The Dog, The Fence and the Bone Problem.

The problem in sales is that the desire for the transaction puts most salespeople already behind the eightball. When he was growing up, Chris’ family put up a chain-link fence originally for the goats, but a few years later it helped with the dogs and inspired an experiment.

Chris opened the gate 30-40 feet away from where he put a dog bone over the fence. His dog tried to go over, under, and through the fence, but couldn’t get to the bone. But it also didn’t back up enough to see the open gate. This is what most salespeople do.

Use your expertise to back up and explore rather than trying to drive their nose through the fence to the juicy steak, the commission on the other side which is counter to the role you want to be in. Most salespeople are screwed up, and most sales compensation programs are screwed up. They encourage people to go through the fence rather than looking for the gate.

Corey Frank (00:34):

Welcome to the episode of the Market Dominance Guys, where the best in sales today comes together. We have Chris Beall, CEO of ConnectAndSell. So Chris, first of all, good afternoon, got a lot going on in your life, which we may get to in this episode. But before we click the record button, we’re talking about sales. And the problem in sales today is the nature of sales in and of itself, is the fact that the desire for the transaction, which most salespeople are already behind the eight ball. So why don’t you set that up a little bit better, just so I understand what that high mountain air has given you from the latest riff.

Chris Beall (01:18):

Actually, no high mountain air here. We’re moving from Seattle. We’re moving to Port Townsend because we can. And part of that is, I’ll call it, the great work from home migration, where folks are able to live wherever they want now, if they’re knowledge workers. Employers have lost the moral authority to tell people to come in and risk their lives in order to get their three pounds of brain physically closer to another bunch of three pounds of brain by moving 3000 pounds of steel for 26 minutes each way.

Corey Frank (01:44):

That’s correct.

Chris Beall (01:45):

That was a strange idea to start with. You never would have designed it that way. If you’d thought about it for a minute, you’d never have said, “I got a great idea.” People could talk remotely to each other and do all sorts of things, collaborate and do stuff. But, I got a better idea. Let’s move 3000 pounds of steel for 30 minutes, in order to get those brains close enough, that the way they talk to each other’s right through the air, rather than through the telephone, it’s finally been shown by necessity to be bankrupt, and we’re never going back.

But the problem with sales, remember one of my reps once asked me in Denver when I’d come back from flying across country. Remember when we used to do that?

Corey Frank (02:27):

I vaguely recall. Yes, absolutely.

Chris Beall (02:28):

Yeah. We were all sitting together and talking about how to get better. And he said, “What’s the one thing you would change about us, to make us like you, as effectively as you do?” And I said, “Oh, it’s simple. I would have you believe in the value of what we do, or the potential value of what we could provide, for the person that we’re talking with as much as I do.” So I get it. And then they buy more. So no, it’s the purpose of you believing that is for them to buy more. It won’t work unless you’re a psychopath, it doesn’t work.

Corey Frank (02:59):

So it’s not just product knowledge.

Chris Beall (03:01):

No, it’s the opposite. And product knowledge is, actually, you need to have confidence that the product that you represent has an above average chance of being part of a potential solution. And that you might explore it, you might find part of within the next conversation. And the next conversation could tell you enough, to tell you to move forward or not move forward. That’s all you could do. And I call it the dog, the fence, and the phone problem. So when I was a kid, I grew up out in the desert, North of Scottsdale, what is now Scottsdale. But back then it was way out there. And we finally put up a chain link fence, cause our goats were a problem. And they were a problem, like they’d climbed up on this realtors convertible T-Bird. They have sharp hooves and it’s not so great when they’re dancing around them on the convertible roof.

And that costs my parents a little money. Then they went next door. We had one neighbor, its kind of funny, within a mile and one neighbor and they were next door and went into their garage and sort of started up fire. And this guy’s ham radio set, it wasn’t that great, right? So we put up a chain link fence, and that meant our dogs were inside the fence. And one time I did an experiment, it was a very cruel experiment, but I was kind of an experimental kind of kid. I think I got it from my mom, the woman who used to say, “Chris has a lot of room out in the desert to bury a child.” I thought, “I’m going to open the gate over here. And then I’m going to come down about 30, 40 feet away and put a dog bone, one of those milk bones, on the other side of the fence and see what my dog does.”

And the dog tried to go through the fence, tried to go over the fence, tried to go under the fence, but never got the idea that it should back up and look around and see the open gate and go through the open gate. I think that this is how, sadly, most salespeople behave. Rather than trying to find the opening that may not be there, and if it’s not there, use your precious time to go find another fence. The opening that might lead to a place from which a mutual solution can be understood.

You’re taking the role of the expert. You’re the specialist, but not using that role in a corrupt way to, to try to manipulate or force somebody into a transaction. Just using that expertise in order to explore; that means backing up as often as going forward and not just trying to drive your nose through the fence, cause there’s a transaction on the other side. That juicy steak on the other side, that transaction that commission, often make salespeople behave in a way that is directly counter to the role that they might claim that they’re staking out as a consultative sales person.

If you’re being consultative, the first thing you have to admit is that there’s a reasonable shot that you can’t help. Qualification is really answering the question. Does it make enough sense right now, from what I understand, to answer the question maybe in a positive way, maybe yes. That’s worth going forward with the next conversation. If not, they’re disqualified. So all the normal qualification dance, and all that, is just garbage, it makes no sense whatsoever. If you sell anything interesting, then I don’t have a budget for it. I mean, that’s just ridiculous. The idea that somebody has a budget for something that actually takes a salesperson to sell, you have to have a budget for it. They can go click on it and some online, whatever, and buy it that way. And even then if they know everything about what you’re selling, you definitely can’t be the expert.

You can’t be providing the value of knowledge, and then the value of a willingness to explore. So I think most salespeople are screwed up, but most sales compensation programs are screwed up this one way. They encourage the dog to go through the fence instead of to look for the gate.

Corey Frank (06:52):

And then, so that desire for the transaction generates maybe alternative behaviors that are not conducive to establishing trust. Let alone curiosity.

Chris Beall (07:04):

Yeah. I mean, they’re fundamentally dishonest, right? If I tell you something for the purpose of getting you to do something, instead of for the mutual purpose of us understanding something, getting it on the table and being able to talk about it, how is that different from me physically grabbing you and forcing you to go through a door I want you to go through or… [inaudible 00:07:24]

Chris Beall (08:23):

There’s really no difference. I’m saying, I’m in a position of superior power and that I know more than you do, and I’m going to use that power to cause you to do what I want. Now I could say sincerely, what I want is always good for you, but that’s unlikely to be the case. Honestly, it’s unlikely to be the case and, discovery, I think is a funny term. In discovery, we tend to think, what are we discovering? Let’s discover the stuff about this person that helps us sell to them. Let’s discover their pain. Maybe their pain isn’t what’s relevant to them right now. Maybe there’s some surrounds some context, some way of understanding the situation that will lead to a realization: “Hey, there’s something much bigger that we could be doing now.” So I think the false negative problem is the one that dominates sales, not the false positive problem. False positives waste your time, false negatives waste the marketplace.

There’s a big difference between the two, a false negative means I left the best deal, potentially, to my competitor. It’s a negative to me, because I didn’t ever engage in a way that gave it a shot. It’s a positive to my competitor cause it’s so good, and now I’ve walked away. And yet we do nothing in sales about the false negative problem. And that goes all the way back to something we’ve talked about before; the original purpose of sales was not to dominate markets, and to shape the valuation of companies. The original purpose of sales was to dispose of inventory in generating flow of gross profits. And when those two come in collision with each other, the old one tends to win because it’s tied to the compensation plan and the belief systems of salespeople. So every sales book you pick up ,by and large, will tell you to do something, to manipulate somebody in order to get them to transact with you. And don’t worry. It’s okay.

Corey Frank (10:14):

So, but that’s pretty widespread. I mean, that’s what we train newer sales reps to do in order to be successful, especially in a commoditized environment. If I’m selling whatever the commodity of the day is, let’s just go back 15 years ago, long distance services or transport services or a Microsoft service provider, for instance. I can get the various types of services from many different types of providers. And so why does it engender that type of inauthenticity in order to sell? Is it because of the pressure of how do I differentiate?

Chris Beall (10:53):

I think so. The fundamental failure of not being differentiated or not knowing your differentiation, I actually have never seen a real commodity. I don’t know what they are. My example is always my breakthrough script for coffee beans. If I’m the coffee bean guy, and I’m delivering the coffee beans it’s probably something like this. I believe we’ve discovered a breakthrough that completely eliminates the fundamental risk that your most loyal customer is going to walk away disappointed because you didn’t have their favorite grind. Does that sound undifferentiated? Of course not.

Corey Frank (11:29):

No, not at all.

Chris Beall (11:30):

It makes you think that, maybe, there’s something different. Not about the beans, although you do get the idea that I will have a selection that makes sure that your customer’s favorite grind is either in there right now or will be discovered. It does give you the idea that my deliveries will be accurate and on time, because otherwise you might be out of that particular kind of bean.

Corey Frank (11:52):

So in other words, Chris, if I hear you correctly, whether you’re in a commodity or not, is less relevant to the fact that how you communicate the messaging around an economic, a strategic or an emotional message, that really is where the differentiator happens. So even if you do find yourself in a commoditized situation, your superior messaging work should be able to pull you out of it. To communicate to the prospect where I don’t necessarily have to be inauthentic.

Chris Beall (12:25):

I don’t need to be inauthentic in any way. I’m trying to sell one product, which is the meeting. And the reason is the psychological difference between me, coming at the prospect, talking to the prospect, and then coming with me on a journey of exploration is radically different. It’s possible for somebody to comfortably confess in a conversation that they voluntarily come to. And it is a matter of confession. Even when we talk about folks’ pain, they don’t wear their pain on their sleeve. They really don’t. In fact, in business, your pain is a secret, because it’s a weakness and folks in business don’t advertise the weaknesses. So you must be trusted before somebody is going to tell you their weakness in business. You could use it against them. You could go out and tell the world, that Corey’s coffee shop is located on a corner that doesn’t get any traffic, and the Starbucks across the street is killing him.

Right? Don’t go to Corey’s. If you confess those things to me, I could be the enemy. I could take that information and do something bad with it. So if I’m coming to your coffee shop, Corey’s Clever Coffee, and I don’t have an open mind about your business and you don’t have a willingness to trust me to tell me what is true in your business. Maybe what’s true in your business is this: “Chris I’m really frustrated. And over there at Starbucks, they got the big line going out the door. I have confidence that when you come into my coffee shop, not only get better coffee, but it’s quieter. A lot of people are annoyed by the music over there, and by all the people going in and out. There’s better places to sit, I got more comfortable chairs and they’re set up in a way that promotes conversations.”

“And I don’t throw you out in 30 minutes if you’ve been hanging out too long. And, by the way, my WiFi is really fast. It bothers me, that folks aren’t coming in here.” Now, that’s an interesting conversation. You’re confessing a bunch of weaknesses about your coffee shop. And if I’m the really smart coffee guy, I say, “So is there ever a problem? You’re trying to run this really quiet shop. Those espresso grinders are really loud and I’ve heard some people complain about that is the other shops. Is that something that, given that you’re trying to have a quieter environment, that is a problem for you, or have you handled that?” “Oh, let me think about that,” says Corey. Well, it turns out that I know somebody who has an ultra quiet grinder and it works really well with all the beans that we sell.

In fact, we roast them a little bit extra and they grind a little bit quieter. Now that’s a coffee person listening to this, I’m just making this stuff up. I don’t know anything about grinding coffee. I do know about sitting in coffee shops, I’m wishing it was quiet. That’s just me. My point is, where do you get to the point, Corey, where you’re willing to confess that weakness or those problems to me somewhere inside that discovery conversation with that exploratory conversation? And if I’m bucking for a transaction, why would you do that? If you think my purpose is to get you to buy something, why would you confess to me? And if you don’t confess to me, how do we have any problems to work on?

Corey Frank (15:44):

If I sold you, Chris, are you an easy sell? Do you see yourself as an easy sell? Do you see yourself as pretty uncomplicated emotional mechanism to get to that trust? Or are you a natural, typical left brain, maybe cynical, and I want to buy and I want to be sold? How do I sell to Chris Beall? And for those who are listening, this is probably something you should take notes because this guy is the CEO of a very large company with an unlimited budget. Let’s get everybody the keys to the kingdom. So how do I sell Chris?

Chris Beall (16:20):

Well, first of all, you do have to approach me as something that makes me think just a little bit. I have to be intrigued. I have to be curious. Secondly, you’ve got to do it in a way that is open about what it is that you’re doing. I really object to somebody who’s asking me the five tricky questions that box me into agreeing with them. Well, wouldn’t you agree, Chris, that it’s superior to have your children left with some money after you die, then being destitute and on the street? I’ve actually experienced that recently, and I’m not an easy sell once you do that. Once I decide you’re trying to manipulate me, I’m really, really difficult. But, if you want to talk about business and the challenges that we might be having, I’m easy. Now, I’m not easy to come up with a big first transaction.

I tend to want to try the relationship out. Because a lot of stuff that sounds great, turns out to be harder than you think. I don’t often think people are deceiving me. I just think things tend to be hard. That is, solved problems are less hard than unsolved problems. So by its very nature, the problems that I have that are currently unsolved are the hard ones. And therefore, they probably don’t avail themselves to easy solutions. So when somebody offers me an easy solution, I think that, “Could be so, but this problem could be a hard problem for some other reason.” I’ll flip it around. So, when we sell ConnectAndSell, we sell an easy solution to having lots more conversations, but that’s not the problem. That’s not a problem we’re solving in and of itself. It is an advantage to have a lot more conversations, no doubt about it, but it gets us into the world of sales. And selling and dominating markets is not an easy problem.

If it was, we wouldn’t have this podcast, right? If, that were a trivial problem, “Oh, I think I’ll just dominate this market.” Oh sure. Choose a market of one. You’ve got a pretty good shot. Once you get to two people, it starts to get a little diverse. At 10, this starts to get pretty hard, right? So it’s a fundamentally hard problem. I have a belief, all fundamentally hard problems have fundamentally hard math at their core. They either have some chain that everything in the chain has got to work. And so the probability of the whole thing working is the multiplicative outcome of taking all those probabilities in the chain and multiplying them together. So if I have a six-step chain, and then it’s a 50% chance that any given step will fail, the odds of success are very, very small. Here’s my chance of succeeding:

one over two times, one over two times, one over two times, one over two times, one over two times one over two. What is that? Well, that’s one over 64, right? So one out of 64 times I’ll get all the way through that chain of events with only six events in it and a 50-50 shot at each one working. but it’s only one out of 64 times, the whole thing works. And I just have to think about the world that way. I think people in business should think about the world more in terms of probability or bets and not the single debt, but looking at value chains and asking about dependencies. If this has to happen in order for this to happen. If I must get Corey to come to a meeting, and then if I must get him from that meeting to accept a test drive.

And if he must actually show up for the test drive with his people, which he has to provide us with the data. And if he can get his legal team to actually sign the test, drive DocuSign. And on and on and on. I go down there and I say, “Well, what is dependent on what?” And there’s a problem that people have. This is one of the other problems of business: salespeople want to just go one step to the transaction, but analytical types want to see how many steps they can put in a process because it shows they’re really thorough.

Corey Frank (20:32):

Sure. Oh yeah.

Chris Beall (20:33):

And if you put enough steps in a process, one thing that’s guaranteed; process will never be executed successfully in a finite amount of time.

Corey Frank (20:42):

You got your too many variables into the system and it’s going to be challenging. Certainly right. VCs are notorious for that or private equity. Hey, fetch me another rock. Hey, if you give me the cohort of this year, and this year’s worth of revenues, then bring it back. And meanwhile, they’re going to use that as the cramdown, as we’ve talked about in the previous episode. So I think that’s a good springboard into the math of sales then. As we’ve always talked about, as you’ve always taught me here in these 40 odd episodes, right? Is that the limited variables in a system, I can predict if I put my major constraint or my main constraint in the business is trust-based conversations at scale. And so if I add that to the top of the funnel, it’s logical that every other piece of the funnel, the math should restrict down to whatever the output is.

And if I don’t know or care about any of those variables in the system, then I’m going to be pretty much relegated to just sell more. Just whatever my marketing team is able to throw from an AdWords perspective. And, for this journey to be authentic, is only as strong as the weakest link. If my math isn’t right, if my focus on the math isn’t right, then maybe that’s why sometimes I’m a little bit more inauthentic on my sales calls. Because I’m going to try to fix or try to artificially create some ratios in my calm, dial the conversation, conversation to page pitch, to meeting, et cetera. That really isn’t naturally there. It’s not naturally water-falling down. But, if I can be a little bit more manipulative, maybe I can help with some of these other ratios.

Chris Beall (22:28):

Exactly. I mean, that’s such a perfect description. It is exactly analogous to the machine and the machine shop. Or are they in the factory that’s supposed to take the blank and it’s supposed to turn it into a tube, or whatever. I remember being in shop, a few years ago, that did that. And the blank was a titanium blank, and the tube was the barrel of the world’s lightest sniper rifle. So it’s less boring than [inaudible 00:22:54]. A sniper rifle you can hold at arms length on one hand, and balance on your thumb. That was a remarkable product. But, somewhere in there, this titanium blank comes in and it’s got to be grilled in a very precise way to turn it into a tube. So, say instead of accepting what the machine does, the operator decides, “I’m not getting the yield I’m supposed to get. Out of every 100 of these that come in, 97 are supposed to go out as tubes that are good enough to be a barrel. But I’m only getting 92.

So what I’m going to do is, I’m going to take the ones aside that didn’t turn out right. And I’m going to take them over here, and I’m going to work from by hand. That’s what I’m going to do. Why? Because, I want to make my number. I want to make my number.” Well, do you really want to be the person who buys that sniper rifle that happened not to be making a standard process, but was rejiggered along the way by somebody who’s trying to make his number?

And that’s how we make bad business in business. We force deals all the time, in order to make the number. Sometimes it’s done through discounting. Sometimes it’s done through over promising. Sometimes it’s done through downright lying. There’s a reason that salespeople have a reputation, by and large, in the large, as not being truth tellers. Because the focus on making the number provides a lot of temptation to not run the system, not run the process, and to instead rejigger the output and maybe fake it. Say, “Well actually, what I’m going to do is I’m going to change the testing, so that now this appears to be within tolerances.

Instead of being out, it’s going to be in. And I’m going to ship them downstream.” And, this is a problem that plagued manufacturing for years. And it’s the problem that, I think, has actually finally been solved in manufacturing. I’m sure there’s backsliding all over the place. But in manufacturing, where I used to live, you didn’t mess around with the running process by intervening. And you went back and said, “Okay, what is it? What’s the root cause?” This is like, this is what the Toyota production system taught everybody. And it’s even used in hospitals now, and all sorts of places you wouldn’t expect . They say, “Hey, let’s report to the truth. Let’s not report to a desired number. Let’s report the truth.” But sales is this last bastion where, since trust is such a big deal, and since the number is held out as the result, what’s the number, right?

What gets sacrificed? Well, we sacrifice trust in order to make the number. And we do it by producing false deals. We take good customers and turn them into bad customers. And, by doing the wrong deal, we do this. Everybody does this, by the way, because everybody has constraints on the business. One of the constraints is, you have to make enough money on the business. And, if you fail to do that, it doesn’t matter how good you would have been. All prize fighters that are knocked out in the first round are equally good in the second round. That doesn’t matter how good they would have been. They’re all terrible. They win the same number of championship belts, zero.

Corey Frank (26:07):

Yeah. Zero, right.

Chris Beall (26:09):

So, you have this issue that has to be solved, but it’s very rare that the company’s issue of staying in business is actually tied tightly to individual reps needing to make the number.

Where that came from, was as a way of assessing performance within the territory that had been granted. There’s actually a way to buy the territory. That is, if I make my number this year or exceed my number, then I get the territory for next year and I get a bigger number. Why do I get a bigger number? It’s assumed it’s easier to grow a territory than it is to grow investors.

So it was actually a purchasing mechanism, where this independent business person called the sales rep, purchases the territory in addition to enough compensation for their own business to stay alive. And they do it through “performance” by making the number. So there’s an agreement that this territory is worth selling to you, if you bring this much revenue. And then, maybe, having clever schemes, some of it has to come from this product, and some from this product. And you put all these cool features in the comp plan, so to speak. But none of those features actually have to do with solving world customer problems. The assumption is: the product solves the problem and caveat emptor; buyer beware. Buyer beware doesn’t work very well in the be-to-be world, where the buyer is increasingly less expert than the seller, because products are increasingly complex and interdependent. So the buyer must truly be able to trust the seller. And when the seller corrupts out and says, “I’d rather make the number, then tell the truth,” problems happen. And they are problems, not for the seller, but problems for the business, the buying business and the selling business.