Selling To Enterprise: Cold Conversations & B2B Selling hosted by Zia Zaid

Zia Zaid invited Chris to join him on his podcast. ‘Selling to Enterprises’ is a humble effort to discuss and learn from the experiences of various leaders with a focus on selling to Enterprises. Zia interviews senior corporate executives (top decision makers & key influencers), business advisors, sales leaders ( quota-carrying reps & sales heads), and key business / P&L heads, to discuss various topics related to selling to Enterprises.

“So the hard part, which is getting above that trust threshold hasn’t changed a bit. Not a bit, we just have to do the same things we had to do, the top B2B sellers are always the greatest experts who are most sincerely willing to jump on the other guy’s side, and truly try to solve their problem while doing great time management for themselves. That formula has not changed, it will never change in my opinion.” 

Zia Zaid (00:26):

Hi, welcome, this is Zia here, those are the words of Chris Beall, chief executive officer at ConnectAndSell. Chris shared great insights, especially around B2B sales and using live conversations to help cross that trust threshold, without further ado, let’s get started. It’s a pleasure to have you on the pod, thanks for taking the time today.

Chris Beall (00:47):

Stunningly amazing, Zia.

Zia Zaid (00:51):

Great, so Chris, for the benefit of our listeners, to get this rolling, tell us about your journey so far, please connect the dots for us.

Chris Beall (00:59):

Well, it depends where you want to start, I was a kid raised out in the deserts of Arizona with no people around. So, my companions were books and animals, and animals being horses, and goats, and dogs, and cats, and chickens, and stuff like that. And I think it actually shaped me, I became very interested in Mathematics and I ended up getting a degree in Physics, but with an emphasis in education, so I was going to go teach high school.

Chris Beall (01:28):

And my high school Physics teacher, Mrs. Wilcox took me aside the day before I was going to take her job, we had this conspiracy, I’m a big fan of setting things up for success like wire it so you just have to snap the mousetrap and something dies, and I was going to take her job, and the day before, she had been eager to do this, and she finally took me aside and said, “There’s a secret I have, I’m an angel investor.” And I said, what is that? Do you invest in angels? You got to get the picture here, this is 1977 or eight or something like that. And she says, “no, I invest in my former student’s companies.” and many of them end up going into technology because it was just that beginning. And she said, “I stack rank my students by an overall entrepreneurial score”.

Chris Beall (02:17):

And, this is kind of embarrassing actually because I don’t think I’ve lived up to it. But she said, “you’re at the top of the list for 40 years, and so I want you to go start companies”. And that’s really what kicked me out of the nest, where I would have been very comfortable teaching high school Physics, I love teaching, having those three months off in the summer wouldn’t have been bad. I was planning on writing a book every year, that was my idea, teaching in the school year or write a book every summer, do a bunch of mountaineering and rock climbing, be a happy dude. And instead, I ended up moving to Colorado and getting into the tech industry because as Willie Sutton said, “that’s where the money is.” and one thing led to another, I sell some big companies, NCR, started the Software Education and Training department at Martin Marietta, now Lockheed Martin. So ended up building a building and doing a bunch of stuff that young people shouldn’t do and went to Bell Labs and wrote the unison C curriculum for Bell Labs.

Chris Beall (03:19):

I was a very technical person and joined up with a company as a CTO, a startup company funded out of both Silicon Valley and Boulder, Colorado, and that’s kind of been it ever since, it’s been the cavalcade of startups, and what I learned about sales. I learned in two places, one in Arizona, right when we were about to leave, my first wife and I were about to leave, she had a miscarriage, and so that led to some disruption of plans and also to medical bills, just being America, the medical bills are yours, all yours, and picture that in that stage of your life, and so I needed to make some money fast. And the job I could get the next day was selling door to door, now I’d never sold and door to door in Phoenix in the summer sounds pretty rough, right? You knock on somebody’s door, they’re losing $5 a minute to air conditioning bills going out the door. So I thought it through and I had a lot of background in psychology and math, and I thought, everybody’s telling me the wrong way to do this, I’m going to try it differently.

Chris Beall (04:25):

So, I came up with a different approach and my approach is this, Zia, you’ll love it. I knock on the door, say, hi, I’m Chris Beall. I’m your new fuller brush, now you probably don’t know what fuller brush is, I sure don’t, and that would cause them to stop in their tracks and be curious like, why would a guy come to my door and tell me he doesn’t know anything about the company he’s working for? And then after an awkward silence and I knew enough to stand there in the heat silently, how can I help you? But when you can get a prospect to ask how they can help you as the first words out of their mouth here, you’re on your way. And I just promised to do a little research for them in case we had a product that might change their life, and if so, ask for permission to come back and share that information with them, that was it.

Chris Beall (05:14):

And my door to close ratio was in the 90s.

Zia Zaid (05:18):

Wow.

Chris Beall (05:18):

And next in the territories was in the sub 5%. So what I learned about sales is kind of cynical, which is everybody tends to be doing it wrong, in ways that assume that it’s one shot visit to a stranger, get something done. And my view, even selling door to door, selling cleaners, spray to kill black widow spiders and whatever, there’s a whole podcast episode on that, by the way, don’t make the spiders angry. That experience told me, no, it’s always a portfolio over time in which there’s increasing trust and keeping of promises to do something of value, in this case, research products for them. So I stuck with that ever since, and when I got into tech, what I realized is, if I’m going to build great software, ain’t nobody going to sell it, it was just really depressing, these salespeople were total dorks when it came to actually knowing when to ask for the deal.

Chris Beall (06:17):

So I just started doing it myself, and that’s how I became the CTO who sold and then over time, eventually, I’m too dumb now to be a CTO, so my buddy Hitesh Shah is our CTO and I get to be a CEO, but I still sell because I also believe something else about sales at every level. You are the number one information provider to the company, in sales we’re learning more per unit time than anything else we can do, it’s got the biggest Delta between what somebody knows and knows they need, and what you know, and you suspect they need. And there’s this big learning process that needs to take place in there on both sides, and if companies can learn that their sellers are the best source of great information, rather than somebody to make a number, making the numbers, to me, the most trivial matter in sales, there’s nothing to it.

Chris Beall (07:19):

If you address the market correctly, you do the right kinds of things, the number kind of makes itself, you don’t make the number, you can’t make somebody buy something, that’s ridiculous, right? But, if you’re really the best learner, who asks the best questions and learns in a sincere way, and you can bring that information back, help to integrate it into the company’s understanding of things, and then come back like I did as a fuller brush man, with good insights, with valuable insights to that prospect. Remembering I’m a specialist, there are generalists, B2B, the buyer is always a generalist, the seller is always a specialist, so there’s something to be taught, there’s something to be offered, but it’s probably not, hey dude, like where’s the contract? Like my friend [inaudible 00:08:04] always used to say to us, where’s the PO? We used to call them, where’s the PO Mohan.

Chris Beall (08:12):

It’s not just, where’s the PO? It’s one of the conversations in which we’re learning from each other, and companies that have more conversations that result in more learning, are more robust in the marketplace because they not only sell more, but they know more, and knowing more is the secret to competing, to dominating market. So, my journey has been through books and animals, and by the way, I learned to sell by selling to animals, as a seven-year-old kid, if you can figure out how to sell a horse on letting you put a bridle on it and put a bit in its mouth with no help, you’re doing a good job at selling. I actually believe we sell to each other more as animals, on the animal level than as sort of these intellectual things we think we are as humans, oh, I’m just thinking, we’re actually feeling much more.

Chris Beall (09:06):

And in the big enterprise sales, which is what you focus on in your audience, the emotions are much more important than in the smaller sales, much more important because there’s so much more at risk. The big enterprise buyer is always risking their career, they always have got to get to the point where they trust you more than they trust themselves, and that’s a tough place to get, your competition is not the other vendors, it’s not the other solutions. It’s the fact that you haven’t exceeded that threshold where they trust you more than they trust themselves, if you want to see that in action, watch somebody train a dog, that’s really the same kind of process. They have to trust you more than they trust themselves before they start doing the stupid things you tell them to do, sit, lie down, don’t eat this thing I put in front of you.

Chris Beall (09:57):

It’s very much an emotional journey that you’re on with another being, in the big enterprise, I used to be in the world of big enterprise complex deals, I used to make ERP systems, those things are nasty when you think about it, you take one on, you can ruin your company. And I found that the emotions were key, not in some trivial way, but in a deep way, like you needed to be deeply trusted because you’re deeply trustworthy, not just an intention, but also incompetence. And you truly had to go and be on their side and just make sure you weren’t wasting your time, if they needed your stuff and we’re moving forward, you keep going. And also the other thing I learned at a sales actually in general is, I learned it from investing, I used to be a kind of an investor of a funny kind, I was a professional blackjack player.

Chris Beall (10:48):

I was a gambler and played cards for a living in Las Vegas for a year, and what I learned is, your portfolio in sales is not all the companies you’re working with now, but each company over time, your portfolio is longitudinal in time, it’s not a snapshot. So you need the snapshot, I need the big, wide, thick pipeline, but in fact, I also need the patients to keep engaged until they’re truly ready to buy, and if I can do both of those, I can dominate. But otherwise, somebody is going to play one of the other of those games better than me, they’re going to have a broader portfolio, more companies they’re working with, or they’re going to have a longer portfolio, more patients to get to when they’re ready to buy. And I will be defeated because I’m just trying to get something done this quarter, so anyway, you now know everything about me, your audience can now go, okay, we’re done with that, dude, bye.

Zia Zaid (11:46):

Those are really unique points, Chris, thanks for sharing. So Chris, tell us a bit more about the company that you apparently run, and that tell us, who do you sell to? Who buys from you? Who’s the right customer for you?

Chris Beall (12:01):

Oh my god, I run a company, don’t tell my fiance… No, I’m kidding, so I’ve been running ConnectAndSell for a while, about seven years, I’ve been with the company for 10 years, we do something that’s so dropped dead simple that everybody thinks it’s something else. So, we let a sales rep push a button and talk to somebody on their list in about three minutes with no effort.

Chris Beall (12:23):

So, when you compare that to the alternatives, there’s two alternatives, one is don’t talk to people, that’s common, and the other is dial, navigate phone systems and go to voicemail repeatedly for an hour for each conversation that you get with a live human. This allows you to ignore those other alternatives, so you get the competitive advantage of talking to people and you get the efficiency of doing it three minutes instead of an hour, that’s kind of it. And you’ll get the liberation of it being comfortable, it’s uncomfortable because you’re going to talk to people, but it’s easy, you just push a button and you go about your business, you do something else, you’re doing an email, you’re doing this and that, boom, there you are.

Chris Beall (13:04):

I hear it, I see it pops up on the screen and I say, hey, it’s Chris here from ConnectAndSell, I know I’m an interruption can I have 27 seconds and tell you why I called? And you’re going to go, sure, why not? And I’m going to say, thank you, 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 where you can use on 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? That little thing that you can do, which takes the prospect from fear, to trust, to curiosity, to commitment in 27 seconds, that is total business magic.

Chris Beall (13:49):

Oddly enough, it’s also effective in the enterprise, people think it’s like mass, well, unless my time is not valuable or I don’t need to talk to people to absurd concepts, I’m always better off getting to talk to whoever I can talk to, who’s ever available at this moment because that’s the key constraint is, are they available? Well, I don’t know, call them if they answer the phone they’re available for 30 seconds, I got that, they didn’t answer the phone, it was a mistake on their part, I get it, they’re not trying to talk to me, but I can make a little deal with them where they’ll give me 15 minutes in exchange for the fact that I’ll satisfy some curiosity and teach them something. So, that is… I’ll call it the universal door that needs to be open in sales, is the door that allows us to build trust with somebody very quickly and to figure out how we can serve them or if we can serve them, and that’s what we do.

Zia Zaid (14:48):

Well, that’s pretty good. So, not enough people are cold calling these days, right? I mean, there is this… I don’t know if you’d call it a myth or that the cold calling is dead and all that, what’s your take on that? And what do you think are the best practices around that risk?

Chris Beall (15:03):

Well, I think calling with the phone is idiotic, so why you’re going to go for an hour without talking to somebody? But as soon as you go from cold call to cold conversation, cold conversation as a cold call that connects to somebody, so it’s a one in 23 chance of connecting. So okay, now I’ve got a cold conversation, is that a worthwhile thing to have, and do people bother to have? So people pay us many millions of dollars in order to get cold conversation, so somebody thinks it’s working, the companies that pay us for this are in every industry imaginable. So we have everything from a one-man team in Denver, Colorado, who’s buying the entire commercial real estate world for a particular asset class by himself, cold calling, and keeping track of all these complicated counterparty relationships and stuff like that.

Chris Beall (15:54):

We have companies like, over here in Bellevue, there’s a company that’s owned by a big German company and they’re calling CFOs and controllers of many small, medium-sized businesses and bigger in order to sell them on various things, to get meetings about various things, they sell SAS kind of products. We’ve got a company that sells heavy lift crane services and heavy lift cranes, the stuff that you bring over and they’re making a tunnel into your city, and they got to figure out how to get the tunneling gear down in there, these are the guys you call. Well, they’ll call you too, it turns out, we’ve got a big German air compressor company that makes air compressors that go into factories because factories need compressed air, apparently. And they had about 100 people who never cold-called anybody, COVID was about to hit, but they didn’t know that what they knew was IOT, Internet of things was keeping them out of factories because now factory security went through the roof.

Chris Beall (16:55):

What are you going to do? Well, maybe we’ll try setting appointments for ourselves, so they went to cold calling. The fact is a cold call is nothing more than a first unscheduled conversation, we mediate roughly 3 million of them a year, people pay a lot of money for that. And the companies that do it literally dominate their marketplaces, so as an example of one of our customers is a commercial insurance brokerage, they’re number five in the world, and their central region started using our product and cold calling. And we just got around to, not quite a full year, so we’re about 10 months in, and they were looking at last September over this September year over year, cohort one number one is those who were using ConnectAndSell, and cohort number two is everybody else, no difference otherwise, there’s no magic.

Chris Beall (17:48):

Cohort number one, across all lines, the business grew 82% year over year, and that’s in a COVID year, it was very rough for commercial insurance. Cohort number two, 11%, only one difference, one group is having… And I could actually look right here, maybe I will look right here and find out what they’ve actually done. So just in this month, this particular group has had a little tiny grip, they’ve had 5,793 dials and had 102 conversations and so forth. If I go back to the beginning of the year, what did it take to get that growth? We’ll see if I can learn how to click on our report here… Sorry, I’m not going to share this screen, but we’ll just take a look from the beginning of 2021, this will take two seconds or so to run. And they have had 589 meetings set up on 109,682 dials, and 3,189 discovery conversations with decision-makers.

Chris Beall (19:00):

You don’t want to compete with that, you just don’t, 3,189 decision-maker conversations, all CFOs have a hundred million dollar and above companies that they’re talking with.

Zia Zaid (19:10):

Wow.

Chris Beall (19:12):

It’s scary, it’s juggernaut-

Zia Zaid (19:14):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (19:14):

You don’t want to mess with it. So, we don’t speculate about this stuff, we’re providing about 60 million fully navigated dials per year, and folks pay us for it, and they’re not dumb. Some of the smartest money companies in the world that you’ve heard of, you would know their owner, founder, CEO if I said who it was, are dominating markets just by having small teams, very scripted, but very emotional. So the scripting allows them to bring out their sincerity and their having 40, 50, 60 conversations a day per rep, setting appointments for themselves or for others, and eating up markets. So I actually think the issue right now is that social and email are both degenerating, each is becoming less and less effective, and there’s no alternative that’s being offered, like what’s the alternative?

Chris Beall (20:15):

I send you an email, you ignore it, if you ignored my first email, you will ignore the rest, that’s why sequencing is so bizarre when you really think about it. I reach out to it on social, you don’t do anything, that’s it, it’s a dead-end, what am I going to do? People pound me on social, do they think it’s going to work? Why didn’t you accept my invitation? What’s wrong with you? Don’t you love me so I can pitch to you? It’s like, no, I don’t love you that much, I’m sorry, I’m kind of a busy guy. So we’re kind of in this interesting world where the magic of the first seven seconds of a live conversation totally changes the game, but it’s hard to get live conversations, part in that, if you try it on your own, you’re going to spend an hour getting one, you’ll be tired and dispirited. So, I get to see it, cold calling is crazy, that’s why we do it for people, so they don’t have to do it. Cold conversations, pretty powerful business idea.

Zia Zaid (21:15):

From your experience and what your team is also doing, talk to us about what you’re seeing from the buyer side of things. How is B2B buying happening? What are the changes that are happening, especially in today’s digital world? And especially coming out of cold?

Chris Beall (21:32):

Yeah, B2B is funny, B2B has always been a fear game, the buyer is afraid for their career, and the bigger the purchase, the more considered the purchase, the higher impact, the solution they’re buying, the more their career’s on the line. So we’re talking about, worse than death, right? I mean, it’s okay to die, but to leave your family destitute and to have your kids not have a college education, and there’s your wife, she was actually hoping you’re a husband, they were hoping to actually retire someday, that sucks. And so, buyers in B2B are always afraid, I’ll contrast it with B2C, in B2C there’s only one thing we buy that makes us really nervous, and that’s a house. And it’s not because of how much it costs, it’s because we have to live in the thing, because we can’t just go, oh, I bought the house, wait a minute, that was a big mistake, I’m going to throw the house away, we’re kind of stuck.

Chris Beall (22:29):

So we’re concerned in the B2C world about that particular factor, I’ll call it the fear factor. B2B is all fear all the time, and the B2B buyer therefore is a very peculiar animal. They are not looking for information, not first, they’re looking for someone that can trust, who they know as an expert, that’s kind of it. So, many people have written about this, Oren Klaff I think in his Flip the Script book, has truly nailed the nature of the B2B buyer on the bigger deal. So my view is the B2B buyer hasn’t changed and it ain’t going to change, it has nothing to do with digital anything, your career’s on the line, who cares whether somebody is using digital, or carrier pigeons, or knocking on your door, or you’re flying again and you meet them in first-class, or whatever, it’s all the same.

Chris Beall (23:25):

You’re not moving until you trust one of the sellers more than you trust yourself, that’s just the way it is, and sellers are idiots about that, they think they’re competing with the other sellers. They’re not, they’re competing with a threshold of trust that they have probably not gotten to yet because if they had gotten to it, they know the deal’s going to happen. You know it and I know it, we both been on the selling end of deals that had a lot of numbers in them, a lot of digits, a lot of comments. We know there is a point in there where they correctly trust us more than they trust themselves with regard of this subject matter, and the questions change, their questions change, there’s a whole new depth of curiosity, I hold the depth of sincerity of exposing the problem. We know we’re in when they treat us like we’re in, and up until they trust us enough, we’re not in.

Chris Beall (24:23):

To me, B2B is the simplest, and big complex B2B deals are the simplest deals because there’s the most on the line. And so once you’re in, you’re really in, in a big B2B deal, they envelop you, I remember doing a deal with Granger back in the day, they needed to get that catalog on the internet, well, as the top electronic cataloging guy in the world, they finally became convinced that they wanted me to help them. And then it’s just like, I’m part of the team, what’s the difference? So I actually think all of this nonsense about, it’s digital this and digital that, what’s great about digital is we can do kind of high fidelity async with trusted people, asynchronous stuff, we can send them a video or whatever, but only in the context of a trust relationship we’ve already formed.

Chris Beall (25:13):

So the hard part, which is getting above that trust threshold hasn’t changed a bit, we just have to do the same things we had to do. The top B2B sellers are always the greatest experts who are most sincerely willing to jump on the other guy’s side and truly try to solve their problem while doing great time management for themselves. That formula has not changed, it will never change in my opinion.

Zia Zaid (25:40):

Yeah, I like it, when you’re talking about this, Chris, that reminds me, it’s like selling to the old brain, that has not changed like the animal brain that you are talking about, so selling to that, that makes a lot of sense, thank you. Another interesting topic I wondered is, why you are hiring for your team? You’re hiring your reps for your team, for example, or in general, what do you feel are the key assets for a sales guy today, especially someone who’s looking to open new doors?

Chris Beall (26:13):

Well, a few things, one is, they’ve got to be coachable, at every level, the very best are always willing to be coached. And the thing that does change is the difficulty of opening the new doors, the techniques that you need to do that, whatever you used to do, you’re probably going to have to learn something new, and that’s just a big part. Somebody thinks they know it all, somebody who comes with the book of business, I will never hire somebody who comes with the book of business, oh, I got my Rolodex, I’m sorry. There are two ways to make sure you never get hired by me, talk about your Rolodex and tell me you’re a team player, talk about your Rolodex, I know you don’t know how to sell or aren’t willing to do any work. You say you’re a team player, I know you’re a parasite.

Chris Beall (26:56):

So, it’s very convenient for me when people say those things because I just go, okay, we’re done, I don’t have to talk to that one anymore. But number one is coachability, number two is, is this somebody who likes to learn? Are they going to have conversations in which they learn? Because selling is mostly a learning activity, we’re learning what somebody else’s problem is, we’re learning about our own solution and how it might fit, we’re learning about the environment that we’re in, and we’re learning in a world of change and doing it under pressure. And keeping a high curiosity, learning attitude while bringing great personal energy, and I don’t mean they have to be outgoing, I just think they got to have an engine, you feel it when you’re talking to somebody, it’s like, how big is that engine?

Chris Beall (27:46):

Are they willing to push me a little bit during this conversation? If I say something stupid, will they kind of go, that doesn’t sound right? So, you can’t have yes people in sales, that doesn’t work, sales is a business in which you’re engaging with serious purpose with strangers in order to turn them into successful strangers and partners, it doesn’t work to roll over. Other than that, you have those three things, you can probably sell if you want to, I mean, if you don’t want to, it’s a stepping stone somewhere, that’s a different matter. But let’s face it, some kinds of businesses require a certain kind of intellect, they’re challenging kinds of products, but I’ve never found that you have to be as smart as your product in order to sell it, ever. In fact, it’s quite comforting sometimes on the part of the buyer to think I’m not that smart with regard to this product, this person isn’t, but they have people who they can bring in and they’re comfortable letting those people speak to me, truthfully.

Chris Beall (28:47):

The great salesperson, when I look at them and say, are they going to be comfortable walking out of the room and leaving the customer success person, or the sales engineer, or somebody in the room with that person, knowing that it’s going to be okay? Can they do that? Because if they can do that, wow, they can become pretty big in terms of their scope because there’s a lot of other people ready to help, but there’s only one person who has to be trusted at that level, and they’ve got to build that trust.

Zia Zaid (29:16):

Great advice, yeah. And you never have to be the smartest guy in the room, You never want to be the smartest guy in the room.

Chris Beall (29:25):

You never want to be, I work on my stupidity coefficient every day, I crank it up.

Zia Zaid (29:30):

That’s great advice. So I’m always big on… There is one question that I ask all my guests, how do you personally handle a day when maybe you’re not really motivated already? How do you handle it [inaudible 00:29:45]?

Chris Beall (29:45):

Well, it’s interesting, so I separate my days and I think everybody can think of it, it’s kind of like this, my moments in fact, everything I’m working on into three categories. So if I’m in flow, I’m in flow, everything’s great, however, there’s a funny thing about flow, we’re only in flow when we’re doing what we already know how to do. So it’s actually kind of dangerous, if you’re in flow all the time, you’re never progressing with regard to what you’re learning, but it feels good and you’re getting a bunch of stuff done. Another thing that I could be is stuck, when we get stuck, and stuck means we need to learn something, we don’t know what to do next.

Chris Beall (30:24):

Our response to being stuck can either be, go to the energized route and say, I’m going to go learn, I’m going to stop trying to do, I’m going to turn off my doing machine and not get frustrated that I can’t do, I’m going to recognize that I’m stuck and I’m going to back up and ask myself, what do I think I need to learn? What’s my hypothesis about what I need to learn? And how might I go about starting to learn that in a way that’s kind of fun and energizing? Because that response to being stuck will keep you from having down days that lasts very long because a down day is generally a response to being stuck, not knowing what to do. Now there’s frustration that comes from waiting, that’s the third state, is waiting, I’m waiting for something, I used to be an expert waiter, so to speak, not that I was a waiter in a restaurant, I did every other job in a restaurant, but I was never a waiter, but I used to be a Mountaineer.

Chris Beall (31:17):

And when you’re mountaineering, weather is a big issue, so sometimes you’re stuck, you don’t know how to get up while you’re trying to get up, you’ve got to figure it out. Sometimes you’re in flow, you’re climbing and it’s all great, and it might be really hard, but you’re doing what you know how to do. The hardest part is waiting, the hardest part is being storm-bound in a tent on a ridge for day two, day three, day four, and asking yourself, what can I do while I’m waiting? And the best thing you can do is change to a different goal, don’t try to climb the mountain now, have an alternative goal and go toward that goal, whatever that goal is and enjoy that, and within that, you’re either in flow or you’re stuck.

Chris Beall (31:58):

I actually think if you take this model and say, look, I’m just at another being going through life, sometimes I’m not going to know what to do, that’s okay, but I got to know what to do when I don’t know what to do because otherwise, it leads to that mix of frustration and depression that we’ll take out on others, we’ll take it out on ourselves, it leads to lower energy. So, I think it’s a recognition play, and if you don’t know, have one buddy, it’s like the buddy system in a pool, so when you’re swimming, it’s good to have somebody else with you if you’re out in the ocean. I know my friend, Nick Anderson swims in the Atlantic all by himself, Nick, if you’re listening to this, I think you’re out of your mind, at least when I run from Reno to Tahoe by myself, I can’t drown, I can just kind of get a little tired.

Chris Beall (32:44):

So, the buddy system works, if you have one person, one trusted person, you can call on the telephone because you’re going to need to hear their voice, and when you’re feeling that funny, kind of down day thing, call them up and just say, look, this is how I feel, I think I might be stuck, let’s talk through it, or I think I might be waiting, I’m trying to wait for something, I can’t find another goal or whatever. Get that language going with them because let’s face it, our sanity comes from interacting with the world, not interacting inside ourselves. When we interact inside ourselves after a while, that’s defined as craziness, our brain will always go in circular patterns when you interact only with yourself, you can reach out into the environment, get some exercise, move through the world physically, your brain was made to move your body, step back to a more primitive state, get out and move your body through the world, that’s one thing.

Chris Beall (33:40):

And your brain is also, because your human, made to interact with other humans in a way where they correct you, they provide sanity for you. So do it, reach out, but don’t reach out to random people, what are the chances they’re stuck and down that day? Pretty small. And by the way, the fact that you reached out to them, it’ll give them a lift, they have an opportunity to help you. And then be there for them, buddy system keeps you from drowning.

Zia Zaid (34:06):

So if someone wants to reach out and say hi to you, Chris, if they want to be more about ConnectAndSell, what is the best way to do that?

Chris Beall (34:13):

Sure, LinkedIn is great, I’m easy to find, Chris Beall, B-E-A-L-L, CEO of ConnectAndSell, I put a lot of stuff out there, I annoy a lot of people, so that’s fairly straight forward and that’s a good way to reach out, LinkedIn invite. You can send me an email at chris.beall@connectandsell.com, I get 800 emails a day and I’m not 100% sure I’m going to get to it, I’m pretty bad at that kind of stuff. And then if you really want to kind of get into this sort of world that I inhabit, my podcast, Market Dominance Guys, at marketdominanceguys.com. It’s a pretty good way to go, I’ve had a few people binge listened to the whole thing and remake their companies around it, I wouldn’t do that myself, I don’t have that kind of patience, but it is unusual stuff apparently. And it was unintentional, I never wanted to have a podcast, so now we’re at episode 100 and something, and there are some people there too.

Chris Beall (35:08):

I highly recommend, if you’re in B2B sales and you want to know how to get meetings, listen to Cheryl Turner, her episode is called The Secret of Her Success, and she has got a couple of things that she does, so she plays at a playground with her three-year-old and sets meetings with CEOs at a rate of 3.59 meetings per prospecting hour.

Zia Zaid (35:34):

Wow.

Chris Beall (35:34):

So, she’s worth listening to, but so are the other guests that we have.

Zia Zaid (35:40):

So, one final question is, are you hiring at ConnectAndSell? If you are hiring, what role then what is the best way to reach out?

Chris Beall (35:47):

Yeah, we’re always hiring top sales talent, it’s hard to get on our team, Jerry Hill actually runs Europe for us, said it was the hardest job he ever had to get, and I thought that was funny, I thought we were really nice to him, I wanted him bad. He’s brilliant by the way, but we’re always looking for top sales reps, it’s an unusual product, it’s something you get to use and that’s kind of fun to actually use the product in order to sell the products. We’re looking for customer success people too, but primarily top sales reps, you can be anywhere, but somebody who can sell to, anything from big enterprises to smaller companies and sell something that really kind of has to work. It’s not a product where you stick data and run pretty reports, it’s a cockpit where people go out and dominate markets and it’s pretty fun to sell.

Zia Zaid (36:40):

Awesome, so Chris, thanks again for taking the time and sharing such awesome insights to our listeners today, so thanks for coming on the pod.

Chris Beall (36:49):

Oh, absolutely, my pleasure, Zia.

Zia Zaid (36:51):

Thanks for listening, hope you enjoyed today’s episode, please do subscribe to the podcast and I will greatly appreciate it if you can leave a review. If you have any suggestions for future guests or any feedback, please write to me at zia@sellingtoenterprises.com. See you on the next episode, thank you.