Sales Tech Helps You Do More – For Better or For Worse
David Masover is behind this show with interviews and insights about driving B2B sales revenue and growing successful sales organizations from sales leaders at the front lines of modern B2B selling.
You can read the full transcript of this episode here:
David Masover (00:03):
Hi, I’m David Masover. Welcome to the Driving B2B Sales Revenue podcast, where I’ll be interviewing senior sales leaders, sales experts, and sales service providers about what else? What it takes to drive B2B sales revenue. So, thanks for being here. Let’s get started.
Hi, welcome to the podcast. This is David Masover, and this is the Driving B2B Sales Revenue podcast. Today, we’ve got a fantastic guest. We are talking to Chris Beall or Chris Be-All, if you will, CEO at ConnectAndSell. Chris, welcome to the podcast.
Chris Beall (00:40):
David, it is exciting to be here.
David Masover (00:43):
Exciting. I love it. Well, let’s jump right in with our traditional opening question. Chris, you’ve been in sales for a long time. What’s the single best piece of sales advice you ever received?
Chris Beall (00:54):
The best was this, and I received it a long time ago, which is, don’t do things that can’t work.
David Masover (01:03):
That’s profound.
Chris Beall (01:04):
Well, a lot of times in sales, people tell you to do something and you think about it and you go, “Well, that can’t possibly work.” And yet it’s the standard thing to do, and so you do that thing. And my example is when I was a Fuller Brush man. They told me to knock on a door and sell something to somebody in Phoenix when it was 115 degrees out, and that can’t work because they just want to close the door in order to keep the air conditioning in. So, I thought, “I’m going to do something that can work. It might not work, but at least it can. And that is, I’ll ask them if I can go research our products, which I have no idea what they are, and if I find something great, can I come back and talk to them?” And that did work.
David Masover (01:41):
Nice. My memory goes back to my early years in sales in the ’90s when I heard things like mirroring as a concept. And I know it’s evolved over time, but I remember hearing about that and thinking, “Okay, I’m going to try to mirror my prospects. When they talk fast, I’ll talk fast. When they talk slow, I’ll talk slow.” And I found that I was concentrating so hard on that I couldn’t really concentrate on anything else, and I completely screwed up all of my sales. I’m like, “Okay, that can’t work.” Maybe it works for some people, but yeah, it’s good to try things, but when they don’t work, it’s probably best to move on.
Chris Beall (02:15):
Yeah. Yeah, Don’t do that.
David Masover (02:18):
Don’t do things-
Chris Beall (02:19):
Don’t do shit that can’t work.
David Masover (02:19):
Don’t do shit that can’t work. I love it. So, what’s some of the worst advice you ever received?
Chris Beall (02:24):
The worst advice I ever received, and I receive it all the time is, never give anything without getting something in return. And I think there are plenty of situations in sales where the right next thing to do is to give something with no expectation of anything in return, much less a demand.
David Masover (02:40):
Yeah. So, how did you come to realize that that was bad advice?
Chris Beall (02:45):
Well, I was trying to figure out how to get into this really, really big company, this big German company. And I finally realized that everything that I was doing was following this advice and I was just blocked in every direction because there wasn’t enough that I was bringing to the table to make somebody want to reciprocate. They weren’t intrigued enough. So, I changed my approach to just go hang out at their lunchroom in their US headquarters. It took two months until I finally heard an opportunity to help them, just straight up. And the help had nothing to do with anything I’d ever thought of before. It had to do with their demo room, their demo center, multimillion dollar demo center. And they couldn’t show any of their products in there because the products didn’t have their new user interface. So, I just offered to rebuild my product so it had their new user interface so they’d have something to show.
And one thing led to another and $120 million deal later, I was glad that I didn’t demand anything in return. So, I didn’t say, “I’ll do this if you agree to show my product.” I just said, “Let me just do this and show it to you.” And I flew my engineers out and the next day we built this thing with their user interface. And then said, “So, it seems to me we could actually use this in your demo center and you wouldn’t be wasting all that money on this empty demo center.” And it was like, “Okay, let’s give it a whirl.” And then it suddenly became their product and then they had to pay for it.
David Masover (04:11):
And what you did was you got yourself into a conversation that they cared about.
Chris Beall (04:16):
Yeah. About something that I had no idea was of interest to them whatsoever until I gave a little bit.
David Masover (04:23):
I love it. That’s great bad advice not to follow.
Chris Beall (04:29):
Yeah.
David Masover (04:29):
I love it. Chris, listen, I am really excited to have you join me for an episode because I think there’s a lot to unpack around what your company ConnectAndSell does and how sales tech, in general, is perceived, both rightly and wrongly in the market. But before we get into all that, can you give us just a brief overview of ConnectAndSell for context?
Chris Beall (04:52):
Sure. So, ConnectAndSell solves this really big problem, which is salespeople don’t talk to enough prospects. And in particular, they don’t talk to enough potentially qualified prospects. So, it lets you make a list and then have your reps talk to people on that list, not two or three a day, but seven or eight an hour with no effort. So, we let a rep push a button and talk to somebody on a list in a few minutes, three or four minutes, with no effort. It’s really important that it’s no effort, otherwise, sales reps won’t do it. And the idea is to take all that phone work, phone operator work, navigating phone systems, talking to gatekeepers, and going to voicemail and leaving voicemails, which is not a great play, and just make that go away and just leave the conversations. That’s all.
David Masover (05:38):
So, much like your experience with the German company,. It’s all about just getting into a conversation.
Chris Beall (05:43):
It’s all about getting into a conversation. And I’m an old computer scientist, as you know, a physicist mathematician turned into a computer scientist. Because, as Willie Sutton once said of banks, “That’s where the money is.” And couldn’t figure out where the money was in physics. What can I say? So, I’ve been doing the computer science thing for a long time, and I always think in terms of information science like, if there’s a problem to be solved, how much information has to move back and forth to solve the problem? And the problem in sales is getting trust. And the amount of information it takes to get trust is big. It’s probably four or 500,000 bits of information that have to go back and forth. And yet very few of those bits, and I’m talking bits like if you were to reduce an email to bits, an average email has about 5,000 bits in it, but human conversation like we’re having has about 20,000 bits a second. That’s four emails every second.
So, in a conversation, we can get enough information to go back and forth to have a shot. Just to have a shot. In other words, we’re doing something that has a shot. It’s not something that can’t work. Building trust through email can’t work. So, stop doing that. You’re not going to always get trust in a conversation, but you have a shot because there’s enough information flow to get to those four or 500,000 bits before everybody says, “No, I’m out of here.”
David Masover (07:08):
So, you have a shot, especially if you’re having enough conversations.
Chris Beall (07:12):
Yeah. And good ones.
David Masover (07:13):
Right. So, thanks for the background. I love it. I love the physics perspective. I want to take us back to a couple of weeks ago where you and I had our first conversation. I knew who you were from your LinkedIn presence. I knew the gist of what ConnectAndSell does. And I was pretty excited to get you on the podcast to discuss how good technology in the wrong hands does little more than scale crappy sales efforts. But in the first 30 seconds of our call, our first call a few weeks ago, you beat me to the punch, took those words right out of my mouth. So, let’s just start by getting this idea out there as something I think we both agree on, which is that these days sales tech is often used to amplify and accelerate crappy sales effort. And that not only makes it harder for companies to get good sales results, but it tarnishes the reputation of both sales and sales tech. Now, generally speaking, are we more or less on the same page with that?
Chris Beall (08:14):
Absolutely. Sales tech by and large amplifies suck. That’s it. I mean, it really does.
David Masover (08:21):
That was a much more concise way of saying that.
Chris Beall (08:24):
Because most sales [crosstalk 00:08:24] suck.
David Masover (08:24):
Yeah. That was a much more concise way of saying that. So, I appreciate that. I guess the next question is why? What do you think is behind that? Why do you think it has to be that way or at least why is it so ubiquitous?
Chris Beall (08:33):
Well, for one thing, most salespeople aren’t trained to not suck. And it’s especially true with early conversations. So, we do something really crazy. We take junior people and have them have first conversations with prospects. Because it’s hard to get prospects into conversations, so we figure we better use a cheap resource, as most of them are going to be. And then it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Oh, cheap resource, few conversations, crappy conversations, better get a cheaper resource.
David Masover (09:03):
And more of it.
Chris Beall (09:05):
And more of it. So, we just keep amplifying up the quantity. What folks don’t realize is there’s a business problem that sits on top of sales. So, sales is not itself solving a business problem. Sales is solving in general an old business problem most companies don’t have anymore, which is disposing of inventory to generate gross profit to feedback into the machine so that the factory can keep making the widgets that are the inventory you have to dispose of. And it’s why we assign territories. It’s a crazy old idea. “Here’s your territory.” “Well, why?” “Because I’ve contained the damage when you start discounting. So, you can form these relationships in the territory of folks who will absorb our inventory at some reasonable profit margin to us, and then we can blend all that money together and keep our factory going or even grow the factory. Wow. Maybe a bank will help us out or whatever.” But that’s an obsolete concept now. It just is no longer relevant.
It’s all about taking markets now. Everything moves too fast for that kind of crap, right? But we’re still using this old model of sales. And so when we’re running that old model, it’s like, “Well, what does it run on? Well, it must on, I don’t know, leads or something, right?” And so what are those? Those are cheap. So, what resource should we apply to it? A cheap resource. And then we get a self-fulfilling prophecy that says we need more and more but what we’re in fact doing is manufacturing false negatives. And false negatives are the business problem that sits on top of the sales solution, so to speak. ConnectAndSell lets you talk to 10 times as many people. So, now you talk to 10 times as many people, but you suck just as much as you used to, right?
So, say your false-negative rate was 40%. 40% of the time you were walking right by a great opportunity because you are incompetent at engaging them in such a way that they were willing to confess what their real need was. So, say that was 40%, right? Is it a problem if you’re talking to three people a day, four? Yeah. Is it a real problem if you’re talking to 50? Huge, because the false negatives go away and you’re manufacturing opportunities for your competitors. And one thing sales folks tend not to think about is the competitive impact of what they’re doing. Business people have to think about it, but they can’t see it very well. And they don’t get that all that extra activity is actually work that they’re investing in so that their competitors can win. They’re sending those opportunities to their competitors because they process them once, and now they’re out of their world. I guess they’re disqualified, right? So, off they go into the competitive landscape where they will wait until the timing is right to do business with somebody else.
David Masover (11:58):
So, I think we’ve established that you think pretty deeply about these kinds of questions that frame what happens in sales. And I think what was really interesting for me when we first spoke was that that seems like a real disconnect between your philosophy about technology scales suck and your running ConnectAndSell. So, was this a revelation that you had sometime after you got involved with ConnectAndSell or was this something you came to ConnectAndSell with a determination to solve? How do those two ideals reconcile each other?
Chris Beall (12:36):
Yeah. When I first saw ConnectAndSell, I thought it was a dialer, and so I refused to take a meeting with the CEO. In fact, what I said to the guy who called me was, “Do you know what the phrase, holy uninterested, means?”
David Masover (12:53):
Tough start to a negotiation, right?
Chris Beall (12:56):
He was really smart and he said, “You got to meet our CEO.” And the CEO’s a famous guy from back when I was involved more with computers. And so I wanted to meet him. Five minutes into that conversation face-to-face, I said, “Hang on. Are you telling me that you’ve reinvented the business telephone to call multiple folks in a list simultaneously, and the mathematical consequence is a 10 times increase in the flow rate of the only thing that matters in business, which is conversations between somebody who might have a problem and somebody who might have a solution to that problem? Is that true?” He said, “Yes.” I said, “I’m in.” He said, “What do you mean you’re in?” I said, “I’m working for you now.” He said, “What if I’m not hiring?” I said, “All right. It’s a free country, so I’ll work for you and you can choose to pay me or not.” And that’s how I became the whatever, VP of products or something like that, at ConnectAndSell.
What I didn’t see was that those conversations were, by and large, going to be not great. So, I made the same assumption as everybody else. Well, more is better. And it is true, by the way. If you ignore all the other consequences, you’re still better off talking to more people, because you’re good salespeople will gravitate toward having those conversations. So, you actually get a positive quality effect just because it’s an unattractive prospect for bad salespeople to talk to more people. So, bad salespeople in the modern tech world gravitate towards the tech that doesn’t have any feedback because then they’re safe. We call these people weasels, by the way.
So, they weasel out of the hard part of sales, which is holding great conversations, and they’re attracted to the other part of sales in which you actually don’t sell anything, you just send emails to people and see what happens or you reach out.
David Masover (12:56):
Lots of activity.
Chris Beall (14:49):
You do these tricks, right?
David Masover (14:50):
Yeah.
Chris Beall (14:51):
Yeah. Subject line tricks or whatever kind of tricks you do. So, I was confident we’d get some quality improvement and we did. I could see it right there. I could go analyze what customers were doing and all that kind of good stuff. What did creep up on me over time wasn’t that the conversations needed to be better. I got that. It’s that we had to actually go do something about it. That’s what got me. So, I thought, “Oh, the sales training world is full of these experts and the experts will come and teach our customers reps how to have great conversations.” But the experts make the assumption you’re not going to talk to anybody. So, it’s funny. They make the assumption you’re going to talk to a gatekeeper or leave a voicemail. So, the training was about gatekeeper interactions and leaving voicemails, with real conversations taking a backseat because they didn’t happen very often.
So, finally, through my thick skull, we finally managed to come to this conclusion. “I guess we have to teach people how to talk the phone on first conversations.” And we did a bunch of workaround that ourselves because we use our own technology and came up with this little five-sentence script, all psychology-based, plug in your value prop without ruining it by putting in your marketing speak, and it’s built to be teachable and learnable. And then we finally started teaching it. And we teach it now in this thing called Flight School, which is four two-hour sessions. And get the precision here. In the first two hours, you’ll make real live conversations happen.
You’ll push the button. You’ll talk to 15, 20 people. And they’ll be targets. So, this is live. Live fire, right? Not training-training, but this is like doing business training. And you’ll be coached only on the first seven seconds of the conversation, the part that counts. For two hours. Now, you have a shot at that point of getting better, that you’ll suck a little less, because the first seven seconds is where you tend to fail. So, we finally, I’ll say, I don’t know, realized, gave up, whatever and started offering this and we’ve launched it as a product. It’s called Flight School and folks seem to get a lot out of it. But it only took us, oh, I don’t know, 14 years.
David Masover (17:10):
So, the first seven seconds. I always thought about a cold call, a first outreach, an ambush call, whatever you want to call it, as having at least two parts. And the first part, five seconds, 10 seconds, people have different numbers, but that’s the first sale. And the first sale is, “Are you going to hang up on me or tune out, or am I going to get a chance to engage with you?” That’s a pretty short amount of time to have an impact. I’ve got to believe there’s more to it than script. What have you found that makes the difference in those seven seconds?
Chris Beall (17:44):
Chris Voss taught me, Mr. Never Split The Difference, right? So, I asked him once, “How long do we have to get trust in a cold call, in an ambush call?” And he said, “Seven seconds.” It made me jump, actually. And almost spilled my drink. And then I just thought, “Well…” This is the good question. I got really lucky I asked the good question. “So, what do we need to do in those seven seconds?” And he said, “Oh, that’s easy. All we have to do is show the other person we see the world through their eyes. We call it tactical empathy. And then we need to demonstrate to them that we’re competent to solve a problem they have right now.” And I said, “Well, isn’t the problem they have right now me?” He said, “Yeah. Bingo. You’re the problem. You’re the invisible stranger. They’re afraid of you.”
I said, “That’s interesting. So, you’re saying that their emotional state on the other side, the prospect side, starts as fear. Because everybody focuses on the rep’s fear.” He said, “The rep’s fear is irrelevant. As a hostage negotiator, it doesn’t matter if I’m afraid or not. I’m certain the other person’s afraid. And therefore I know where we’re starting.” And that’s the most important thing. And so it’s all about the emotions. So, the script’s job is to carry your tone of voice and enough of a message of these two things: I see the world through your eyes and I’m competent to solve the problem, which is me. By the way, I am competent to solve the problem. I can go away. Your problem statement is this when I ambush you. You’re thinking, “How can I get off this call with my self-image intact?
Right? Because it’s easy to get off the call. If you were my mother, you’d say, “No, thank you,” and you’d hang up. My mother’s self-image was, “I’m somebody who slams the phone down on people and slams doors in their faces.” That was my mom, right? So, she had no problem with this. Most of us, our self-image is not consistent with just saying, “No,” and hang up, right? Some yes, but most not. So, how do we offer somebody a way to achieve their goal, get off this call with their self-image intact, and do it in a way that doesn’t just have them listen to us, but has them trust us? And that was Chris Voss’s big revelation to me. He said, “You can get trust 100% of the time in seven seconds by doing these two things.” So, that’s what we teach. And it does make all the difference. It’ll more than double the flow rate of good outcomes, meetings or whatever, just by doing this one thing.
David Masover (20:14):
So, an awful lot of cold call training takes the perspective that if you know who it is you’re calling and you articulate a problem that they’re having and present yourself as a solution, the person will decide, “This is something I want to listen to.” What you’re saying is they’re nowhere close to that yet because they have no idea who you are. And you said something interesting that the script is there in particular, in this first seven seconds, to carry the tone. Where does the right tone come from?
Chris Beall (20:48):
Training. You have to be taught what every word means, what its purpose is, how to say it, why you say it like that, what the anticipated response is inside the other person where you’re trying to go. And you got to practice. So, it’s just like surfing, right? The job of the script is to be the surfboard. If I were going to teach you to surfboard, I’d say, “David, I want to teach you to surf. Really cool. There’s a huge amount of energy in these waves, it’s just magic. It comes from the wind and it’s from far away and look at them. They crash on the shore. Wouldn’t it be fun to harness that energy so that you have the power of waves instead of just your puny little muscle.” “Yeah. That’s cool, Chris. I really want to do that.”
I go, “Okay. So, what I want you to do first is go, I don’t know, cut down a tree or find something and shape it in some way that you think it’ll [inaudible 00:21:42] in a wave.” It’s like, you’re going to go, “Are you kidding me?” Right? That’s what we do with reps. We go, “You go figure out some words. You go shape your own surfboard.” It doesn’t work. The surfboard is the script and it’s got to be shaped by experts. Because it takes decades to figure out how stuff like surfboards work, but you’re going to learn something really simple. We’re going to be on the beach and you’re going to learn to pop up, right? You’re going to put your hands at the side of the board. You’re going to pop up. If your back’s like mine, 15 to 20 minutes later, you’ll finally be upright, right? So, I think I could actually do this as a side, but I could make my living doing something funnier than cat videos, which is me trying to get up on a standup paddleboard.
So, it is significantly funnier than cat videos and I’m sure it pays better than being CEO of ConnectAndSell. So, anyway, we’ve got to give you the script. We got to give you the surfboard. But then we got to teach you the most basic thing, which is getting up on your feet and what are the principles involved. So, that’s what that “first seven seconds” is. Then the trust shows up. The board begins to trust you, so to speak. The wave begins to trust you. It’s like, “Oh, I see, I now feel it.” Like, “Oh, when I do this, this happens.” So, when we take somebody through Flight School, we do a messaging workshop with their senior people, and we just go through the psychology of the script and then we plug in their little value piece. And the value piece’s purpose is to get curiosities.
The emotional journey goes from the prospect’s fear instantly to trust. We spend a little of that trust to get curiosity. And then we use the curiosity as a foundation for asking for the meeting. And we basically insist on the meeting for their own good. Not for our good, but for their good. Because we know that they’re going to learn something in the meeting and it’s good for them no matter whether we move forward or not in any other way, right? So, that’s our mindset is, this is good for you. So, I’m going to insist. So, that’s what we learn how to do. And we have to learn how to do it in a fluid fashion. We can’t be consulting them. “Oh yeah, let me see. What was I going to say next?” It doesn’t work like that, right? So, it’s practice for that basic motion with the emotion that allows somebody to come along with you on this journey from fear to trust, to curiosity, to commitment. That’s it. It takes practice.
David Masover (24:07):
Now, I’ve been in sales for 30 years and I have never experienced a sales training like that. I read all the books. I do trainings. I train a lot of people. This is an approach that is not familiar to me. Are we doing sales training all wrong?
Chris Beall (24:25):
Probably. We’re probably doing it all wrong for the same reason we’ve done all training all wrong, which is we’ve taken an approach that says, “We’re going to talk to you and you’re going to listen to us. We’re going to do a simulation, a role play or something like that. And then we’re going to ask you to take it out there,” right? So, it’s like teaching somebody to play golf by showing them a video of the setup. And we’ll show you Tiger Woods hitting golf balls, and then say, “Go out and do that.” Last I checked, none of us are Tiger Woods. And then we might take it all the way to the simulation on the range. That’s pretty good. It’s better than nothing. But the problem is, under pressure we perform really, really differently from in the practice range or in the simulator. We just do.
And in sales, I’ll compare it to playing the piano. So, I play the piano a little bit and I play really well for my fiance. Trust me. She loves me. And if you have a real pianist walk into the room and start listening to me and I know they’re there, my piano playing becomes a little different and not quite as good. And it’s because the freedom, those internal trajectories that I have where I can do things ballistically, where my left hand magically supports my right hand, who knows how it happens, suddenly my left hand is wondering, “What is my job here?” And it’s because I’m under pressure, right? In sales, we’re always under pressure. We’ve just ambushed somebody in a cold call. We’re under pressure. So, how do we learn to perform under pressure? Well, by practicing under pressure. And there’s no pressure in a role play.
In fact, role play’s, I think, tend toward having the opposite of the good effect. Role-plays are about gotchas. It’s not about getting smooth and comfortable and ballistic so the words come out of your mouth without consideration like the scales that you learn on a piano. That’s what role play should be is, let’s just get some basics down so when you got to do it you’re not fumbling around, right? But instead, role play turns into this, “Hah, gotcha. You see, you should have done this instead of that.” It’s like, “Okay. So, now I’m freaked out all the time, second-guessing myself all the time.” And it turns out that the real prospect doesn’t care about any of those things. They’re on a different journey, not the one that my role play instructor, playing Gotcha to show that they’re cleverer than anybody else. They’re on this other journey. And it’s an emotional journey. It’s a journey that starts in fear and a desire to get off this call with my self-image intact. That’s a different journey. So, we got to get under pressure and we got to go live.
David Masover (27:13):
I think many of the best, let’s just call it sales teachers, because I don’t want to put a specific category, but many of the best people, I think, who are teaching sales move towards what you might call coaching instead of training. Let’s work with things that are happening when you are with a prospect. Back in the old days, that was called a ride-along. There are technologies that will let you work on a call after it’s happened, some kind of a recording technology. You can argue about what’s better or what’s not. But it sounds like what you’re saying is coaching something that really is happening versus training in a sterile and safe environment is a huge difference. What about the content of the sales training? Because the kind of things that you’re talking about are not what you typically hear about in sales training. It’s not, “Here’s your value proposition. Here’s your way of overcoming an objection, et cetera, et cetera.” What’s the real meat and potatoes of the content that we should be helping salespeople with to make them more effective when engaging with prospects in the wild?
Chris Beall (28:14):
Well, I think there’s two situations. So, there’s content appropriate to situation one, which is we’re approaching them. And content or interactions appropriate to situation two, where they’re approaching us. So, the big divide in sales psychologically is between where we’re ambushing and when they’re voluntarily coming to us. And I’ll compare it to something I experienced a lot growing up. So, I grew up in horse country, out in the desert. And it was horse country because bicycles didn’t work there. I mean, really, literally. You couldn’t get around except on a horse. So, that’s how we traveled, right? I mean, I get it. That’s a little weird. My dad went to work in a car, but we went around on horses. And so when I was about seven, eight years old, here, I’ve got a horse. Now, how big am I at seven? I’m pretty big guy now.
This morning I was significantly bigger because we were on vacation for the last five days. So, I really became a bigger person. Quite spectacular according to an instrument I stood on this morning. So, back then I was probably 62 pounds or something like that, right? So, here I’ve got this horse. Weighs over a thousand pounds. Horse is fast. Horse can kick. So, I got two problems. One is, I can be injured by this creature. And the other is, I can’t catch up with it anyway, even in a corral. How do I get a bridle on a horse? Well, it’s the same thing. It’s a cold call. I have to approach the horse because it ain’t going to approach me, but then I’ve got to get it to approach me. So, there’s two situations. Situation one. I approach. What am I seeking? Curiosity.
So, I put a little carrot in each hand. I hold them out far apart. I force the horse to make a choice. Is there a value prop in there? Maybe there is, but mostly it’s that universal instinct and curiosity. Like, “What’s going on here?” So, as soon as I’m deemed to be harmless, the horse will approach one of my hands because it’s forced to because they’re too far apart for it to not choose one. And it chooses one. I drop the carrot, reach behind me, grab the bridle, pet the horse a little bit up around the ears, drop one loop over the ear, and we’ve begun a journey to having a bit in the mouth, right? Where the horse has voluntarily given up control of its head to an eight-year-old kid. Kind of crazy when you think about it. Horses aren’t that smart.
So, prospects are very similar. We start by approaching them, but how do we get them to approach us? We do it through curiosity. So, the first thing we need to learn is content about curiosity and how to deliver that content in a way that makes somebody curious. And that’s not value, by the way. The value is in what they’re going to learn. We’re curious because we want to learn something. So, the question is, well, what are you going to learn? Well, that’s the meeting. The meeting is where you’re going to learn. In the meeting it’s a completely different game. Now I think we’re at the point of, how are you going to hold a conversation that lets somebody confess?
And we don’t think of that. We think of interrogating them. “I want to ask you a question. I’m going to ask you another one, ask you another question.” We’re taught to ask questions. Very good to ask questions once they’ve decided to confess, but if they haven’t made the decision to confess and they haven’t started confessing, your questions are, guess what? A move back to situation one where you’re chasing them. So, if you turn discovery into pursuit, you’re screwed in sales. You’re only going to get the weak who are going to go with you. And you want the strong, right? Because they’re influential in their company, in their situation. Strong people don’t let themselves get bullied by your questions and to being boxed into your answers that miraculously always say they should buy your product. It’s truly a miracle that sales conversations that are successful are expected to miraculously always end in the same place.
“Oh, we’re discovering something. We’re discovering you should buy my product.” Really? That doesn’t make any sense, right? That’s not discovery. What is there to be curious about if it’s always going to go to the same end? It’s like, “Oh, I’m so glad we had this conversation. Thank God it turns out that you’re going to buy my product.” [crosstalk 00:32:23].
David Masover (32:23):
I just happen to have this solution right here in my pocket.
Chris Beall (32:26):
It’s a miracle. It’s a miracle.
David Masover (32:28):
Pure coincidence.
Chris Beall (32:28):
It’s like being born into the true religion.
David Masover (32:30):
Right. Right.
Chris Beall (32:32):
So, there are two situations. Content is radically different, but both of them have to do with the big emotions. It’s called approach-avoidance in psychology. If I approach you, you will avoid me. Different personalities deal with approaches differently. And if you’ve ever had animals, get a litter of puppies and just play the approach-avoidance game. Put your hand toward each one. Each one will express their core personality by how they respond. And you’ll find out just like that. When they’re just days old, each one will have a personality around, “What do I do when approached?” In sales, we don’t know what that person’s personality is to start with. So, the conservative thing to do is to use a universal approach that allows them to switch it around and approach you. And since you’re a professional, you don’t faint at the sight of blood. You don’t have to avoid them. I mean, think about it. The main thing we do as professional salespeople is we agree to let people challenge us without us running away. That’s our main trick.
The main thing we do as a surgeon is we agree take a knife and cut somebody open without fainting at the sight of blood. That’s the main thing we do. It doesn’t sound like it, but try conducting an operation as a surgeon if you’re unconscious on the floor. Now you’ve got the blood all over the place and everything. And meanwhile, the patient’s not getting any better because you’re the one who needs the treatment. So, in sales, we agree to harden ourselves to the sight of blood, which is somebody challenging us, approaching us. And we stimulate that. And then we deal with it professionally and dispassionately in order to explore something we’re an expert on, except we’re not an expert on their situation.
So, they’re bringing their expertise on their situation. We’re bringing our expertise on our category of potential solutions. And we’re going to let them approach and challenge us. So, we have to be really careful on that content, not to flip it back around and start chasing, which sales people love to do. Because it takes the burden off of them of having to deal with the blood, which is them approaching you and challenging you. I don’t want to be challenged, right? Anyway, so two kinds of conversations, very different.
David Masover (34:44):
Chris, the way that you think about and articulate what it is that we do in sales is absolutely delicious. I’m just very grateful that you’ve shared some of this with us on the podcast today. In a second, I’m going to ask where people can reach you or find you or learn more because there’s just no shortage of good stuff in here. But I cannot end this podcast without asking you what you’re reading right now, because I have the feeling you’re a reader and I’m curious to know what’s on your list.
Chris Beall (35:11):
Yeah, I’m a reader, all right. I was banned from my school library in the seventh grade because I devoured it. So, this is what I’m reading right now, The Delusions of Crowds. And I think it’s very relevant even though it’s not about sales. It’s very relevant to sales and sales technologies and processes and fads. Sales is unanchored. We think it’s anchored in results, but it’s not. It’s just not. Salespeople are anchored in results. Sales management generally consists of, hire a salesperson and see if they work out. That’s it. That sales management, right? Hire a salesperson. Assign them a territory. See if they work out. If they don’t, hire another salesperson. And then we go up the chain, which is why VPs of sales last on average 17 months, because they’re just at the apex of that management process called, “We don’t know how this works, so let’s just keep inserting a new process source because we don’t understand the process.”
And then the fads are free to run through sales because they’re not anchored to results. They seemed to be. But if they were, would we really have a 10 times difference between the top person and the bottom person in a sales team selling the same product? No, right? That’d be weird. Can you imagine going out on a factory floor and saying, “Well, here are these two machines. They both do the same thing and we bought them from the same manufacturer. They’re made out of the same stuff. This one produces 10 times as much as this one, but let’s ignore that and move on.” It’s like, “No, we can’t ignore that and move on. Something is wrong in the process.” And so as a result, we have fads. And the sales world is full of crowds that follow fads.
“Let’s all send emails.” “Okay. Really?” “Oh, let’s send them in cadences and sequences and whatever.” “Oh. Really? Is it going to work?” “We don’t know. We don’t know.” So, delusions of crowds. Crowds are not that smart. And the whole wisdom of crowds thing was predicated on one and only one idea that is ignored every time, and that is, it’s not really a crowd. It’s a bunch of independent judges who happen to be opining on the same problem. As soon as they’re not independent, they’re a crowd, and crowds act like mobs.
David Masover (37:36):
We started this episode with the idea that technology in the wrong hands, if you will, often does nothing more than scaling suck. And it feels to me like we’re ending in the same place.
Chris Beall (37:50):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fads allow the suck to spread. Like a suck idea, and maybe it’s a great idea, but who knows, right? It’s a fad so we never get to test it. It just washes over and then it stops.
David Masover (38:01):
Right. We’re not going to think about it. We’re just going to follow it.
Chris Beall (38:03):
Exactly.
David Masover (38:03):
Yeah. Chris, fascinating to speak with you. Thank you for sharing your time and this wisdom with us today. If people want to learn more about you, find out what you’re up to, reach out and get in touch with you, what’s the best place to do that?
Chris Beall (38:19):
Well, I’m a little bit unavoidable on LinkedIn.
David Masover (38:23):
That’s true. That’s true.
Chris Beall (38:25):
Due to a post I put out there many years ago called the Zombie Post and then what happened afterwards. So, yeah, I’m easy to find on LinkedIn. Chris Beall, Chris8649, whatever. Easy to find. Also, the Market Dominance Guys podcast. If you have a high tolerance for this kind of thing that I’ve been talking about, there’s 100 episodes. We just dropped the 80th episode. And the idea is to explore what I call a conversation-first approach, not to sales, but to dominating markets. So, that’s a good place to go to. And then chris.beall@ConnectAndSell.com. I may or may not see it. I don’t know. I get a lot of email.
David Masover (39:05):
Well, I will put all of that contact information into the episode notes and folks can choose where they want to feel lucky. Chris, thank you again for sharing your time with us today. It’s really been a pleasure.
Chris Beall (39:15):
David, amazing talking to you as always.
David Masover (39:19):
You’ve been listening to the Driving B2B Sales Revenue podcast with your host, me, David Masover. If you’d like to learn more about how I can help you and your sales organization accelerate growth, or if you’d like to be a guest on the show, reach out to me at davidmasover.com or find me on LinkedIn. Please rate and subscribe to the podcast to be the first to know about new episodes, and thanks for listening. Now, let’s go drive some B2B sales revenue.
