Sales Strategy and Tech PayPod Episode 134

Chris knows that sales is crucial to growth for merchant service businesses and fintechs. Technology and effective sales strategy can make a huge difference. Scott Hawskworth invited him on to talk about this topic.

To listen to more episodes from Scott, you can go here >

Here is the transcript from this episode:

Automated recording (00:04):

Welcome to PayPod, the show that features thought-provoking interviews with leaders and entrepreneurs in the payments and financial technology industries. From credit card processing to Bitcoin, we cover it all. So if you want to know what’s happening right now in the payments industry, stay tuned. Now, here’s your host, Scott Hawksworth.

Scott Hawksworth (00:26):

Hey everyone, Scott here again, and welcome to another episode of PayPod, the payments and fintech podcast. One thing that is integral to merchant services payments in many fintechs is the ability to sell. Many businesses have sales teams, whether they are made up of one salesperson or dozens of them, and quality sales execution and strategy is often the most single important factor for an organization’s growth. But what are the keys to success for a sales team? How can technology and general sales strategy be utilized to grow a payments or fintech business? Joining me to answer these questions and so much more is Chris Beall who is CEO at ConnectAndSell. ConnectAndSell is a sales solution that provides the most transparent demand generation solution on the market. Delivering the most dials, the most sales conversions, and highest conversion rate. So with all of that said, let’s dive right in. Chris, welcome to the show.

Chris Beall (01:33):

Great to be here, Scott. Thanks.

Scott Hawksworth (01:34):

Yeah, thank you for joining us. And to start us off, can you tell us a little bit about your career and how you ended up as CEO of ConnectAndSell?

Chris Beall (01:44):

Sure. I’m a scientist type. I was one of those nerdy kids and won some math contests and stuff like that. And one day I found myself in immediate financial need having to do with a medical situation with my first wife, very young. And I needed a job that day. It’s in Phoenix, mid-summer. I saw that there was someplace advertising in the newspaper that you could meet at Denny’s and maybe get a job. And the job was Fuller Brush man. So, I had never sold in my life. And I kind of stepped back, thought, “What they’re teaching me is crazy. This isn’t going to work,” and applied all the math and all the psychology I knew to this situation and became the top Fuller Brush man in Arizona history in two weeks.

Scott Hawksworth (01:44):

I love it.

Chris Beall (02:30):

And I realized, wow, there’s something to this selling thing and it even works when you’re up in a hundred, 1,015 degrees asking people to open their door and open their home to you.

So, fast forward to, well, what are you going to do for a living, Chris? And I ended up not going to Los Alamos to run the Meson Physics lab there, but instead becoming a software guy because as Willie Sutton the famous bank robber once said, “Why do you rob banks?” “It’s where the money is.” So why software? Because it’s where the money was. And one thing led to another. I don’t make a very good employee. I don’t sit in the corner and do what you’re supposed to do. And so finally I just realized I had to make my own companies and started doing that in 1983 and have been doing it ever since.

So, startup, startup, startup, different kinds, all in the world of kind of enterprise software. And this opportunity to join ConnectAndSell showed up one day, not even to join, just to talk to Shawn McLaren, the CEO at the time. And I simply couldn’t believe that a company had cracked the problem of having as many sales conversations as you want, which was key to me, and to my way of thinking as to the solution to the big mathematical problem in running a business which is the top of your funnel is never as robust as you need.

So this thing filters 10 times more conversations than you can have any other way. And it’s comfortable, but not at first. First couple of times you try it, it scares the living daylights out of you, but then it gets comfortable, kind of like a race car. And you can just go talk to whomever you want. And the big deal to me, it was so crazy was, wow, you can aim this at a market, and I’m a devotee of Geoffrey Moore, the author of Crossing the Chasm and the founder of the Chasm Group. And he says companies go into what’s called the chasm where your early adopters, real early adopters are actually on the other side but you’ve fooled yourself into thinking you’ve made progress with your visionary customers. And then you go down where there’s no revenue for a while and you starve to death. And this seemed like the ultimate weapon to prevent the most common form of startup death, whether it’s fintech or anything else, which is, you’re just not talking to enough people to find the right early adopters and do the right deals with them.

Scott Hawksworth (04:49):

I love it, and thank you so much for sort of giving us that overview because the fact is, sales is not necessarily easy to do no matter how good you might be at it. So if you could set the stage, and you were kind of alluding to this a little bit, but what are some of the challenges that salespeople, in any industry, are facing today? When you look at that bigger picture, what are some of the challenges that businesses sales teams as a whole might face?

Chris Beall (05:16):

Sure. One of them is that sales used to be back in the old days of capitalism I’ll call it, when you had factories, you invested capital in your factory and you made widgets. Sales was really an external factor. That is it sat outside your company, whether it was employees or not, and disposed of your inventory and generated gross profit flow so that you could keep the factory doors open, the lights on, and make more widgets, and maybe even invest in more machines. Now, fast-forward to today, if you’re a fintech company or you’re a tech company of any type, you have very little time to go establish product-market fit and to show progress in the market.

You’re going to need money one way or another to make this thing work, whether venture money or from customers, and in either case, there’s a clock ticking. And it’s not that your factory is the issue. You don’t have a factory. You make the next unit of your product at zero cost, it’s software. But you’ve got to get it out there, very, very fast in the market. So, a new challenge that didn’t use to be such a big deal is speed, and it’s speed to identify your market, speed to get into your market, speed to get traction in your market. So now the question is, “Well, what’s your market?” So the next big challenge is identifying your market. Thank God today we have ZoomInfo. You can go out with ZoomInfo or with LinkedIn Sales Navigator and use it with say LeadIQ And you can generate a list of potentially relevant people to talk with.

So now comes the big challenge, having conversations with those people, and the biggest challenge, getting them to trust you sufficiently that when they’re finally ready to consider even having a meeting with you, they are no longer willing to consider having a meeting with somebody else in your space. You’ve got to figure out how to get a competitive advantage and the way to do that is very odd actually. The best way to do it is to simply have trust-building conversations well in advance of sale. And it’s a huge challenge because, how do you have those conversations? You can’t send an email to somebody to build trust, it’s not enough information in one Meet email, it’s not enough information in 50 emails for somebody to finally cross that threshold.

So, Chris Voss, the author of “Never Split the Difference,” FBI hostage negotiator guy once told me we have seven seconds to build trust with somebody in a first conversation. Well, nobody’s going to read 50 of your emails in seven seconds, or ever for that matter. So, that’s a huge challenge because there’s a big barrier to having conversations with people who are far away, and it’s called voicemail. Leaving a voicemail is not the same as having a conversation. And so here we are in a world, I’ll call it the post-voicemail world that showed up around 2004, it’s pretty old. Where the habit of most decision-makers is, let it go to voicemail. So how do you break through that? Well, you can’t leave clever voicemails. You can’t really send clever emails. That’s all been tried. For a while you could send InMails or invites on LinkedIn or whatever, and that one’s starting to get worn out. So you’ve really got to have impact. I impact first conversations that build trust. And it’s a huge, huge challenge to do that, much less to do at pace and scale, to do it at all.

Scott Hawksworth (08:28):

Absolutely. And that really sets the stage I think with sort of what salespeople again in any industry are tending to face today. So now that we have that stage set, how can something like ConnectAndSell help individuals and businesses really succeed in sales? Again, you were kind of touching on it but can you dive into how your sales solution works and ultimately solves these very challenges you were pointing out that’s faced by those that are trying to sell products and services today?

Chris Beall (09:01):

Sure. I mean, say you have a new offering in fintech and it’s designed to make the world of in-person but no touch payments work 10 times better for whatever reason.

Scott Hawksworth (09:15):

Sure.

Chris Beall (09:15):

And you decide you’re going to reach out to a world that is infected with this so to speak in a good way, which is the world of small agriculture selling at farmers’ markets. So that’s your market, you’ve decided to go after that, right? So, how do you do that? Well, you can’t go visit all the farmers’ markets in the world. That one doesn’t work. So, you make a list of farms and in particular a list of farmers, that’s highly doable. But now, what are you going to do? Well, with ConnectAndSell what you do, is you take that list, you run it through some tool, or other, ZoomInfo’s usually the best, to get phone numbers. They can be direct phone numbers, cell phone numbers, or even main phone numbers. And this is the key. Because every farm has a way to call it, believe it or not. Like every other business, there’s a number.

Is it going to ring in the farmer’s ear so to speak? Probably not. But at some point, somebody is going to pick up, and you need to have some means of navigating that conversation whether the somebody who picks up as a machine, it’s a dial by name directory or whatever, or whether it’s a human being who happens not to be the person you want to talk to, call them a gatekeeper. So, you’ve got to have a way of getting all the way to the farmer in this case. That’s the decision-maker because that’s the person who sends the product to the market, probably goes with it, and needs to accept payments on the spot in order to make money in the post-COVID world or the mid-COVID world I suppose.

So, what do you do? Well, if you do it yourself, so you dial the phone and you navigate those phone systems that they have, and everybody has one now [inaudible 00:10:48] they say so or not, you are going to spend 95% of your time navigating to voicemail. And that’s worthless. So with ConnectAndSell, you just push a button, you put in your list of farmers, not one, but your list, and you push a button, and in three or four or five minutes, boom, you’re talking to a farmer that your fintech solution makes all the difference for. It’s what that farmer has been waiting for. She has been waiting to have something that allows her to no longer deal with cash and not to pay the outrageous fees that your competitors are charging and to simplify her no-touch offering so that it works better in a farmers’ market with all the constraints they have there.

So you’ve got the solution, she has the need. Now, you’re having the conversation because you just pushed a button, not dialing an individual, but calling a list all at once. And that’s kind of the magic of ConnectAndSell. It lets you take your time and use it in conversation with people you want to talk with, presumably who might have an interest in learning more. So that’s kind of the only other thing we do at ConnectAndSell, for free, by way that part was not the free part, all the dials and everything.

Scott Hawksworth (11:56):

Sure.

Chris Beall (11:56):

You’ll be charged for the dials, right? But for free, we’ll actually teach people how to talk on the phone, how to have an impactful, effective, curiosity,-driving first conversation, how to concoct a message in five sentences that has maximum probability of getting somebody to accept a meeting with you, how to avoid death which comes from talking about your solution and talking about it in terms that you would say, talk about it with investors. One problem with startups is they get used to talking to investors. The language you use with investors and the language you use in marketing are all fatal when they’re used in cold calls. And so we’ll teach you how to avoid that language which seems so innocent but it turns out it’s a hand raised that says, “I am a salesperson, don’t talk to me.” So we teach you how to do that, how to deliver it and we run a thing called flight school for those who want it, where, in life calling, making money, making real dollars.

They also learn how to execute with precision and impact inside the conversation. So that’s something that we’ve found we need to do because let’s face it, who has 30 or 40 conversations a day with strangers anymore?

Scott Hawksworth (13:08):

It’s a very, very good point. And I think it’s really accurate that you’re kind of talking about the importance of these conversations and I’m curious about, really one aspect of this is that trust-building aspect. And you alluded to it earlier about the importance of building that trust and the difficulties of just sending an email, that doesn’t build that trust. From my time in merchant services, I’ve learned that this trust, ultimately the value proposition, the fact that you’re more inexpensive than your competitor, these are really, really key to getting a merchant to sign up, whether they’re a new merchant and this is their first business and they haven’t signed up before, or in some of those cases where there’s folks out there that are trying to get merchants to switch from their long-time processor over to their new payment method or their new offering.

So, why is this trust so important to sales and what insight might you have for folks who are selling to build more trust in those conversations? Maybe they get through the gatekeeper, they get there, they’re on the phone with the person they want to sell to. How do you build that trust?

Chris Beall (14:20):

It is crucial that you build it quickly. You’ve hit the nail on the head. Trust and value are the two things that are important and you’ve got to get them in that sequence. So, if you open with value, you will never get trust. If you open with value, you sound like a salesperson, and you’re actually telling this person, “You never really thought about this,” and it’s kind of insulting. Like they’ve been sitting around waiting for a salesperson to call them and tell them about something that any competent and diligent person in their position would have thought about, right? So, number one is get the sequence right. Trust first, value second, that’s key. So, second is, trust is required in all business to business. It doesn’t matter whether you’re selling to Chimacum farms which specializes in goat cheese and sells it only at the Port Townsend Farmers Market or somebody who’s running a substantial merchant enterprise in their town in a fiercely competitive situation. Doesn’t make any difference.

They are very hesitant to do it anything on the purchasing side, to purchase any solution because it’s risky. So your issue really is that you represent risk as a seller. You don’t feel that way as a seller. You feel like you represent value and risk reduction, and you probably do, but you are not initially seen as that because, for the B2B buyer, they’re putting either their career or their business on the line when they make that decision. Very different from the consumer.

The consumer simply is putting their money on the line. It’s not that big a deal. Even if I buy a Tesla and I don’t like it, I just sell it. Maybe I’m out 10 grand, but I’m not out my job, I’m not out my business. I haven’t lost my kid’s college education and my retirement. So in business, the buyers are very, very risk-averse, very cautious, and the threshold of risk that you have to cross is the threshold of trust. And that is, you’ve got to get that person to trust you more than they trust themselves with this particular issue. Because you’re the expert, they aren’t, and they can never be the expert.

So, how do you do that? It turns out that you have an advantage that you’re unaware of, which is, the other person is afraid of you once you get them on the phone. I know that sounds crazy. Everybody thinks that the seller in a cold-calling situation is afraid. But it’s not the seller who’s afraid, or maybe they are, you should probably get over that over time, it’s the buyer. The buyer is afraid because you ambushed them, and human beings hate to be ambushed especially by invisible strangers. So the invisible stranger in the environment of evolution is those guys, and I do mean men across the river who paint their faces horizontally. We’re good people, we paint ours vertically, and they talk a different language a little bit and they eat the wrong food. And when they’re invisible, it means it’s nighttime and they are in our village. It’s not good, they’re not bringing us a Bud Light.

So, we don’t like invisible strangers, we’re afraid of them. And when we cold-call somebody, we are an invisible stranger. And this is where Chris Voss set the straight on this. And he’s a guy who used to sell what he calls 20-year jail sentences to people holding hostages. So, he’s the greatest hostage negotiator who ever wrote a book on negotiation, that’s for sure. His book is called Never Split the Difference, a highly recommended read for all entrepreneurs.

And what he told me one day was, “You have seven seconds to get somebody to trust you. And during that time, you need to show them that you the world through their eyes and that you’re competent to solve a problem they have right now.” So, the beauty of the situation is, guess what? When you cold-call, you are the problem that they have right now, and you hold the key to solving that problem. You can go away. So make a quick deal where you offer to go away and do that in exchange for what you want. And we do it like this, “Scott, I know I’m an interruption. Can I have 27 seconds to tell you why I called?” And the reason we say, “I know I’m an interruption,” hammering the word know, is we’re saying, “I see the world your way. I’m a problem. I’m a bad thing. I get it.”

You see you throw yourself under the bus first before they can, and you do it right away, and you never soften it. You never say, “Oh, I know I’m a bit of an interruption,” or, “I know that I’m interrupting your day.” You say it flat and hard. “Scott, I know I’m in interruption,” and then you switch to a playful, curious voice that offers the opportunity to solve the problem. And the problem is you. I’m the cold caller. I’m the problem. Can I have 27 seconds to tell you why I called? Playful, curious, come with me, and guess what? I’ve offered a solution to the problem. I’m going to go away in 27 seconds if you just agree to listen to me. And then, trust happens. It’s kind of magical.

Scott Hawksworth (19:14):

I love it. And in that open there’s no, “Hey, I’ve got this perfect solution for you.” There’s no talk of numbers or anything like that. It’s very simple. It’s just opening that door, right?

Chris Beall (19:27):

Exactly. And all you’re looking for is some sort of yes. It’s normally a chuckle, it’s a “Go ahead.” It’s, “You got 15 seconds.” It’s, “What?” It’s something that allows you to move forward. And then you’ve got to be super, super careful. Now you’re on a high wire because you have a little bit of trust so it’s all downhill from here. All you can do is lose it. And if you lose it, you’re never going to get it back. So, you’ve already accomplished your first order goal. You’ve actually increased trust in your target market. It’s amazing. And you’ve made it hard for a competitor at that point. But you got to use your 27 seconds for something. So at that point, you’ve asked for the 27 seconds, and you’ve actually made it clear that you’re competent to solve the problem they have right now, which is you, the cold caller, you, the scary invisible stranger. You have a little trust. If you don’t blow it, you’ve made progress in the market. You’ve gotten the market in the form of this one person to trust you more now than they did seven, eight seconds ago.

Scott Hawksworth (20:32):

And that’s really the key to it, using that time effectively. I think a lot of folks sometimes that’s where when it comes to sales they fall short. In my view, sales at its core is about people, it’s interpersonal. But technology has this power to facilitate so much when it comes to sales. How can technology really support the core I guess “people” business of sales. Because so many people, whether they’re using Salesforce or whatever, it’s like technology’s here at this core but it’s also about people.

Chris Beall (21:08):

Yeah. Technology lets us do something totally stunning which is to break the paradigm that’s been around since people have been doing business with people forever, which is we must meet in person in order to have a conversation that might lead to a transaction. Technology says, “No. We can be separate in space, and we can be separate in time, and we can still have interactions that might lead to business.” So that’s kind of what technology is all about. It can tell us who might we want to talk with, fabulous, ZoomInfo, LeadIQ, folks like that, they help with that. They help a lot actually. Can you imagine trying to go out and figure out who among 70 million people you might want to talk to about something, all by yourself?

Scott Hawksworth (21:55):

It’s a nightmare.

Chris Beall (21:57):

Yeah. It’s so daunting. Like, I want you to climb this hundred thousand foot glass wall. And by the way, you don’t get to even wear shoes. So, that can’t be done. So technology lets us identify who we might want to talk with, I’ll call it the hypothesis of our market. It lets us have remote interactions, which is always more human than not interacting. But it has a delicate edge to it. And this is where sequencing is so important. So, there are digital technologies that operate at the level of what I’ll call textual relationships. And they tend to impact the cortex of your brain, the surface of your brain, the part that thinks and reads in particular. So reading is a very new skill for humans, that we haven’t been reading for that long. And it’s not really native to everybody. It’s kind of not natural. And so we can use text, email, and text messages and stuff like that. But we have a little problem which is, sales is about human emotions, not about human thoughts.

And so how do we get to the emotional centers of the brain, the ones that are inside in the midbrain? How do we get in there to the hypothalamus and places in the brain that get afraid or get excited or whatever it happens to be?

We need to use to do that, technology, but older sensory modalities. And we can’t use touch, that one doesn’t work. That one’s very effective but we have to know each other pretty well before we start touching and that’s why we used to shake hands back in the day. Because we would go immediately into a little trust relationship by touching somebody. And now, no, we can’t do that. And by the way, nowadays, in the middle of COVID, we actually can’t do something else, which is visual. A smile or facial expression that tell somebody that we’re open to them, it’s hugely impactful, but it’s hard to start with that unless you’re face-to-face, so technology can help there. Zoom video, Microsoft Teams, products like that. They help, but only once somebody trusts us enough to use those, because we know that they’re penetrating right into us, and we’re hesitant to do that with strangers we don’t trust.

So it’s kind of [inaudible 00:24:10] technology to overcome these barriers of distance and time in order to move forward to where we could maybe use more technology. I think the ultimate sequence of the best sequences start with, it’s kind of a compromise, the human voice which has immense power to convey meaning, to convey purpose, to convey your intentions. Not in the words so much, but in the sound of the voice. And then allow that to form enough of a trust relationship that you can either move to, I’ll call it a better media, like Zoom or a more efficient medium like email. In either case, I could use Zoom once you trust me enough to have a Zoom call with me and I can actually get you to read my email with an open mind if we just had a conversation.

So, to use technology effectively, it’s all out there, it’s easy to use, there’s sort of nothing to it. And then you think of the Truecaller tracking technologies and the exotics, the predictive analytics say who you should talk to next and all that. All wonderful things, but if you get the sequence wrong, you don’t get the trust factor in play correctly. And without trust, folks won’t trust you to interact with them using powerful technologies. So, you got to really go through that trust eye of the needle and the best way to do that is with the human voice.

Scott Hawksworth (25:35):

Absolutely. And I like how you point out that all of these technological tools are so great they can get the right person in front of you. You can have all the analytics, all of this stuff, and if you don’t cross that kind of critical trust threshold so to speak, then it’s all for naught. You can have all the fancy tech in the world but if you’re not using that, that’s going to make the sale a lot harder, right?

Chris Beall (25:58):

Yeah. Way harder. And our little tagline at ConnectAndSell that we’ve never changed is just conversations matter. And we don’t mean email conversations and it’s not because of their word content, it’s because of their emotional content. The difference between me saying to you, “Scott, I know I’m an interruption,” and “Scott, I know I’m an interruption,” it’s radical.

Scott Hawksworth (26:21):

Absolutely. So I like to, as we sort of head towards the end of the discussion here, look to the future. So, turning our focus to the future, where do you see this kind of unification of sales and technology in five or more years? So, on down the road, what tools, technologies, or maybe strategies, might be on the scene and utilized by the most successful people and organizations in sales?

Chris Beall (26:50):

Well, I think there’s three areas that we’re going to see really big improvements. One of them will be a greater improvement over time but it’s going to be big. And that’s figuring out who you want to talk with. Sharpening up your hypothesis and a person sufficiently to decide that you’d like to have a conversation with them. Because conversations, no matter what, even with ConnectAndSell, they’re fundamentally kind of expensive. And so the better you can sharpen up your targeting, the better off you are. So, I think we’re going to have big improvements there because the more folks interact with technology, the more they expose the truths about themselves that can be harvested including just plain old who they are, but also their personalities, what they really do for a living, not their dumb job title, all that kind of stuff.

So I think that that’s to be an area that over the next five years, we’re going to look back and say, wow, “We used to just get along on like Aquarian ZoomInfo or Aquarian LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Really?” So that’s one that’s going to be really big. A second one that I think is going to be a really big is that we’re going to figure out how to integrate the technologies that allow us to begin and follow through on conversations over time, I’ll call it managing the long cycles of sales without losing track of what you’re doing. So, when you come right down to it, most people or most businesses are not going to buy this quarter. Businesses replace solutions of a given category about once every three years. So the technologies that allow you to maintain a trust relationship and build on it, so become a trusted advisor before a transaction, are going to be really big. And some of those are around things like this, around podcasting, but there’s a bunch more. And so that sort of I’ll call it the longitudinal relationship that’s going to be there.

And thirdly, we operate in 2D now that we’re all virtual. This virtual thing is here to stay. It’s here to stay not because of COVID. COVID triggered this work from home revolution, but it’s here to stay, this mouse trap is snapped. And it’s for a bunch of reasons. But one of those reasons is the senior people who make decisions about what the big companies do have moved away from their headquarters already. And they’re not about to sell that retirement house that they now get to live in with their big income in order to go back to commuting so they can hang out in the office and get a 50% reduction in productivity across the board. That’s just not going to happen. It’s done, it’s game over. So, now we’re in virtual selling world. Well, let’s face it. Zoom’s a little flat. We don’t live in a 2D world, we are 3D creatures. Our brains, our big, hungry brains are built for 3D interaction, but they aren’t built for virtual reality.

Virtual reality is painful for many people. My VP of sales, if you put a VR headset on him, you better have a barf bag on the spot because he’s out, right? So the motion sickness and all of its friends that tell you you’ve been poisoned because your inner ear and your eyes are telling you different things, I’ve actually seen what I think is the future of conversations like this, where we would be in a room. And we might be in a room with a thousand other people, and we might talk to each other privately, or we might mill around and talk to a bunch of people. So I think the third dimension oddly enough is going to come back in the visual world. And I think that will happen sooner than people think. There’s some work that’s being done, I’ve seen some of it, it’s stunning, that does 3D interactions properly in a browser already. And when we can do that and we could do it comfortably, then the world of the conference and the summit, and the world of the conversation and the trust building, will come back together without the travel.

Scott Hawksworth (30:49):

It’s going to be incredible to see, simply incredible. Keeping that future focus, if you could peer into the crystal ball, what do you see in the future for ConnectAndSell? Are there any specific technologies, features, or new products on the horizon that you can share that our listeners might find to be interesting?

Chris Beall (31:08):

Sure. One of them we’ve just added and we haven’t rolled it out yet is what I’ll call clean attribution. You notice that all of the technologies that folks buy, it’s really hard to attribute revenue and profits correctly in a way that a CFO would be satisfied with. And so it’s like, “Hey, we bought this thing and everybody seems to like it, and our adoption is good.” Now in fintech actually, it’s kind of cool because in the world of payments especially, we can actually say, “Hey, somebody saved money,” right?

So, we could do that, or that they made money. We can do that as long as we can peer into their systems of record. And if we’re mediating transactions, that’s great. But in most of the world of sales and sales tech, it’s hard to do. So that’s something that we’re launching right now and we’re going around and sharing it with specific customers like, “Let’s start with ConnectAndSell. Are you making any money with this thing? And how? Are you making it directly through meetings that are set in conversations that we enable? Are you making it indirectly in meetings that came in through email after a conversation? Or are you making it very indirectly? It wasn’t a good conversation, but somehow still they came back to you.” So that I think kind of tying end to end.

We talk about marketing and sales alignment as though there’s an alignment problem, there’s a leakage problem. Nobody ever talks to marketing’s inputs and they can’t tell whether they’re making money off any of this stuff. So that’s something that I see happening fairly soon and that will make a big difference. And then for our company, these are good times. I hesitate to say it because it’s bad times for a lot of people, but we enable work from home to happen with a level of employee engagement for salespeople that’s simply stunning.

If you’re talking to 30 or 40 people a day, you’re engaged. If you’re sending emails to 30 or 40 or 50 or 100 people a day, I don’t know. If you’re staying emotionally engaged in that job, you’re a better man than I. I think there’s a lot of issues out there in work from home sales that need to be addressed and how we think about those jobs. And we’re really focused hard on making the work from home situation as good or better than the office situation without the commute. So instead of feeling lonely, you feel surrounded by friends, you feel pumped up, you don’t have to have the gong being rung or so to speak out there on the floor. The gong is being rung elsewhere and being rung a lot. So that’s another one. And then, we kind of see this as a time for some companies probably to come together, I don’t know exactly how it’s going to happen, but there are some big innovations on the financial side.

So, the world of the SPAC is upon us, the Special Purpose Acquisition Company, and those things are really, really interesting. $53 billion of IPOs have been done with blank check companies. I think they offer a way for everybody, fintech, companies like ConnectAndSell, all sorts of companies to think of new and creative ways to let the public participate in their business success without going through the, I’ll call it the pain and the daunting process of grinding through a public offering or just kind of giving it all up and selling out to somebody. So I think there’s going to be a lot of innovation around, how does our technology and how do our technology companies get to interact with the world of money, investment money, in order to really bring a next generation of innovation out to market in a synergistic way with less friction?

Scott Hawksworth (34:38):

Again, it’s going to be exciting to see, and I’m excited to see where ConnectAndSell goes as well.

Chris, we have a segment that we like to end with on each and every show. It’s five questions, it’s rapid-fire. Are you ready?

Chris Beall (34:52):

Always.

Scott Hawksworth (34:54):

Make a prediction about the future of sales or sales technology that you expect will happen more short-term in the next 12 to 24 months.

Chris Beall (35:03):

Training salespeople to have great cold calls has kind of become a dominant issue for every sales team because they’re all working from home.

Scott Hawksworth (35:12):

What’s one cool piece of payment or finance-related technology that you’ve come across recently that impressed you?

Chris Beall (35:20):

Look, I went to Australia and lived in a touch-less world there before COVID. I tell you, the ability to transact on the spot with the product rather than with the store is amazing. Farmers’ markets have taught me that it’s more efficient, and I think we’ll be more efficient in stores to simply be able to take something off the shelf and pay for it on the spot instead of waiting in line. Queuing up I think will be a thing of the past

Scott Hawksworth (35:50):

In the next five years, most in the US will make a purchase with either Bitcoin, Apple Pay, some other thing. Which one and why?

Chris Beall (36:02):

Well, I think Apple Pay is going to be increasingly important because it’s just plain old built-in and convenience for the buyer. (Silence) actually saved me once when I was running out of gas during a move. And I was down at the U-haul place, I needed to put gas in the truck and guess what I forgot? My wallet. Once a technology saves your ass once, you use it over and over.

Scott Hawksworth (36:32):

Accurate, accurate. What’s one piece of advice you would have for someone who’s considering a career in sales?

Chris Beall (36:41):

Learn to talk to strangers.

Scott Hawksworth (36:45):

Last question. What’s the best business advice you’ve ever received, and from whom?

Chris Beall (36:54):

It’s interesting. It’s actually life advice but it’s helped me with every business. My dad wants to told me, “Chris, you can only sleep in a bed that’s so soft and eat food that’s so good.” And I interpreted that to mean, in business, don’t spend money just because everybody else is spending it and don’t raise money just because everybody else is raising it. Keep your expenses low and figure out what’s real before you start to put a bunch of gas in the tank. Because it’s tempting to think you’re smarter than you are, and guess what? The market’s smarter than you are.

Scott Hawksworth (37:27):

I think that’s fantastic advice. And having been around many businesses, you can sometimes see those that are just sort of spending money because they’re spending money.

Chris Beall (37:36):

It’s popular.

Scott Hawksworth (37:39):

Chris, thank you so so much for joining me on the show today, really helping dive into not only the technological side, but the interpersonal side of sales. Folks listening, whether you’re in merchant services or you’ve got a brand new app that’s going to revolutionize the way people bank, sales is going to be at the core somewhere. And doing those sales right and having great tools to support your sales efforts I think is just crucial. So, thank you Chris for joining us and sharing you guys’ story.

Chris Beall (38:14):

Thanks so much Scott. It was great.

Scott Hawksworth (38:15):

Absolutely. And before I let you go, if folks are listening and maybe they are excited and they want to find out a bit more about ConnectAndSell, where should they go, how should they find you guys?

Chris Beall (38:26):

Well, you can go to ConnectAndSell.com and you’ll be told that we are not an autodialer and you’ll never figure out what we’re doing. You can connect to me on LinkedIn, Chris Beall, CEO of ConnectAndSell @Chris8649. But I really recommend, go check out my podcast. It’s Market Dominance Guys, all one word, marketdominance guys.com, and Corey Frank and I explore the world of dominating markets through a conversation-first approach. Think of it as a cookbook to make sure that if you follow that recipe, your company never fails.

Scott Hawksworth (39:00):

Awesome. Thanks again, Chris.

Chris Beall (39:02):

Thanks Scott.

Scott Hawksworth (39:05):

So that completes our show today. Thanks so much for listening and don’t forget to subscribe if you like the show. You can do so on iTunes, Google Play, and many other platforms. Until next time, I’ll see you then, and thanks again for listening.

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