The First Law of Sales Holes: If You Find Yourself in One, Stop Digging!
The United States may stake its claim as the first country to land a man on the moon, but Russia can boast that it is the first country to drill the second deepest man-made hole ever recorded here on Earth. Since the early sixties, there has been more than just a space race. There has been a drill to the Earth’s mantle boring race. And why the mantle? Because we’re told that the scientists have only a reasonable understanding of what it’s made from and how it works, and the scientific riches would enrich scientists for many years.
And so in 1970, Russia decided to fully enter this race to win, and they decided to dig and dig and dig as deep as they could. But unlike the moon landing, Russia achieved more than the U.S. ever did, because over the next 20 years, a Russian team of scientists drilled down to a depth of 40,230 feet. That’s over seven and a half miles.
This hole, known as the Kola Superdeep Borehole, is only nine inches in diameter. But what’s interesting is the nearby residents around the dig always said that they could hear the souls screaming in hell, coming from the depths as the team dug deeper and deeper.
But the drilling and the screaming stopped in 1992, finally, when the temperatures below as they drilled just became too hot because the drill bits melted one after another. In fact, the temperatures reached 356 degrees before they had to cease eventual operations. And despite reaching such an incredible depth, Russia still never got close to the elusive mantle.
But for those of us in the sales profession, there is still a deeper hole here on Earth that we dig every day, and we dig it in our own cold calls. It’s called the trust hole, and it’s truly the deepest hole on Earth if we fall into it. It is truly inescapable. We fall into it with our prospects when we say we are going to only innocently tell them why we’ve called. Then we blow past that initial trust allotment that they’ve given us and we test it further, and then we finally abuse it by doing what? Pitching them your entire sales presentation versus simply building and investing the trust that they’ve given us and earn it into a discovery call.
So, in this week’s episode of the Market Dominance Guys, Chris speaks of the cautionary tale that envelops all of us too frequently on our cold calls. Because if you do the right thing and say the right thing on your initial cold call, you’ll have some trust built in all of seven seconds. We’ve talked about this before. And if you do the right next thing, that trust will be converted to sufficient curiosity for the prospect to take your discovery meeting.
And frankly, if they’re not interested in our initial pitch, the simple math of market dominance says to leave them alone. Just come back later in your list cycle and restart the process. Don’t attempt to squeeze any more trust from the call, because once you’re out of trust, as Chris says, you’re out of trust. There’s no cash advance or check you can write to get any more because you can never climb out of the trust hole for the rest of the relationship with that particular human being.
So, put the hard hat on, tread lightly, and let’s start exploring this week’s episode entitled The First Law of Sales Holes. If you find yourself in one, stop digging.
Corey Frank (04:47):
So, Oren in Pitch Anything. He talks about four key components in any successful call that is memorable is having curiosity, humor, intrigue, and the most important one is tension. He postulates that most weak-minded sales people avert tension because of supplicative behavior, need for approval, want to be liked. Certainly you see that in the emails that you just talked about. And so are you postulating that email is not effective as a prospecting tool mainly because there are no stakes for the other person? There’s no tension. I can create some intrigue and curiosity maybe a little bit, but I’m not involved in this process. So don’t use emails. Two tablets coming down the mountain from Chris Beall, do not use emails from a cold perspective to generate your leads. You will not get to market dominance one email at a time.
Chris Beall (05:50):
And it’s for two reasons. One is it is absolutely less effective than other approaches. And two is your competitor might choose to use tension. The real issue with market dominance is it’s a relative thing. You’ve got to win before your competitor takes the market. I always call them your fiercest competitor. Whoever that is, is going to combine having the goods, having the will, and being smart enough to put together a plan of action and execute that plan of action. That competitor is your issue in terms of taking a market.
So now the question isn’t might… So, here’s a way that people commonly think of it. I send a bunch of emails out, and I have some hope for response rate. And I get responses either within my band of response rates I hope for or not, and I tune the emails until I get the response rate I want. And then I use those and I get some meetings, and I’m getting what feels like traction, right? I am getting traction.
So that’s interesting. Of course, after a while I find that that gets harder and harder because I can send emails to everybody. And once I’m sending to everybody, then the ones who are going to reply, or if I’ve already replied and now I’m kind of… It’s too fast, right? So for any market, I can saturate the communication part, the initial communication with email too easily, but that’s not the real issue.
The real issue is my competitor might choose to do something that works, not just at the beginning and not just for those who are inherently curious and social or whatever. But it works in the general case. And that is something that starts with the tension of a fear relationship. If you choose to start with fear, you’re in the driver’s seat. As long as you know how to convert fear into trust. So if your competitor chooses to go down the fear route, because the ultimate tension is just to inject fear into the situation. Fear is the emotion that overrides all other emotions, ask anybody who’s ever tried to jump out of an airplane. I did it a few weeks ago. Now, it didn’t scare me, but my life background conditions me not to be afraid of stuff like that. It probably did scare me, but I don’t recognize it. I don’t actually-
Corey Frank (08:05):
Driving Ferraris, jumping out of airplanes, running up mountains.
Chris Beall (08:09):
Yeah. You can condition yourself to have a different kind of response envelope around stuff. My dad used to tell me, “Fear is incredibly valuable. It tells people what to stay away from so they can survive.” And my counter-argument was, “Great. Love it in others. I’m going to substitute for fear, assessment, reason, and cold calculation. So that’s going to be my fear.” And I was very deliberate about it. I said, “I’m going to choose something else to do the work of fear, because I don’t trust fear.” My view was in the modern world, we’re going to fear things that it doesn’t make sense to fear. And if we’re wise, we let fear play a role to create tension in a relationship that we can then resolve. All stories require attention. And if you think about story writing, and every deal has a story, every new customer relationship has a story, we start with somebody wants something.
Then we have to have some obstacle. Something is in the way of somebody getting something, right? But somebody wants something, we call that our hero in the story. And the things that get in the way we have a bunch of names for, but they’re the challenges in which the plot of the story is that the hero is going to go through a series of adventures. And those adventures are going to ultimately result in either the hero getting what they want, those are the happy stories, or not, which are the tragedies, right? So Romeo and Juliet, we can work our way through that story. Somebody wanted something, and everybody ended up dead. That’s why we call that a tragedy. Along the way they almost got it. In fact, they almost got it, and then un-got it, and then almost got it again.
And then damn, everybody was dead. All because of a little communication error. But very telling actually, when you think about it. They were in a situation where the way they lived was at the edge where fear could be reality. Because that was back when, as we saw in the opening of the play, someone gets killed. And they get killed just for saying something. That was back in those days when you could… The discipline of society was exercised at the tip of a sword among individuals. So it was a different world. We don’t live in that world anymore.
So my choice, and frankly I think if you can pull it off, it’s not easy to do by the way. But if you can pull off substituting for as much of your own fear, substituting reason, and testing that and getting help, having people give you good information, knowing how to get information. Knowing when you’re going too fast and you need to slow down and think, knowing when it’s time to act right now and you better do something because that’s what reason tells you to do. Now sometimes reason actually creates urgency, which is something that folks often don’t think. So if you want to dominate markets, you have to be the adult in the room.
And if you’re the scared person who’s just running around and going, “Oh my God, I’m not going to make my four, I’m not going to make my number. I might get fired,” you can’t dominate market. All you can do is get lucky a few times. And then eventually something’s going to catch up. Whereas your opponent, a serious player who wants to dominate this market, who says, “I’m going to put fear to work for me. I’m going to let the fear that’s inevitable in a cold call,” not a cold email outreach. Not walking up to somebody to conference, by the way. There’s no fear in that because you see the person, they’re a visible stranger.
Corey Frank (11:30):
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Chris Beall (11:31):
If a person walks up to you and they hold their hand up to shake your hand saying, “I’m unarmed,” then we’re good.
Corey Frank (11:31):
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Chris Beall (11:39):
We don’t fear that person. We may not like them. We may be thinking, “I’ve got something else to do.” And so we can use a conference, for instance, in order to do useful things to advance our business. But we don’t have the ultimate control position. The control position is to engender fear and the other person, and then resolve that fear as quickly as possible.
Corey Frank (12:03):
Yeah.
Chris Beall (12:03):
And it’s a place from which you cannot lose, but you have to develop the skill in which to do it. And then you have to not blow it because you’re going to take fear and turn it into trust. And the trust is a currency. As you spend trust, you don’t get more of it. You have to keep building more. So you get a little bit of trust. And now what do you spend it on? You spend it on curiosity. And once you get curiosity, you’ve rolled the boulder off the cliff at that point. All boulders rolled off cliffs, get to the bottom. You just don’t know what the path is going to be. That’s why it’s curiosity.
So now you got another problem. If you over-engineer. The next part, that is once the curiosity turns into discovery, you want to have a period of, “Okay, approach me now.” That’s why you want to set the meeting. This set the meeting, hold the meeting is so important compared to have the meeting in the ambush call. You can never climb out of the trust hole. For the rest of the relationship with that human being, you will never climb all the way out of the trust hole that you put yourself in, or the mistrust hole.
I always tell people, “It’s pretty simple. If you do the right thing, you’ll have some trust in seven seconds. If you do the right next thing, that trust will be converted to sufficient curiosity to take the meeting. If it isn’t converted, leave them alone and come back later. Restart the process. Don’t attempt to keep squeezing.” Once you’re out of trust, you’re out of trust. There’s nothing more to spend. There’s no credit card that you can pull out and go, “Don’t worry, I’ll pay you back later. You can trust me later. I’m going to do something right now that’ll make you not trust me. But it’s okay, we’ll get it back later when you see how wonderful my offer is.” I don’t care how wonderful your offer is.
Corey Frank (13:43):
But that’s what happens, right? We’re going to be rolling in trust when you take this 30 minute demo call for me that, “Hey, we have time right now. Let’s just jump right into it.”
Chris Beall (13:53):
Exactly, exactly. So you need to have the horse approach you before you try to put the bridle on it. You just have to have it come to you, and that means you need a separation. And you actually want things like, you want there not to be 100% show rate. That’s actually your best qualifier. Your best qualifier really is, they have a declaration of a willingness to do something. But the intention to actually do it and overcome all those obstacles, then you have a new hero by the way.
The new hero is your prospect, and their journey is to come to visit your land, your world. They’re going to come into your house, and you’re going to share something with them. Hopefully something of value. You’re going to teach them something that is going to help them understand their world economically. It’s going to help them understand their world emotionally. And that’s going to help them understand their world strategically. The three things that we need to be able to get help with in order to navigate through the world. You’re going to give them that stuff, right? But they have to come into your house.
Chris Beall (15:50):
So they’re going to your house, which is the discovery meeting. If they’re not ready to come to your house, fabulous. We’ll push the button for that 15 minutes and have more conversations. This notion that, “Oh my God, nobody showed a meeting. They no-showed a meeting.” That’s wonderful. That’s great. The ones that no-showed are the ones you weren’t going to move further with right now anyway. Now, call them back because maybe it was something that’s just in their world that came up. And they’re going to love you for calling them back and saying, “You know, we had this meeting on the calendar for the 15th at 8:00. Clearly something came up with you. I remember you said you were a morning person. How about if we do Friday? Can you go even earlier, maybe 6:30, 7:00?” Whatever it is, it’s okay to do all that stuff.
It’s also okay if they don’t show. Qualification before discovery is an error, but there’s one form of natural qualification you get for free without even having to work. Did they show up at the meeting or not? And being petulant about a no-show is ridiculous. You were offered a gift, they didn’t show. That’s a gift of time, and to be all pissed off about it as just to be a child.
Corey Frank (16:58):
I asked Burmeister, It’s a common question I would ask when I was at Stormwind, was what’s a good show rate? Or what’s an acceptable no-show rate?
Chris Beall (17:09):
60% is a good show rate.
Corey Frank (17:11):
60%, so-
Chris Beall (17:12):
That’s a good show rate.
Corey Frank (17:14):
So the son of man himself, Jesus used ConnectAndSell, it’s impossible to get 80, 90, 100% show rate? It’s just not possible?
Chris Beall (17:24):
It’s wrong. It’s possible to do it, but it’s wrong.
Corey Frank (17:24):
That’s a better word for that, it’s wrong.
Chris Beall (17:30):
Jesus is a lot smarter than that.
Corey Frank (17:34):
That’s great.
Chris Beall (17:36):
I mean, Jesus would have been so happy if 40% of all those who could’ve showed up, but weren’t really going to take it seriously didn’t show.
Corey Frank (17:43):
Yeah.
Chris Beall (17:45):
I mean, he had the same problem we have, right? There’s only so much time on earth to get the job done. And we all have that problem.
Corey Frank (17:52):
It’s funny. Maybe you planned this, Chris, is that he had three years to get to market dominance.
Chris Beall (17:58):
Maybe he planned it. Three years, as far as we can tell, is the replacement cycle for everything. If you’re going to take up a new set of health habits, how we started this conversation, and you’re really going to be able to say, “Okay, now I do things differently.” So say you decide you’re crazy and you decide to become a barefoot [inaudible 00:18:18] runner. The time during which you’re going to actually stick to it if you’re serious about it before you replace it with something else, probably about three years. If you go past three years, you’re going to be really hard to sell to. But for the most part, we turn over our cars. We turn over our jobs. We turn over the system that we bought to do X, Y, and Z, which is the most part for selling. Whatever it is, our habits-
Corey Frank (17:58):
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Chris Beall (18:44):
We turn them over about once every three years. And so if you want to dominate a market, you have to eat that cycle. That cycle is built into the market. It’s not you, it’s them.
Corey Frank (18:53):
Yep, I know.
Chris Beall (18:53):
Then you get the ones who are going to go today, the ones that are going to go at quarter from now, the ones who don’t even need to meet up. You got to go through 12 [inaudible 00:18:59]. It’s just the way life is. That’s a fact of the world. And maybe your market’s weird. People always tell me that markets are different. My market’s different. The whole thing is going to be over in 12 months.
Corey Frank (19:09):
Really?
Chris Beall (19:10):
Show me some examples of where that happened, where you know all the facts. Where you actually know when they started, when you actually… Not the news stories, not the dressed up documentary, not the BS. How it actually went. Go back even to a [crosstalk 00:19:25].
Corey Frank (19:24):
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Chris Beall (19:25):
One of the huge, huge successes. Look at the first three years. That’s what it took. It takes three years, right? During that three years, you are going to manufacture trust over and over and over and over and over again. You don’t ever get off the hook. You never get to go, “Oh, look, we’re so good at this. We’re 15 months in. We don’t have to be in the trust manufacturing business anymore.” Sorry, you got to keep manufacturing trust at a steady flow rate. The flow rate is represented as units. The unit is discovery calls held per unit time, or quarter or whatever, for folks are offensively in your target market, because that’s what you’re trying to dominate. And your target market is always identified based on publicly available information. That’s competitive, because you and your competitors have access to the same publicly available information.
Corey Frank (20:16):
Yeah. And that is the unified field theory, as far as you’re concerned, about dominated the market. The math works out.
Chris Beall (20:23):
The math is the math and the glue on` the hidden particle, the thing that… Like the discovery of quarks, right? Couldn’t figure out how atoms worked until somebody finally came up with this crazy idea about quarks. And then the whole key to quarks is, well, what keeps them together anyway? Why don’t protons just… As far as we can tell, protons will last the length of the universe, why don’t decay? Well, they just have this peculiar relationship among the quarks. Which, it’s like we’re just going to play the same game back and forth. “Here, you get the blue out, and give it back to me. You get it.” You know, they don’t get bored on that game. Whereas everybody else occasionally they’ll kind of slip on out and there’ll be a decay that occurs and something will become too [crosstalk 00:21:05].
Corey Frank (21:05):
Right, right.
Chris Beall (21:05):
So yeah, the unified field theory is this. The essential fundamental particles, so to speak, of this entire thing is trust. And the certainty is fear. And so what you do is you trigger fear, manufacture trust, turn that into curiosity, turn the curiosity into commitment, the commitment into action. And you just run that cycle over and over and over. You run at the lowest cost you can, add as tight a target as you can. And this is the number one reason you must never qualify in a cold call, because you screw the whole thing up. When you qualify, you’re saying, “My target market is not my target market. It’s actually a subset of that, that I’m going to discover, but I’m not going to discover it during discovery. So I’m going to try to discover it when there’s not an… I’m going to spend some of my trust currency to try to make this thing go away.” Whereas all I really have to do is set the meeting and have them not show up. It’s so simple.
Corey Frank (22:08):
So trigger fear to manufacture trust.
Chris Beall (22:12):
Yes.
Corey Frank (22:13):
And then-
Chris Beall (22:14):
Spend that trust on curiosity.
Corey Frank (22:17):
Spend that trust on curiosity, and repeat.
Chris Beall (22:20):
And then that curiosity becomes commitment, right? But not yet action. And then commitment becomes action. And there’s attenuation rate on each one of those, right? The curiosity, it doesn’t always become commitment. It only becomes commitment maybe 6% of the time, 7% of the time. For a whole bunch of reasons, right? You’ve just injected yourself into somebody else’s life. Curiosity is actually relatively weak as a motivator, but it’s the best we can do.
Corey Frank (22:50):
So trigger fear, manufacture trust, spend that trust on curiosity, and then hope manufacturer spark catalyze that curiosity to become commitment.
Chris Beall (23:02):
Yeah.
Corey Frank (23:03):
And that chemical reaction, curiosity becoming commitment, is probably very heavy on tone and language.
Chris Beall (23:12):
Yes.
Corey Frank (23:12):
The choice of my words, the pacing, the performance piece.
Chris Beall (23:12):
And luck.
Corey Frank (23:17):
And luck!
Chris Beall (23:18):
So once I, once I optimize, now I’m down to luck. Luck number one, timing. Am I going to get a meeting? Let’s try this. So say somebody cold calls me on June 27th, 2020. I’m getting married on July 5th. Following that wedding, there are going to be two days probably in the penthouse over there at the hotel right across the water, which is where we’re getting married. Then there’s going to be a month in Iceland.
Corey Frank (23:53):
[crosstalk 00:23:53] Iceland! Oh that’s fantastic.
Chris Beall (23:54):
Then there’s going to be an additional month in Ireland, Wales, Scotland, and the Shetlands. Then there’s going to be three weeks in the Nordics. And then there’s going to be two weeks on London’s West end seeing plays. And then I’ll consider a meeting. The pudding is, no matter how much curiosity you get out of me, I could be like [crosstalk 00:24:15]-
Corey Frank (24:14):
You’re shut down until Thanksgiving, basically.
Chris Beall (24:16):
Shut down until Thanksgiving, and that’s just luck on your part as the cold caller. And that’s the real world. We don’t know what somebody is available to do. And curiosity is very weak as a motivator. It’s just the strongest motivator that we can find. And curiosity can be about economics, can be about making more money, not losing money, reducing risk. All economic concepts. It can be about emotions. It can be about reducing frustration or reducing fear. Very occasionally it can be about the emotion that we, quote, read. It can sometimes be about envy. But usually it’s just frustration or fear. The twin emotions that we get to use in business regularly are frustration and fear. You’re frustrated with the way things are going, or you’re afraid of bad things going to happen. That’s kind of it.
Corey Frank (25:05):
That’s it. But you’re saying Chris that because of this intersection, this confluence, this convergence of luck, timing, tone, choice of words. If I have that, and that is performing at a high level, I still can only expect to get one out of 12, one out of 13 proceeding to accepting a discovery call.
Chris Beall (25:27):
Yes, at the beginning.
Corey Frank (25:30):
At the beginning.
Chris Beall (25:30):
And that number gets better over time because I’m actually taking those out of the market and I’m pressing the remaining market into the remaining quarters. So the concentration goes up a little bit over time, and I’m also improving my approach slightly because now I’m talking to you for the second time. If I have an aggregated trust, I get to start from the trust position. I don’t have to go through the whole fear bit. When I call you the second time and I say, “Corey, when we spoke on August 20th,” all I have to do is say that. “When we spoke on August 20th, you said,” whatever. You immediately trust me. Cause I’m not a stranger. You might not remember the conversation, but you have to make a decision now.
Corey Frank (25:30):
Yes.
Chris Beall (26:19):
I’m either a liar who’s pretending that we spoke on August 20th, and that’s way too specific. Only the greatest con-men in the world would ever say that, right? Or, wow, I’m actually not a stranger. This is why everything always comes… This is the weirdest math, right? The funnel is the concentration of effect on the first seven seconds of a cold call, because that’s where you have the invisible stranger effect. Which guarantees fear, which allows you to make the move to trust within seven seconds. After that, don’t blow it.
Corey Frank (26:57):
Yeah.
Chris Beall (26:57):
This is like fishing for a fish of unknown size and strength. And the strength of your line is always exactly the same. I’m fishing on seven pound test line. Okay, well if it’s a big fish, I better let it run a little bit. The biggest fish is the one-on-one, take the meeting now.
Corey Frank (27:16):
Yeah.
Chris Beall (27:18):
So I have to adjust how much tension I put on the line, how hard I try to get them into the meeting, depending on how strong the fish is. And I don’t know. So all I can do is ask the fish. “You going to come with me? Ooh, I guess not, catch you later.” Right? So then you go catch them again. You play catch and release over and over and over.
Corey Frank (27:41):
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Chris Beall (27:42):
This is what’s ironic about it. The bulk of the market is captured through followup calls. Second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth conversations. But the key skill is the cold call because followup calls can’t be executed until you have a cold call. And if the cold call isn’t executed in a way that you leave them with the possibility of trust when you call them back in the follow-up and say, “Hey Corey, when we spoke on August 20th, you said that you were headed to whatever to do whatever.”
Corey Frank (28:10):
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Chris Beall (28:14):
“You didn’t have time for the conversation with me.” Even if you hang up on me, by the way, I’m going to say that. Because you didn’t have time for a conversation, otherwise you would have talked to me. So this is the strange thing is cold calling itself only generates this very modest yield. If you generate 5% conversation of meeting in cold calls, you’re doing really well. There’s only eight and a half percent of the market’s in play in any quarter anyway.
Corey Frank (28:37):
Oh right, right. Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Chris Beall (28:40):
Four and a quarter is halfway. So you’re above 50%, and above 50%, you can dominate the market. But you have to persist because the market is not ready. They’re not ready because your product’s new or whatever, but they’re also not ready because it takes three years for the market as a whole to consider a new offering because of the replacement cycle of existing solutions.
So you got to talk to people over and over. The skill required to have a second conversation is very modest. The skill required to execute the first seven seconds of a cold call is monumental. Huge. There’s nothing easy about any part of it. The point of the call where, say it’s… So I’ll do the ConnectAndSell one because I’m familiar with it.
Corey Frank (29:18):
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Chris Beall (29:20):
So I do the whole thing from scratch. I don’t know if we’ve done this from scratch, but I’ll do it from scratch.
Corey Frank (29:24):
That’s good, that’s good. Yeah, okay. Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Chris Beall (29:26):
So I say, I haven’t heard your voice, it’s a ConnectAndSell call. So I just have a beep in my ear.
Corey Frank (29:30):
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Chris Beall (29:31):
So I say, “Hey, this is Chris from ConnectAndSell. Corey, I know I’m an interruption. Can I have 27 seconds, tell you why I call?” You’re going to go-
Corey Frank (29:40):
Sure. Yeah, sure.
Chris Beall (29:43):
That’s right. And I’m going to say, “Corey, I believe we’ve discovered a breakthrough that completely eliminates the waste and the frustration that keeps your best sales reps from being effective on the phone or even using the phone at all. And the reason I reached out to you today is to get 15 minutes on your calendar to share this breakthrough with you. Do you happen to have your calendar available?” And you’re going to say something along the lines of, if you’re interested, “What, what are you talking about? Tell me more.”
Corey Frank (30:07):
Yes, yeah. [crosstalk 00:30:09].
Chris Beall (30:10):
And I’m going to say, “You know Corey, we’ve learned the hard way that an ambush conversation like this just isn’t a fair setting to talk about something that’s important. Are you a morning person? How’s your Wednesday?”
Corey Frank (30:20):
But what is it? Is it X? Is it Y? Will folks try to come back to you a second time, or that’s so strong of a response that most of the time they’ll just say, “Okay. Yeah, I’ll bite”?
Chris Beall (30:32):
Well, the reason for that response being worded like that is it makes two things perfectly clear. Remember when I told yo. I know I’m an interruption, I’m reminding you that I agree with you that I’m an interruption. And if you’re trying to change this to a conversation about what it is that I’m offering, which is not what I told you I was willing to do, by the way. That wasn’t the deal, the deal was I’d tell you why I called. The reason I reached out to you today is to get 15 minutes on your calendar, not to explain what we do. Now I’m telling you why I can’t explain. I shouldn’t explain what we do, it’s wrong. It’s ethically wrong. It’s not fair. It’s not fair to you and it’s not fair to our offer because it’s too important.
I’m establishing myself immediately as your peer. We’re on the same page. We’re looking to do the same thing, which is have whatever happens next be what should happen next. And certainly what’s unfair shouldn’t happen. So Chris Voss talks about the F-word, says you should almost never use it. And I agree with him because as soon as you imply that the other person’s being unfair, the amount of reactants are going to get as crazy. But if you’re saying, “If I were to do that, it would be unfair to you and to me.” Then it’s kind of okay.
Corey Frank (31:42):
So that’s the proper way to use fair?
Chris Beall (31:45):
Yes.
Corey Frank (31:46):
Is in the potential negative connotation, the self-deprecating connotation versus fair enough, or does that sound fair?
Chris Beall (31:54):
Exactly. When you use it the other way, you’re basically saying, you know what? I’m about to accuse you of being unethical.
Corey Frank (32:02):
Interesting.
Chris Beall (32:02):
Fairness is an ethical term, not a moral term. When you accuse somebody of being unethical, you’re not saying, “Hey, you violated a moral.” You’re saying “You’re a bad person.”
Corey Frank (32:11):
So that’s been in Vogue for a number of years. And now you’re saying that it’s time to retire that word.
Chris Beall (32:17):
Always has been, it’s a very dangerous word to use. And it’s used unskillfully a lot. When somebody says, “that’s fair,” think about when somebody says that to you. Whatever it is, they say, “that’s fair.” What are they really saying? They’re not saying anything about fairness, right? They’re saying “I’m going to withhold my assessment of what you said until it’s convenient for me.” They’re refusing to engage with you at that point. When somebody says, “that’s fair,” that’s simply, “I’m not ready to engage.” And people say it all the time. When they say, “that’s right”, they’re saying, “I’m ready to engage. We’ve now made progress, and this is something we both agree on.” It’s objective. That’s why it’s, “that’s right,” rather than, “you’re right.” When they say, “you’re right,” they’re saying, “at this point, I can’t defeat you in this argument based on what I know in the position I’m in. So I’m going to say your rights so I can get away from you.”
So there’s a big difference between “that’s fair,” “that’s right,” and “you’re right.” And folks that use them interchangeably get in trouble and they have no idea why. Then I’m morass at that point.
Corey Frank (33:25):
Yeah, I think it emanated from Sandler. I know Matson uses it a lot, but I think even David Sandler used “fair” in a lot of his early recordings from kind of the late 80s, early 90s or so in some of his screenplays. But that’s interesting how-
Chris Beall (33:41):
It’s super desirable as a state. And therefore, you’re playing with fire when you’re playing with “fair.” The other F-word.
Corey Frank (33:47):
I love it.
Chris Beall (33:47):
But it’s okay in this case, because a little fire as needed. When you asked me for more information, turns out, you’re not really asking me for more information from your curiosity. You’re of two minds. One is you might want to know a little more. The other is you want to say, “We’re set.” You want me to tell you enough so that you can say we’re set. And then you’re out of the conversation through the back door. I don’t want to let you out through the back door because I think it’s wrong. I think you’ll benefit. I think you’ll learn one, two, or three things of immense value to you if you just come and attend the meeting. I believe that deeply, that’s my product is the meeting.
I believe in my product. I think you’ll learn something about the potential for reducing your costs of having conversations. I believe you’ll learn something about the potential for having your life as a manager be easier because you’re [crosstalk 00:34:47] do something that you want them to do. And I believe you’ll learn about the potential for dominating markets or getting on a path to dominate a market, which is fundamentally going to allow you to keep your job, or if you own the company, to survive. I believe you’ll learn about those things regardless of whether we ever do business together. I believe in my product.
Corey Frank (35:06):
That’s beautiful.
Chris Beall (35:07):
The product is the meeting.
