you get such a reliable starting point, as you do in a cold call and anything else? Like, when somebody is reading an email, they could be doing anything at that time, they could be in any emotional state. And you have no idea. So, how are you going to respond to their emotional state, if you don’t know it? And then, in sales, the whole game is emotional.
When you cold call somebody, I guarantee you, they’re a little bit afraid of you. And that’s fabulous, because now, you can bounce off of that fear, so to speak. And your script, your surfboard, needs to be constructed knowing that the first thing it’s got to do in the wave is turn fear into trust.
And so, that’s where your voice comes in. Your voice is like the surfer, it brings the artistry, the balance, the knowledge of how to work the wave. But every wave is still kind of a wave. And the surfboard doesn’t change either. It’s how you use it.
So, the script is key to being successful in a cold call because it allows you to bring your personality out through your voice and generate trust. And without the script, you just have to get lucky. You have to be like, “Oh, it turns out I’m not only a sales development rep, I’m also a linguistic psychologist with 50 years of experience.” Well, you’re not.
David Dulany (14:24):
Wipe out, right?
Chris Beall (14:26):
Wipe out. And I listened to more cold calls and follow up calls probably than anybody on earth. And we do $50 million a year. We connect about two and a half million sales conversations. And so, they’re all there to be listened to. And the number one thing that happens is the rep is dead in the first seven seconds. They’re dead. They don’t have a chance.
And Chris Voss, the author of Never Split the Difference, told me at dinner one night, why that’s so. So, I asked him, “Hey, Chris, you what? Those hostage negotiations, they’re in a cold call, how long do we have to get trust? Then, when is it too late?” And he gives me this flat look and he says, “Seven seconds.”
I jumped back and spilled a little bourbon on my shoe. I was wearing shoes, though. You know how rare that is for me and I’m the host of Christmas dinner …
David Dulany (14:26):
Pre-COVID, right?
Chris Beall (14:26):
What can I say?
David Dulany (14:26):
Yeah.
Chris Beall (15:20):
Pre-COVID Christmas dinner.
David Dulany (15:23):
Yeah, I was actually wearing pants. Okay.
Chris Beall (15:25):
I was wearing pants, yes.
David Dulany (15:26):
Seven seconds. Holy cow.
Chris Beall (15:28):
Seven seconds, yeah.
David Dulany (15:29):
Wow.
Chris Beall (15:29):
So, I said, “Chris, our research says eight seconds.” And he says, “Your research is wrong. It’s seven seconds.” I said, “Okay. You sound pretty sure of yourself, what in the world do we have to do in those seven seconds to get somebody to trust us?” He said, “Oh, that’s easy.” I’m thinking, “This guy is … Is that his third or fourth drink?” And he says, “It’s easy.” He sound he was not slurring his words. So, I kind of believe maybe he knew what he’s talking about.
And he said, “All we have to do is show this person on the other end of the phone that we see the world their way, through their eyes. We call it, tactical empathy. And then, all we need to do is demonstrate to them that we’re capable. In fact, competent to solve their problem that they have right now.”
And that’s when the little ding, ding, ding, went off in my head and I said, “The problem they have right now is me. I’m the cold caller. I’m the problem. Fantastic. Absolutely, fantastic.”
David Dulany (16:33):
So, you already know the emotion, you know the emotion you’re going into. Now, you know the problem that they’re having.
Chris Beall (16:38):
Exactly. It’s so easy from there. There’s nothing to it, right?
David Dulany (16:43):
Okay. Now what?
Chris Beall (16:45):
Well, I said, “So, Chris, here’s what we teach people to say, and we don’t know why it works. We teach him to say this.” You’ve answered the phone, right? And I say, “Hey, Chris here from ConnectAndSell, David, I know I’m an interruption, can I have 27 seconds tell you why called?”
So, I spat that out, right? And he looks at me, cocks head, thinks for a second and says, “It’s perfect.” I’m thinking, “That’s terrible. I wanted free consulting.” He says, “No, no, it’s perfect, and here’s why. When you say I know I’m an interruption, and you hammer the word, no, you’re throwing yourself under the bus. You’re indicting yourself before they can indict you. That’s the first thing you need to do, because that’s how they see the world, that you’re the problem. You’re a problem.”
So, you just called yourself a problem. He said, “You want to blow it? Soften it. Say, I know that I’m interrupting your day. Then, you’re blaming this circumstance. You’ve got to blame yourself. So, reps have a hard time doing this. This is like a nightmare for reps. It’s like, “I don’t want to be the problem. I’ve been told all my life not to be the problem.” Well, you got to just say you’re the problem. I know I’m an interruption.
And then, he said, “You change to a different voice, you change to what we call a playful, curious voice. Your voice went up twice, can I have 27 seconds to tell you why I called?” And you didn’t ask him to do anything. You just asked, can you have something? Not, may you have it. You weren’t asking permission, you’re asking a question of fact, to which you both know the answer.
Sure. After all, they answered the phone. And you’re offering to solve the problem, you go away in 27 seconds, not a bad trade. So, that’s what you do. And he said, “The point isn’t to get the 27 seconds. Now, they trust you a little bit. So, don’t blow it.”
David Dulany (18:29):
You build a little bit of trust. And then, so, usually, the response you get then is, “Hey, I’m running into a meeting. I’m just shutting down my laptop. I’m just getting in the car.” Like, they come up with some reflexive. There’s almost like when you knock a knee on the doctor’s office, this reflexive thing. So, does it just depend on the situation? What do you recommend that they … Where do they go from after that?
Chris Beall (18:54):
Well, generally, they will give you the 27 seconds, even if they’re walking into a meeting. So, now, you have an …
David Dulany (19:01):
Okay.
Chris Beall (19:02):
… because it’s only 27 seconds, right? And it’s a weird number. If you say 30 seconds, it doesn’t work. If you say a quick 30 seconds, they know you’re a lying salesperson. So, you say 27 seconds, sounds pretty precise, right? It’s a promise. It turns out, it only takes 17 seconds to save the next part. So, you really have a lot of time. You got all the time in the world.
So, then, you say something like this, and this is … Again, the first part is hard for reps because, A, they don’t want to indict themselves. And B, they don’t want to use that playful, curious voice. They just think it sounds weird. But if you do both of those, you get the 27 seconds, and they’ll say something like, “Sure, Chris, go ahead, shoot.” Or, “I only got 15 seconds.” Or, “What? Twenty-seven seconds?” And you say, “Yeah, that’s all I need.” And then, you just go for it.
So, I would say to you, you say, “Yeah, go ahead,” and I say, “David, I believe we’ve discovered a breakthrough that completely eliminates.” Now, once I get past the word eliminates, I have to put in my own company’s little value prop. But it’s not actually a value prop for our product. It’s a value prop for the meeting. And it’s just designed to get curiosity, nothing else.
So, the journey is from fear, to trust, to curiosity, to commitment, to action. That’s the journey of sales development from first touch. They’re afraid of you, fear. Your own fear is not the issue. Reps being afraid, they just got to get over that through practice. The other side is always afraid, because you’re an invisible stranger. And in the environment of evolution, the invisible stranger lived across the river. They’re invisible, because it’s night. They came to your village to change the demographics rather suddenly.
David Dulany (20:52):
So, that’s the thousands of years of response built up in the human psyche, right? And so, through this process, we’re kind of getting out of that comfort zone, right?
Chris Beall (21:04):
We are. I mean, we are admitting we’re the invisible stranger. And then, we’re making it okay, by offering to solve the problem. I’ll go back across the river. It’s like, I’m here, actually, I have a Bud Light for you. I’m not going to hit you with the club. And then, I’ll immediately, while you’re drinking the Bud Light, I’ll go back across the river. Cool, huh? It’s like, “Oh, I kind of like that guy now.”
So, the rest of this little script is really interesting. When you say, I believe, I believe is very unusual thing to say. It really tells somebody, I’m about to tell you something from inside of me. So, by the way, you have to believe it. It doesn’t work just to melt the words. You have to say it with conviction, I believe, hammering the word of I. And then, you need to get curiosity.
Well, people are curious about two things. They’re curious about stuff that might be valuable, call it treasure. And they’re curious about people, more about people than about things. There’s a whole industry called the people curiosity industry by me. There’s a magazine, People Magazine, there’s another one, Us, there’s another one … I don’t know, who we, all those paparazzi.
People even care about the British Royal Family. Even people who are not themselves British Royals care about that. Why? They’re just curious. Those people are weird. They live in a weird way. They have this weird history. Who knows? They’re interesting.
So, we, when you say I believe we have discovered a breakthrough. Nobody knows who we is. So, they’re curious. And then, when you say discovered, there’s nothing to push back on. If you say the usual, we save companies like yours. At ConnectAndSell, we help companies like yours talk to 10 times more people. You get psychological reactance immediate pushback. Because when you say, “We’re great or I’m great,” folks immediately go, “No, you’re not. No, you’re not.” “Yes, I am.” No, you’re not?” “Yes, I am.” You’re back in the third grade playground at that point. Not a good place to work from.
When you say we’ve discovered a breakthrough, a discovery is innocent. We found it. It’s cool. Don’t worry about it. I’m not saying I’m great. I’m saying I’m lucky. Hang with me. It’s always good to hang with lucky people. So I say, “I believe we’ve discovered a breakthrough.” And the main thing about the breakthrough is, now, we can tell a story because we have a hero.
The hero is the breakthrough. That’s it. The breakthrough is going to go on a journey. Maybe, slay a dragon, come back with the gold. Cool. We know how to listen to hero’s journey stories, we’re wired for it. So, we haven’t used very many seconds. And so, we’re going to send our hero on a journey.
Good heroes eliminate bad things, right? Heroes don’t actually bring good things in general. They make bad things go away. Now, the sheriff comes to town and cleans it out, right? So, I believe we’ve discovered a breakthrough that completely eliminates. Now, you need something economic. I love waste. I believe we’ve discovered a breakthrough that completely eliminates the waste and the frustration, because we needed something emotional.
And now, you just have what it is that you help them do strategically? Like, where are they trying to go? Ours is this, I believe we’ve discovered a breakthrough that completely eliminates the waste and the frustration that keeps your best sales reps from being effective on the phone, or even using the phone at all. And the reason I reached out to you today is to get 15 minutes on your calendar to share this breakthrough with you. Do you happen to have your calendar available? Notice that playful, curious voice at the end?
David Dulany (21:04):
Yes.
Chris Beall (21:04):
That’s it.
David Dulany (24:49):
Yes. And so, you’ve built the curiosity and then, as you mentioned, you’re not selling a product on this call. You’re not selling even a solution. You’re trying to just get the time on their calendar at that point, is that correct?
Chris Beall (25:05):
Exactly, exactly.
David Dulany (25:05):
Tell me about that. Why not go on and on, and get into a 20-minute conversation if they want to?
Chris Beall (25:12):
Because you ambush them. And when you ambush somebody, they will never tell you the truth. And so, they’re seeking a way out of the conversation the whole time. And if they can get you to talk about your solution, then they can say, “Thanks. Thanks, David. You know, we’re set.”
David Dulany (25:29):
Yes, exactly.
Chris Beall (25:31):
That’s exactly what they do. And I love a good objection as much as the next guy, right? Jeb Blount wrote a book called Objections. I worship Jeb Blount and that book, and Sales EQ, as a matter of fact.
So, gosh, we have three books in here already, right? Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference. And we got two, Jeb Blount books, I’m on a roll. And my podcast is just an attempt to write a book, that’d be the fourth book. So, Blount taught us about objections. Well, here’s the hard objection that when somebody says, “We’re set,” what do you say? No, you’re not?
David Dulany (26:04):
Right.
Chris Beall (26:04):
I mean, they’re claiming they know more than you do about themselves, which they do. And now that you’ve confessed what it is you do, and insulted them by saying that they were waiting for a sales guy to call them up and tell them how to do their job. So, you insult them, and then you give them a way out. And then, I shouldn’t be surprised if they take the way out, which is reset.
So, the way you avoid that is, you use no category language, no marketing language. There’s a huge mistake that’s made in sales development, where we go to marketing and say, “Hey, hey, give us a message.” And marketing goes, “Okay, let’s see, how do we do marketing messages?” Well, we’ve established that we’re in a category, and then we differentiate ourselves from others in the category in a way that conveys potential value to somebody that we want to sell to. That’s how we segment, right? Isn’t this fabulous?
So, we say we’re in this particular category. So, here’s how you blow the one that we do for ourselves. David, I believe we’ve discovered a breakthrough dialing technology that … Oops, dead. Because you’re going to say we’re set.
David Dulany (27:11):
Yeah, we already have that. Yeah.
Chris Beall (27:12):
We already have a dialing technology. What? I mean, it’s not what I’m looking for, right? Whereas, when I say, “I believe we’ve discovered a breakthrough that completely eliminates the waste and the frustration that keeps your best sales rep from being effective on the phone or even using the phone at all.” You’re a little mystified at that point.
David Dulany (27:30):
Yeah. What is it?
Chris Beall (27:31):
What is it?
David Dulany (27:32):
Yeah.
Chris Beall (27:33):
That’s what we’re looking for, curiosity. So, now, you’re going to come back and say, “Here’s your objection.” I call it, the Venus flytrap. The objection that says, “So, Chris, tell me more.” And if I go for it …
David Dulany (27:45):
Oh, okay.
Chris Beall (27:46):
I’m a sucker.
David Dulany (27:47):
Yes, yes. Yes.
Chris Beall (27:49):
I’m a sucker. So, I got to say something more like this, “David, we’ve learned the hard way and an ambush conversation like this, isn’t a fair setting to talk about something that’s important. Are you a morning person? How’s your Wednesday?”
David Dulany (28:02):
Right. And so, it’s very counterintuitive, because you’re like, “I got one. I’ve been dialing all day and somebody actually wants to talk to me.” But, now, we’re shifting to the meeting. So, that gives you some breathing room, right, to put everything together. It gets them off the hook, because you’re the issue when you took them through this process. What are the benefits of shifting to that, getting that 15 minutes on the calendar?
Chris Beall (28:27):
Well, the big one is psychology. So, I have an analogy about a horse because everybody should have an analogy about a horse. So, I do also. Now, that I’ve done surfboards, why not do horses, right?
So, when I was a little kid, 7-years-old, or thereabout, I was given my first big chunk of responsibility in the form of a horse named Tim. And Tim was a nice horse, big Quarter Horse Gelding, unlikely to do anything too bad. But he’s still a lot bigger than me. And I had to learn how to put a bridle on this horse by myself. And I weighed 62 pounds, I wasn’t very tall.
So, how do you do that? Well, you got to get the horse curious, so it comes to you. So, you do it by holding your hands out, palms down, in a fist with a carrot, little piece of carrot in each hand. And the horse will eventually sniff one hand or another, it’s got to make a choice. And so, you feed it with one hand, you drop the other and you put the bridle over, it’s here, right?
You got to get the horse to come to you. That’s what the meeting is for. The meeting is to get the prospect to voluntarily come to you, so that they’re in a frame of mind, where it’s possible for them to confess their truth. Because the purpose of the meeting is a confession. It’s for them to tell the truth about their situation. It’s not for you to tell them about your product, nor is it to discover whether your product can solve their problem. That is not the purpose of discovery.
The purpose of discovery is to discover what’s true about their situation, that’s relevant to your breakthrough. That’s it. And people skip that step too, everybody wants to jump ahead. Big problem with sales is when you’re in an environment of scarcity, like scarcity of conversations. You’re having two a day or three a day, then it’s hard for you to stay relaxed and treat each one as just another conversation, which is the key to getting to the point where everybody’s relaxed enough to either take the meeting or in the meeting to confess. So, that’s number one is psychology.
Number two is research. There’s no need whatsoever to research somebody before you cold call. Research them enough to put them on the list. But that’s enough because it’s a psychology game. You don’t need to know about their business. You don’t need to know about their cat. You don’t need to know anything about them except as a human being. I just called him out of the blue and they’re afraid of me. That’s all you need to know.
David Dulany (30:55):
Right. Because you can do the research later once you get the calendar invite booked, then you can do that. But in the meantime, it’s becoming an expert in the other aspects of the call that you went through.
Chris Beall (31:08):
Right. You become a performance artist. That’s what you really are with a human voice and you have to have an underlying belief. So, it’s just like going knocking door to door if you were in a religion that knock door to door. You got to believe. It’ll be kind of crazy to go on a mission as a missionary if you didn’t believe. Wouldn’t that’d be weird?
David Dulany (31:30):
I think that happens every day. I mean, people just kind of fall into their career. And next thing you know, they’re selling DNS solutions, for lack of a better example. But they’re selling something that they’re like, “I hardly even understand what this is.” So, that belief is not there. So, that’s thing number one.
Thing number two is, get off of the usual way of researching and try to come up with something and become an expert in this format that you’re describing versus trying to research everybody.
Chris Beall (32:01):
Right. A research can only hurt you in a cold call. It can never help you.
David Dulany (32:06):
Wow. Okay.
Chris Beall (32:08):
It can only hurt you.
David Dulany (32:09):
This is so counterintuitive. Yeah.
Chris Beall (32:11):
It hurts you by misdirecting you away from the psychology and toward the situation. Their business situation is irrelevant. You cold call them. Their situation is, “I just took a call from somebody I didn’t really want to talk to.” That’s their situation. So, ignore the business thing but you got to believe in the meeting.
David Dulany (32:11):
Psychology.
Chris Beall (32:34):
You got to believe in the potential value of the meeting. Yeah, you need to know the meeting is your product. That’s what you’re selling. And you have to believe that this meeting has potential value for this human being. Even in the case where you’re never going to do business with him. Your company is never going to do business with him.
And if you believe that, then it’s easy to sell the meeting. And what could you get out of the meeting? Well, you could learn something. From whom? An expert. Hey, guess what? All sellers are experts compared to buyers. A buyer is never an expert on the topic. That’s why the seller’s company exists, right?
If I were an expert on DNS, I’d buy [inaudible 00:33:15] the company is selling DNS services? No way. They can teach me useful things and that’s what is going to happen in the meeting. So, you don’t actually …
David Dulany (33:26):
Building that trust.
Chris Beall (33:27):
It’s super simple.
David Dulany (33:28):
Yup. Okay.
Chris Beall (33:30):
So, then you have a third problem that you have to solve, though. So, you’ve solved one problem, psychology problem, get him to come to the meeting, right? You solve problem number two, the research problem. Now you can afford to research.
Say you’re doing four discovery meetings a day, you can research four times a day, it takes about two minutes. I do it all the time. I take four discovery meetings a day, still to this day. That’s my average. And I research for two minutes. I want to know one minute about their company. Are they funded or not funded? What industry are they in? And what do they seem to really kind of think is cool. And one about the person. And that’s it.
And then I move to discovery to include a different matter just by asking a simple question. So, “David where are you right now on the face of our blue world? And the reason I ask that question is I want your psychological state to shift from whatever it is,” and I have no idea what it is, “to pride of place.” Because that’s a predictable place to start from.
So, I want you to be in a very specific psychological state. Because when we’re feeling pride and we’ve spoken with pride, we’re open to listen to the other person about what they have to say. Because we just got to say, “I’m proud of where I live. I chose it. By the way, people are proud of where they live. So, let them say it.
David Dulany (34:54):
And I had a little interference on the call. So, you said where are you in the blue world? So, like on this little planet we’re on?
Chris Beall (35:01):
Yeah, where are you in the face of our blue whirling planet? So, the image is an image of us being together rather than apart. It’s an image from space, right? You get that image immediately. There’s a famous picture that we’ve all seen. So, the earth only looks blue from far away. So that means we’re together. Here we are. And that’s what I want, is I want you to speak proudly of where you are. And I want you to have the psychological impression that the feeling that we’re both together. We’re on the same side of the table.
And then I ask a second question once you’re done talking about that, which could take a long time by the way, I don’t care. I never heard anybody buck this. And the second question is, “So, David, I always check out websites. I try to understand somebody’s business. I’m always wrong, 100% of the time, I don’t get it. So, tell me when everything goes great in your business. Perfect customer, perfect situation, perfect timing, perfect budget, your people execute perfectly, everything’s great. How does your product change that person’s life, that buyer’s life?”
David Dulany (36:15):
Do they know that?
Chris Beall (36:16):
Then let them talk.
David Dulany (36:17):
Okay.
Chris Beall (36:17):
Because now they’re [inaudible 00:36:18]. Oh everybody knows it. Well, they never thought of it before to say something. They might say, “You know, I’ve never thought about that before.” Right?
David Dulany (36:26):
It’s a great question. It’s a great question. It’s just that, do they know? Yeah.
Chris Beall (36:30):
It doesn’t matter. It’s a question that always gets you where you want to be, which is talking about their mission and why they are working on that mission as an individual human being. That’s what you want to know because if you’re going to help them, you’re going to help them with something economic or something emotional, or something strategic. You don’t know what’s of most interest, but it’s got to be of interest to them. It’s not an abstraction.
So, by having the buyer no longer be an abstraction, but be a person whose life was changed. You’ve changed the entire context of the discovery from how can we work together to help that person that you are on a mission to help? And that’s where you want to be in sales.
David Dulany (37:14):
Got it. So, tell me more about the discovery. What are we trying to achieve in that discovery call now that you’ve gotten them to open up a bit?
Chris Beall (37:23):
Well, a discovery call is essentially a confessional. We want them to tell us the truth about what they’re trying to get done that isn’t getting done. I mean, people work for pride of workmanship. That’s why they do what they do. W. Edwards Deming taught us this way back in, I don’t know, from the ’50s, I think. That’s the ’50s of the 1950s, not the ones that are coming up or this house will probably be underwater.
But in the ’50s, Deming figured out something that’s so profound people still struggle with it, which is, folks don’t work for money. They work for pride of workmanship. And so, if you want to have a sales conversation with somebody, you’ve got to get the purpose, right? Simon Sinek is always telling us start with why, get the purpose. And then people think, “Oh, that means I should ask why?” It doesn’t mean to ask why? That’s a little bit of a primitive interpretation, maybe you should ask why.
But probably you should get to why. And folks don’t like to confess their why just to anybody. They’ve got to trust you. So, you’re building on trust. And you’ve got to get to the next level where they start to tell you truth they don’t tell other people. After all, everything in business that results in success comes from proprietary information from knowing something of the other guy, your competitor doesn’t know.
And it’s in discovery, done correctly, where you get told things that the other guy doesn’t know and is never going to know, unless they execute correctly. So, you’ve got to get to that point of trust. And the way you do it is through, again, psychology and making no assumptions.
So, reps do this all the time. Well, let me see if I can do this one, they say A. I’m going to say, “Well, doesn’t that mean B?” And B always means buy my product. It’s a miracle that my product happens to be the immediate knee jerk answer going back to your knee jerk reflex to everything they say. And I’m going to steer them in that direction. I’m going to ask them questions that trap them in a corner where they have to say, “Gosh, your product is the thing,” right?
It’s exactly the opposite of what you want to do. What you want to do is find out what resonates with them. It’s going to be something economic or something emotional, or something strategic. By strategic, I mean, where they are trying to go. Something’s blocking them. They don’t have the time. They don’t have the support. They don’t have the resources to get where they’re trying to go.
And your company, well, along with your product, is going to provide either time. Many, many products offer us time, right? Or support, we might be experts on what they need to know how to do something. We’re going to help them with that. Or we’re going to take what was … think of like a rock that was submerged under the water and lift it up, give them a place to stand from where they can go to the next thing.
CRMs are like this. You get a CRM because you think, “Hey, if I get all the data in the CRM, then I can,” and you list three or four things you could do then that you couldn’t do before, that strategy. So, you’re looking for resonance, just resonance of one of those, then you drop the other two, like a hot rock. You’ll never go to features.
David Dulany (40:40):
Yeah, that’s what I was going to say. Because usually, they ask you a couple of quick questions, and then just start going through a PowerPoint deck. And you’re just like, within about a minute, you’re just bored stiff because they’re just … right?
Chris Beall (40:40):
Right.
David Dulany (40:57):
They’re going at this whole spiel and you’re trying to solve a business problem.
Chris Beall (41:03):
Yeah or worse. Yeah. So, once you’re confessing, you get on a roll and you just keep going. But you got to let the role of a salesperson in discovery is to help that confession get started.
And if you have props, the purpose of the props is to give somebody something to kind of think about. Like, I have a prop that I use and my prop is watching our team live. I just go to our leaderboard and say, “Here’s my sales team. And look, here’s [Josh Lehman 00:41:35]. He’s one of our SDRs. And Josh has used ConnectAndSell for four hours and 37 minutes and 24 seconds today.
And he has had, look at that, he’s had 33 conversations, set three meetings, he’s got 18 follow ups. His goal for the day is 2.3 meetings. So, he’s above goal. I’m sure he’s happy. And he hasn’t done any work, really. He’s just pushed a button 33 times. Here’s what he didn’t do. He didn’t do those 962 dials and he didn’t navigate 962 phone systems, and even talk to, God knows how many gatekeepers. And he didn’t have to hang up on probably 923 voicemails. So, he didn’t do that. He just pushed the button 33 times, hit his goal. He is a happy guy working from home.
And what do you think? It makes it easy to manage. I really like being able to see this. And I like seeing that my people are happy. Notice that I got in an emotional thing. I got an economic thing, “Hey, we got meetings,” that’s a strategic thing.
Somebody’s got to use that prop. And they’re going to focus on one of those. “You know, we’re really having a hard time with our SDRs working from home. It’s just hard to keep them engaged.” I said, “Yeah, it is. It is even with ConnectAndSell it is, 33 conversations, but you’re still alone.”
So, one of the cool things to do is go find a conversation where they were struggling a little bit. And get on a Zoom with them for three minutes, play that conversation. And just ask him, “What do you think of it?” And now, they can engage with you in a meaningful way and you didn’t screw up their day? By the way, Josh just had his 34th conversation.
David Dulany (43:12):
As we’re talking. I love it. I love it. Okay, so you’re ticking off all the different psychological aspects. So just from a technical aspect, taking it back a step, how do you go about getting enough information in the system so that somebody on the back end, they can be calling 900 people and making those one connections? Do you run out of names and phone numbers after a while, especially if you’re calling into big accounts where there just might be a handful of people?
Chris Beall (43:46):
Yeah, my experience says no, but there must be cases where you do, but I don’t run into them very often. So, when you think about it, it’s pretty unusual to put together a company and then say, “In the lifetime of our company, we intend to sell to seven companies.” It’s weird. I mean, I know one like that, by the way, and they’re ConnectAndSell customer.
But the reason they’re ConnectAndSell customer is those seven companies are really big. They’re the seven largest wireless carriers in the world and his deals are really big. They range between 100 and $300 million. And it’s really important to know everybody who might be important, including people you don’t know are important. So, he likes to talk to lots and lots of people. So, he doesn’t walk into that $100 million closing meeting and have that technical objector he has never met in the back of the room.
So, seven targets, but within the seven targets, if there’s a lot of value, there’s a lot of people. There’re always people associated with value in business, always. When the dollars are big, the number of people you should talk to is large. If it’s spread over a whole bunch of customers, well, then that’s the case, right?
But the fact is though when you dial a phone number, you don’t hurt that phone number, you don’t hurt that person. There’s no reason not to call them again. It’s just a pain in the butt to do it, you don’t like to do it. And so, people give up after two or three dials and say, “I didn’t want to annoy them.” They don’t really mean that. What they mean is, “I got frustrated trying to do this and I keep ending up in voicemail.”
So that’s the whole ConnectAndSell idea. You don’t ever go to voicemail. You just push a button. You wait, let’s see, Josh Lehman today. He has waited for five minutes and 18 seconds, on average, for the next conversation. That’s what he’s done and he could do something else. He could pet the cat for all I care.
David Dulany (45:36):
Right.
Chris Beall (45:38):
And make a cup of tea. Who cares?
David Dulany (45:40):
Right. And so, to get the data kind of structured and dialed in a way that’s useful and it gives them enough, sort of, I guess you could call like grist for the mill.
So, in your idea, I think you don’t necessarily have to have just the decision makers, it could be anyone involved in the deal. You just want to talk to them so you can start to build up that trust? Is that correct?
Chris Beall (46:08):
Yeah. And you want to get referrals. Yeah. So, you want to target reasonably well, right? So, your targeting is based on, it’s always guesswork. I mean, like, call it whatever we want. But there’s a lot of segmentation information out there in Zoom info, for instance, or in LinkedIn Sales Navigator that lets us get pretty close with the simple query.
So, if we know what industry we’re in, we know what kind of title we’re going after or titles. And we know in our own database that we haven’t talked to them yet, it’s pretty easy to put a list together because all you need is first name, last name, company name, title, and a phone number. And you don’t even really need the title.
So, that’s not very hard to come up with, those five pieces of information. And then, there’s only two states, they’re either in a list or not in the list and you want your list to be tied to messages. So, each individual breakthrough script, as we call it, has a message component.
In our case, it would be the part that says, “It keeps your best sales reps from being effective on the phone or even using the phone at all.” But if we’re talking to a marketing person, we’d say, instead of that, we’d say, “I believe we’ve discovered a breakthrough that completely eliminates the waste and frustration of having your best leads never have a conversation from any of your reps and get thrown back in your face.”
David Dulany (47:33):
It’s slightly different depending on the audience, but it’s something that you could use for a wide variety of levels of people and persona. Got it.
Chris Beall (47:44):
Because they’re human.
David Dulany (47:45):
Right. Then we go back to the psychology of the structure of the call.
Chris Beall (47:52):
Yeah. Yeah. Don’t call people who aren’t humans, because that’s not going to work. But as long as you restrict your list to human beings, then the question is, “Might they be somebody who you want to talk with?” And that might resonate with this message and you can get that easily from modern data sources.
And by the way, I don’t think SDR should do their own data work. It’s kind of crazy here. I am hoping for somebody to be an expert in riding the surfboard. But I wanted to jump off every once in a while and take a knife and carve it and do a different shape.
David Dulany (48:25):
What?
Chris Beall (48:26):
Those are different skill sets. There are different skill sets.
David Dulany (48:29):
That’s what we see a lot, right? You expect one person and it’s usually somebody right out of college who doesn’t have 20 years of experience in your industry. And you’re saying, “You write the message, you set up the system, you structure the data, and make the calls.” It’s really crazy out there to see that.
Chris Beall (48:49):
It’s so funny. Aaron Ross started this whole thing by saying, “Let’s specialize.” And then, it was like, “Well, we specialized. What do we specialize in? We put one person in charge of the whole thing.”
David Dulany (49:01):
Right. It always fascinates me that I think it’s what the investors want to see, but they’ll have headcount for like three SDRs. And there’s no system in place. There’s nobody writing the scripts. There’s none of the stuff that you’re talking about. But then they go out and hire the three SDRs. Well, why not break out one headcount to be the data and messaging person and then have the two SDRs really be optimized? It’s interesting.
Chris Beall (49:28):
Yeah. Well, you don’t have to do messaging very often. And we did a messaging workshop for, I think, the country’s fourth biggest insurance company brokerage, and it took an hour. It takes an hour to understand and believe in the psychology. The message part itself takes two minutes, but to get it enough that you would stand behind it and manage to it, oh my goodness, that takes about an hour.
Because unless management understands the psychology, what are they going to coach? It’s a psychological approach, right? So, they got to coach the sound of the voice. And that means you got to be able to listen to it, know what to listen for, “Oh, your voice went up there where it should have gone down.” That kind of thing.
David Dulany (50:13):
And they have to have the tools and be able to do it. I mean, there’s a lot more to it than most executives realize. It is just overall in sales development. I mean, they kind of look at it as sort of a turnkey thing that all you do again is hire somebody and stick them in the sea, but you double click on it and there’s so much to it.
Chris Beall (50:33):
Yeah, when we say hire somebody, stick them in the sea, God knows how long, right? I’ve heard six weeks, like six weeks. So, our standard is, today, so you join our team or one of our customer’s teams as an SDR. And you’re told what the purpose of the meeting is like, what somebody is going to learn in that meeting how it’s going to be valuable. That’s what you’re selling.
And then, we go through the psychology of the script and they learn the breakthrough itself. And then, they practice it eyeball to eyeball with somebody through Zoom or whatever, 30 times, no role play. Role play screws up salespeople. It’s just as bad because it’s a trip up kind of thing. It’s a gotcha thing. And if I can do enough gotchas to you, you’re going to become uncertain, and you’re going to sound uncertain, and nobody’s going to want to talk to you.
So, you’ve got to be confident and confidence comes from rehearsal. So, you rehearse 30 repetitions feedback on each one on the first place that your voice wasn’t right or that you got a word wrong. Go back, do it again. You will be able to work farther and farther in and finally the muscle memory kicks in. When the muscle memory kicks in, your personality comes out. Until then, you sound bad.
David Dulany (51:49):
Exactly. And people, they hear that word script. But we, as we talked about, the script is the surfboard. Chris, this has been amazing. I am running up against the hour here. And I just appreciate you so much coming on sharing your wisdom. How can people get in touch with you?
Chris Beall (52:08):
So, three ways. One is reach out to me on LinkedIn. I’m not allowed to reach out to you because I got too much of that. So, I love LinkedIn connections. That’s Chris 8649 or Chris Beall CEO of ConnectAndSell, not that hard to find. Some people say I’m pretty annoying and hard to get away from. So that’s one.
Two is, go ahead and check out my podcast that I do with Corey Frank. We have 57 episodes exploring just these topics. How to dominate markets using sales development in a conversation-first approach. And you might not believe there’s 57 episodes that could be done on that, but trust me, we’re not done yet. So, the podcast is called Market Dominance Guys, like the [crosstalk 00:52:53], Market Dominance Guys.
David Dulany (52:55):
Chris, thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. And let’s do it again sometime real soon.
Chris Beall (53:01):
All right, David. Keep it up. Sales development business needs leadership and it’s great that you’re providing it.
David Dulany (53:06):
Thank you. Bye, bye now.
Speaker 1 (53:08):
Thank you for listening to the sales development podcast. The only audio forum 100% focused and dedicated to sales development with your host, David Dulany. Please be sure to subscribe to the show on YouTube and take a moment to leave us a review on iTunes. Your support makes our show possible. If you’re struggling with your sales development program, contact us at tenbound.com for a no obligation exploratory call. Again, that’s tenbound.com.
