The Minding Your Business Podcast Hosted by Ron “Champ” Brooks Ep 242
Entrepreneurship, real estate, trending news, there’s no business like minding your own! Host Ron “Champ” Brooks, a business consulting strategist and avid cheeseburger lover, takes you through applicable best practices for your business or organization, your own personal growth, investing in residential and commercial property, and tackling today’s news stories. New episodes are released every Friday afternoon! He invited Chris to join him for Episode 242 – Dominate Your Market by Properly Speaking With Your Target Audience.
Listen to “#242 – Chris Beall, CEO of ConnectAndSell.Com” on Spreaker.
Entrepreneurship, real estate, trending news, there’s no business like minding your own! Host Ron “Champ” Brooks, a business consulting strategist and avid cheeseburger lover, takes you through applicable best practices for your business or organization, your own personal growth, investing in residential and commercial property, and tackling today’s news stories. New episodes are released every Friday afternoon!
Ron Brooks (00:00:39):
All right, MYB community, thank you so much for having me back. We’re at episode 242 of the Minding Your Business Podcast; Entrepreneurship, real estate, trending news. There’s no business like minding your own. I’m your host Champ Ron, joining you here post-inauguration day. Woo hoo. Look at that. For those of you that were storming the Capitol Building, we got a new president. I know you’re just all tickled pink to know that we’ve got a new president. And then for those of you that weren’t at the Capitol Building back on January 6th, we have a new president, right? How much different has your life been in the last few days? If you didn’t take action, guess what? Nothing happened. You could believe that, right? We changed the president and if you didn’t do anything, nothing happened, right? And if you did take action, something did happen, which would’ve been, whether it was January 19th or today, right? What’s the moral of that story? Take action.
Ron Brooks (00:01:33):
Doesn’t matter. Take action. I say all that in jest, but definitely shout out to the new president, president Joe Biden and the new vice president, Mrs. Kamala Harris. And so, we’ll be looking to see from their leadership, what goes on here short-term, and then over time. But so glad that you all could join here for this new episode. Subscribe to the podcast, five star, five star, wherever you get your pods. That helps me to continue to grow the MYB community. Don’t forget to text me, 312-847-4071. I’d like to get you a copy of my new e-book, Investing in Real Estate with Little to No Money Down. I’d like to get that to you expeditiously so text me, 312-847-4071. You could purchase the paperback and check me out on my site. That’s at champronbrooks.com. Champronbrooks.com.
Ron Brooks (00:02:31):
Listen, I’m excited about today’s guest that’s joining us today. He is joining us from the comforts of the state of Arizona. He’s already in game shape. He’s already been out, working out and making me feel bad since I haven’t been doing that. But Chris Beall joins us today. He is the CEO of ConnectAndSell, that’s connectandsell.com. And you’re in for a treat today, MYB. I can tell you already with Chris and I talking offline, I think you’re going to get some great gems and some nuggets, but Chris, thank you so much for taking time out. You’re already in midday form.
Chris Beall (00:03:10):
Champ’Ron, it is incredible to be here with you today.
Ron Brooks (00:03:15):
Yeah, I appreciate it. No doubt. And Chris is also a podcaster, so MYB, you know how I am and how we are as a community with supporting our fellow podcasters. And so, the Market Dominance Guys, that’s marketdominanceguys.com, make sure that you check out and support Chris and his team on the podcast. Go out on all the various DSPs, make sure that you subscribe to the podcast, leave a five-star written comment, that’s written. Don’t just click the five stars and walk away. Click the five stars and then leave a nice written comment. I will be doing the same after the podcast and make sure that you support the Market Dominance Guys, as well as ConnectAndSell. Chris, with that, again, thank you so much, and let’s jump into it.
Ron Brooks (00:04:01):
Man, tell us a little bit about yourself and just your journey to get to where you are. I’m sure it was full of adventure and it was real smooth and easy and never ran into any obstacles. All obstacles just moved out your way, just parted like the Red Sea, and you just waltzed into everything.
Chris Beall (00:04:24):
Yeah, that’s exactly right. I mean, some people were born with a silver spoon in their mouth. I wasn’t born in the desert, but I was raised in the desert and there’s nothing like a silver spoon out there, right? Yeah, my family moved from Maryland to Arizona in 1957 and so I was just a little kid, three and a half years old. And effectively, I was raised in the desert with no people except my four older sisters and my parents. Some folks, that as people moved out to North Scottsdale, what is now crowded, well, not crowded by some standards, but now filled in, was just open desert. And I was raised in a house full of books and I had a whole bunch of animals, six horses, two goats, 16 dogs, and jobs that involve animals, cows and horses and goats and sheep and chickens and whatever.
Chris Beall (00:05:18):
I do declare that’s where I learned how to sell. I learned how to sell because what I learned how to sell first was, for example, getting a horse when I was seven or eight years old to lower its head so I could put a bridle on its head and I was alone. I weigh 60 pounds. A horse weighs a little bit more than that, and a horse can run and it can kick and yeah… You got to somehow get that to happen without language. And what I learned is that tone of voice, approach, the confidence, those things are the essence of selling and the essence of entrepreneurial success. And if we could learn to see each other first way at the inside as animals and what do we really need and then go to, “Okay, now that we got that under some level of being addressed, what might we be able to do next, I think you have a different view of life, and that’s what I learned by necessity.
Chris Beall (00:06:13):
And then my house was full of books. My dad was an avid reader. He had a lifetime project that we were unaware of until the day after he died. We found a manifesto that he wrote at the age of 26, where he never showed it to anybody and he was renouncing essentially everything other than taking care of his family. He had a job. He worked as an aerospace procurement guy, very successful. Rose to be the head of procurement for a pretty good sized company but that wasn’t how he saw his job. He saw his job as reading and annotating the best of all that had ever been written and thought by humans. And so, he had this library that was at my fingertips because those were all of his books, and a lot of it was business too, because he was getting an MBA.
Chris Beall (00:07:01):
I was reading Peter Drucker when I was eight years old, not knowing that you shouldn’t do that, right? That doesn’t make sense. And I have a mathematical mind. I did pretty well in high school and some of these national mathematics contests and stuff like that. You take math, science, and business, and what do you get? You get a different way of looking at businesses. I think my other big formative event was being a Fuller Brush man in Phoenix in the summer. It was a necessity. My first wife had a miscarriage. We had medical bills. Of course, there was no insurance. Why would you have that? We’re just kids, and needed to make some money fast. There was an ad in the newspaper, said I could get a job the next day. Turns out, the job was carrying a bag, going door to door in 110 degree heat, getting people to buy household cleaning products that I didn’t understand.
Chris Beall (00:08:04):
I had a breakthrough, and my breakthrough was actually a negative. I said to myself, “You know what? I don’t think you can sell this stuff to somebody who opens the door. What can you do? What action can you take?” You said, “Take action,” and one of the interesting things to me about taking action is sometimes I think people go like that, “Just do it,” thing that you and I had talked about earlier, that Elon Musk or whatever he says, “Well, just do it and you become a multi-billionaire. Second richest man in the world. Doesn’t work like that, right?
Ron Brooks (00:08:32):
Right.
Chris Beall (00:08:33):
You need to take action and action I could see that you could take and succeed at, which is an important thing to know about in action, that the action has a shot, right? It doesn’t have to work, but it has to have a shot. I thought, “I can introduce myself to this person and offer them a service and the service would be researching our products for them.” I’d knock on the door and say, “Hi, I’m Chris Beall. I’m your new Fuller Brush man. You probably don’t know what Fuller Brush is. I sure don’t.” And on that, “I sure don’t,” I’d just stand there and that person was a little stuck and they had to figure out something to say. I wasn’t trying to sell them anything so everybody would say, “Well, how can I help you?” And at that point, it’s over.
Ron Brooks (00:09:16):
That’s true.
Chris Beall (00:09:20):
“I just joined Fuller Brush. I’ve heard a rumor that we have products that are good in the household that you can’t get in stores. I don’t know if this is true at all, but if I go find one or two products that we carry, that I believe will change your life, do I have your permission to come back and share them with you?” And everybody said, “Yes.” I went from the standard two, 3% door to close rate, to 92% door to close rate in my territory, just by dividing one thing. A mathematical mind, right? You divide one thing. What if I divide it into two things? Might there be some economic and psychological advantage in that?
Ron Brooks (00:10:00):
Exactly.
Chris Beall (00:10:03):
I’ve run that principle through all the companies that I’ve been involved with. Started starting companies in 1983, and I’ve been doing it ever since, one way or another. Some with venture funding. Most in the software business. One is a floor finishing company that, by the way, you’re in Memphis, that one Halloween plus one day I woke up in Memphis and found I’d lost that company overnight.
Ron Brooks (00:10:28):
Oh my goodness.
Chris Beall (00:10:29):
And thinking everything was great the day before and realizing from the numbers in my ERP system I built on salesforce.com, looking at it and just going, “Oh my God, we’re out of business.” I had a million and a half dollars of checks on my desk that I could have deposited in the bank from investors, and suddenly ethically, I couldn’t take those checks. I just had to figure out what to do. Sell the company. It was very, very difficult, but I got to come back to Memphis sometime, get a good memory.
Ron Brooks (00:10:58):
Yeah. I was going to say [crosstalk 00:10:59] we need to help you to create some better memories here.
Chris Beall (00:11:02):
I know it’s a great town. I got to get over the PTSD from that.
Ron Brooks (00:11:04):
Yeah, I was going to say we’re a great city, but man, that’s a tough experience to lose a business in that fashion.
Chris Beall (00:11:12):
[inaudible 00:11:12].
Ron Brooks (00:11:12):
Chris, I’d love to hear from you. We both have to date ourselves a little bit. I turned 40 years old this week so I was born in 1981. You mentioned 1983 when you started launching startups and things like that. I’m curious, compare and contrast when you started businesses back in those times, compared to if someone’s starting today. Obviously that’s a complete world difference with technology and everything, but I think the mindset that you described, I think would be fairly similar, whether it’s 1983 or it’s 2021, right? You took this mathematical approach to… Again, like we talked about in business, solving problems, and that’s where I see that math and business intersect, is both are about can you identify and recognize a problem? And then can you work through the fixed and variable inputs to get to a solution and then can you execute on the solution? Yeah, I’d love to hear from you man, compare when you were starting companies, ’83, ’84, ’85, ’86 to today.
Chris Beall (00:12:20):
I don’t think there’s any significant difference. You hit it. Champ’Ron, you hit it. You got to find a problem to solve that’s worth solving that somebody will pay to have solved. And then, I recommend this. Go up to a whiteboard and draw a circle on it. That’s your business. You’re going to start. Draw a little arrow coming out of the right hand side of the circle, just a little straight arrow. Put a little stick figure to the right of that and then put inside that circle that you’re going to solve this problem. And by solving, you’re going to completely eliminate some bad thing in that stick figure’s life and they’re going to either make money or save money, and you’re going to put how many dollars each time that problem is solved at the one unit level. And then ask yourself, “How many of these stick figures are there? Is there one? 10, 100, 1,000, 100,00 or whatever, right?
Ron Brooks (00:13:14):
Right.
Chris Beall (00:13:14):
And then say, “Okay, now I’m going to go talk to as many of those people as I can before I do anything stupid like start a business to solve a problem that nobody cares about.”
Ron Brooks (00:13:25):
Right, very true. That’s a tremendous point.
Chris Beall (00:13:28):
And that’s it. That’s all. I mean, essentially you start with conversations with people, and my friend Venkat Mohan is a very well-known venture capitalist out of Norwest Ventures, and just an outstanding human being. One time, I hired him to be my boss when I was in Boulder, Colorado. I needed somebody between me and the CEO. I was chief technology officer. Venkat kindly joined the company to provide me a buffer so I didn’t do anything violent. And one day, he divulged to me the secret and he divulged again later as a VC. He said, “Chris, I don’t count noses. I count nose hairs. And the way I do it is this. When somebody comes to me with a business idea, I make sure I understand it and then I get on the phone and I sell it to who they claim, that person claims, is the target audience.
Chris Beall (00:14:20):
I just make a list and I just call them up and I call it selling the paper product. Instead of a product being the real product or the real service, it’s the same thing. I just sell it and I look at the percentage of folks who are willing to move to the next step, which would be a meeting to learn more about it, and that’s it. And if it’s above a certain threshold, it has a shot. Otherwise, scrap it and get a different message or a different audience.”
Ron Brooks (00:14:50):
Right. Yeah, that’s interesting and that’s what I thought. I wouldn’t think there’d be a ton of difference. Obviously, the methods of going about it and some things may be easier from one to the other. I think you could always compare and contrast that throughout a whole day, but I think, like you said, that mindset that you described, Chris, is the same, whether it’s 1983 or it’s 2021 in the middle of a pandemic. And so, as you come along and you started these companies, you’ve had various different degrees of exiting those companies, talk to us about ConnectAndSell. I’m curious as to how that came about, Chris. Did you have business partners to start? And talk about that mindset in starting where you were with ConnectAndSell.
Chris Beall (00:15:40):
Well, I stumbled on ConnectAndSell. I didn’t start it.
Ron Brooks (00:15:43):
Okay, gotcha.
Chris Beall (00:15:44):
In fact, I came home from a breakfast with Sean McLaren where I’d been lured into this by A former employee. He told me about ConnectAndSell. I looked at it online and I said, “Do you know what the phrase, “Wholly uninterested means?” And he said, “Well, yeah, but you got to meet Sean McLaren.” I said, “The Sean McLaren, the inventor of the IBM storage industry? Are you kidding me? [crosstalk 00:16:12]. I’ll go meet that guy.” He was famous in the 70’s and 80’s back when I was doing stuff. And he said, “Yeah, yeah. I think it’s that guy.” I think he was just making that up. I went and met him because I thought he was dead too so I-
Ron Brooks (00:16:26):
Yeah, I was going to say. Yeah.
Chris Beall (00:16:27):
Meet a dead guy, right? Why not? And Sean, who by the way, elbow bumped me… This is in 2011. He elbow bumps me-
Speaker 1 (00:16:36):
Every tear compliance regulations change thousands of times and every year ADP makes thousands of seamless platform updates so businesses can focus on everything else, like running their business. Grow stronger with ADP; HR, talent, time and payroll.
Chris Beall (00:16:51):
… doesn’t shake hands. That guy’s ahead of his time. He sits down and he tells me this story. About, oh, four minutes into the story, I say, “Hang on Sean. Are you telling me you’ve reinvented the business telephone to call a list instead of one person at a time and the mathematical consequence is a 10 times increase and the rate of having conversations between you might have a problem and somebody might have a solution to that problem? 10 times you’re telling me.” He says, “Yeah.” I said, “I’m in.”
Ron Brooks (00:17:20):
Wow.
Chris Beall (00:17:20):
He says, “What do you mean you’re in?” I said, “I’m working for you now. It’s a free country. You can choose to pay me, and I recommend it because it stabilizes the employer/employee relationship.”
Ron Brooks (00:17:30):
Right, exactly.
Chris Beall (00:17:32):
I joined on the spot. I go home and tell my wife, my late wife now, but my wife, I tell her, “Look, I joined this company.” And she says, “Do they have a product?” I said, “Yeah.” She says, “I give it three weeks. You’ll be out of there in three weeks because you don’t do other people’s products. You hate everybody’s products.” It’s like, “Well, yeah, but this thing’s pretty amazing. 10X, you never see 10X in business. People talk 10X but I’m a math guy. A real 10X, you never see it about something important,” right? I joined and apparently it’s longer than three weeks. I went from being, in this case… It’s funny. People think entrepreneurship is only about starting companies. Every once in a while, it’s just about joining somebody who’s got something going and saying, “I believe in this so much that I’m in.”
Ron Brooks (00:18:24):
Yeah, exactly.
Chris Beall (00:18:24):
Not, “I’m asking you for a job. I’m in.”
Ron Brooks (00:18:27):
Yeah. You want to be a part of it, right?
Chris Beall (00:18:32):
Yeah.
Ron Brooks (00:18:32):
Sometimes you can recognize the idea and be a part of it where you know that you can add a level of value and a level of expertise that helps take it from this level to that level.
Chris Beall (00:18:42):
Right, right. And in this case, no good deed goes unpunished, and eventually through a series of things I can’t talk about, actually-
Ron Brooks (00:18:52):
Sure.
Chris Beall (00:18:54):
… the company changed hands from the ownership structure that it had to the one that’s more like what it has now back in 2014 and I became CEO.
Ron Brooks (00:19:04):
Sure.
Chris Beall (00:19:05):
And at that point… This is the hardest decision I think you make in business. We had a company with a pretty big expense bill every month, about 1.7 million, and we had a pretty small amount of cash, like $16,927, and that meant you had to take action. What action do you take? There’s raising money. There’s cutting expenses. There’s stuff. The action I took was to call a lot of people. Call all of our vendors who provide us with key services, call our customers who might be willing to pay us early, call a bunch of people that were not going to be working at the company anymore come the next Wednesday and have those conversations. And we managed to navigate from there to here, which is about three times bigger company with a lot more marquee customers, none of whom will talk about our product, because it’s a weapon, not a tool. People don’t like to talk about the weapons they’re using to dominate markets.
Chris Beall (00:20:09):
It’s funny that we have this thing that literally lets you dominate a market with conversations and I’m not kidding. I’m not speaking figuratively. I mean, literally you make a list, you get a message. You push a button. You talk to people and you build trust throughout your entire market before your number one competitor ever makes a move and then you harvest that trust over the next two, three years. And that’s what you do. That’s what that Market Dominance Guy’s Podcast is about. It’s a cookbook on how to dominate markets using a conversation-first approach. All we do at ConnectAndSell is let you push a button, talk to somebody on your list. That’s it.
Ron Brooks (00:20:48):
Yeah. Well, walk us through that button, Chris. What type of companies or what industries do you work with? Are you just across the board? Is it pretty diversified or do you have a specific industry or industries that you tend to target? And with that button, walk us through that. For those that are listening, what does that entail and how does that benefit… Say if I got an existing company and I’m listening to this and I say, “Hmm, I want to know more about ConnectAndSell because I think this can help us drive better relationships, closer-knit relationships, especially, and we’ll tell about this in a second, as it relates to all the noise of the pandemic, right?
Chris Beall (00:21:32):
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean the noise of the pandemic is actually minor compared to the noise of email and the noise of social. Those things became really, really noisy back, and started to bubble a little in 2004 and ’05, when voicemail became ubiquitous and you couldn’t get people on the phone as easily anymore. The biggest difference between 1983, 1984 and now is 1983, I could call any CEO or any VP of sales or anybody and some admin would answer the phone. I got through to human being 100% of the time and that admin would actually take a message and that person would probably call me back.
Ron Brooks (00:22:15):
Yes.
Chris Beall (00:22:16):
Now that’s a different world. It was so easy.
Ron Brooks (00:22:19):
What changed with that? I mean, what do you think resulted that into change into something different today? I mean-
Chris Beall (00:22:25):
Well, the cost of computer storage went down so much in the 2000 to 2004 timeframe that the providers of voicemail services, of phone services that had voicemail told everybody, “Open them up to the outside,” and they got spammed to death immediately by sales people. And so, folks stopped listening to their voicemail and the listen rate on voicemail went down 33% a year for three consecutive years, to finally getting to almost zero where it sits today. Here you have a funny situation. You got to talk to people to build trust. You got to build trust to get people to actually engage with you enough to trust you more than they trust themselves that they’ll buy something from you but you can only do that through voice because email is too noisy and doesn’t have enough information.
Chris Beall (00:23:10):
This is a little computer sciencey here, but it has 5,000 bits of information approximately. Your voice has 20,000 bits a second. Four emails per second in your voice. Think about that. And almost all of it carries trust information. It’s your tone of voice. It’s the pace of your voice. You, Champ’Ron, have the kind of voice that if you talk to somebody, they’re going to trust you, unless you say something really horrible about 100% of the time, and you’ve probably found that throughout your career. When you talk to somebody, a nice side effect is they trust you. Why? Because you sound trustworthy.
Ron Brooks (00:23:47):
Sure.
Chris Beall (00:23:47):
That’s just all there is to it, right? You’re comfortable. You’re not doing anything to them and your voice carries that and people smell, or they hear sincerity like we’ll smell fear, right? You can tell when somebody’s sincere.
Ron Brooks (00:24:00):
Sure.
Chris Beall (00:24:01):
Ow you got this problem. In 2005, 06, ’07, you can’t get people on the phone anymore because everything’s going to voicemail and then we turned to everything else. Ah, email, and then the social stuff shows up and all that, and each one is a little fad. It goes like this and then back down. The universal is still the human being and the conversation. The reason we do ConnectAndSell it all is to let folks open real relationships with a first conversation and then nurture those relationships with further conversations and do it with exactly zero effort on their part. None whatsoever. All they do is just like calling an Uber or a Lyft. You push a button and you wait.
Chris Beall (00:24:40):
Now, who do you talk to? Somebody on your list. Make a good list. Don’t put people your list you don’t want to talk to because you’re going to talk to them. And then we teach it as a sideline, or whatever, for free. We teach folks how to talk to people in a way that’s effective. We run a course called Flight School and Flight School, the first two hours of Flight School you’re calling your list and in two hours, you talk to 10, 15, 20 people, right? That’s 10 days worth of conversations.
Ron Brooks (00:25:13):
Absolutely.
Chris Beall (00:25:15):
And you get coached on the first seven seconds of the conversation. Every conversation, the first seven seconds, because that’s the key. Second Flight School session, two hours, you get coached on the value portion, what we call the 27 seconds. Third session of Flight School, you get coached on landing the airplane, and that is asking for the meeting. And the fourth session you get coached on handling turbulence, objections, and then you’re a master cold caller in four sessions of two hours each. Well, we offer that just for the price of the dials.
Ron Brooks (00:25:44):
Wow.
Chris Beall (00:25:45):
Because people got to… It takes practice. You got to-
Ron Brooks (00:25:48):
And it does.
Chris Beall (00:25:49):
… be trained and you got to get practiced.
Ron Brooks (00:25:52):
The way Chris, you just described that. I remember doing trainings. I think I shared with you offline that I was groomed through the banking industry of 17 years. And I remember getting in, as I groomed and evolved into leadership, and I was leading branch teams and I’m responsible for coordinating training, in some cases delivering training. And what you just described, I can remember the fear on new sales people in the branches, right? The sales reps that are at desk and that fear of that conversation, and I always would beat that drum of, “You’ve got to get over that fear. You got to have conversations. You’ve got to talk to people and you can’t be fearful of talking to people and you can’t be fearful of the turbulence, right? You got to know how to navigate that.”
Ron Brooks (00:26:43):
I love the way you described that in regards to the flight theme, because all those pieces of the conversation are so critical. How do you help people, and maybe these are younger organizations or maybe established ones, navigate that conversation because to go from being okay, to being good, to great, then to being where you excel at it, you’ve got to practice that, right? You’ve got to really embrace that piece of the conversation. And you and I both know, I mean, with what I do today with reaching out to bank CEOs, you’re exactly right. They’re not easy to get a hold of. What I’ve able to do is leverage what you just said. Initially, when I call a bank and I ask for the CEO, what am I saying, right?
Ron Brooks (00:27:36):
What compels that person at the bank to route my call to Jim or Jane or whoever the CEO is, and then for them to take it, Right? And so that’s something that’s an ongoing practice and the other thing I took from what you said is, it is. It’s an ongoing, continuous learning. I don’t know if anybody ever just completely masters it where you’re just the Oracle, chief, best of all time, cold caller or anything. I think the greats, like with anything, they continue to practice and sharpen that skill and continue to learn. Now, I think organizations that do that and take that type of mindset, even when they become great and they excel, they’re always looking to, and probably working with you, to how do we continuously improve that? How do we land the plane quicker, right? How do we get to the value quicker? How could we do all those things within our metrics?
Ron Brooks (00:28:35):
Chris, in my last role in banking, I had a 20-seat call service. It was my first time managing a call center piece within the retail and all the metrics that go into outbound calling and inbound calling and all those type of things and the time on the phone and all that type of thing and developing a sales team within that. I wish I’d had you back then. I would have… Really have helped me the business because there was heartburn, I guess I’ll say this, Chris, in taking people that were on the service end of the business and trying to convert them into the sales conversation and hoping that they take the empathy and the understanding that they have in the service conversation and translating that to the sales conversation. And we had problems with that. I’m free to admit we had significant problems in compelling our people to be able to do that.
Ron Brooks (00:29:39):
And like I said, I wish we had had a tool like this, to be honest with you, that I think would’ve helped shorten those learning curves, which would’ve helped us been much better with our clientele. Wouldn’t have been as clunky, not as goofy, and obviously, at the end, helps the whole bottom line because taking away the goofiness would’ve helped us be a little bit better. What are your thoughts? I know I just gave you a mouthful, but what are your thoughts on that, that whole how organizations can leverage you all’s offering and the flight school just to be better with the folks that are in these roles? And particularly, like you say, I think we’ll continue to go down this path like you described, where people are going to answer the phone less and less and less. We’ve got all these robo calls. We all get them. People have phones. They pay $200 a month for a cell phone. They never answer it. But again, I gave you a lot, but just some of your thoughts on some of that.
Chris Beall (00:30:43):
Oh, it’s fantastic. I love your thrust here, which is folks have got to be good… If you’re going to have conversations, you got to be good at it, right? There’s only really three things. One, is you’re having conversations with people that you got to shop with, that makes sense to talk with. Second is, is your conversation going to be something that causes them to want to take action, the next action that is useful for both of you? That action is probably to attend a scheduled meeting of some kind. I mean, the scheduled meeting is the universal product of B2B and of lot of B2C.
Ron Brooks (00:31:21):
Yeah, absolutely.
Chris Beall (00:31:23):
If it’s a meeting you’re selling, learn to sell the meeting. Stop selling the product.
Ron Brooks (00:31:27):
Yes.
Chris Beall (00:31:29):
Why does somebody attend a meeting? You need to know why they attend a meeting, why they commit? They commit because they’re curious. They’re curious only after they trust you. We all get this in the wrong order. It sounds like we’re a training company, by the way, which is funny. What we are is we’re a mechanism for delivering about 50 million fully-navigated dials per year to companies that want to dominate their markets, from one person shops up to the biggest companies in the world. And we do it in this very brute-force way. We have hundreds and hundreds of people who navigate phone calls on behalf of other people, but never speak to their targets.
Ron Brooks (00:32:10):
Wow.
Chris Beall (00:32:10):
That’s what we do. Think of it as your Uber driver comes and picks you up. They take you where you’re going, but they don’t go have the meeting for you. We are your Uber driver. I’ve got hundreds and hundreds of Uber drivers and they bring you a conversation and put it in your ear and you’re talking to somebody you want to talk with. But what we’ve learned is, we have to help folks with their scripts, their targeting, their messaging delivery, the tone of the delivery, the psychological framework for all that. And the big breakthrough that people have to get over their own fear is to realize this, and Chris Voss taught me this. Chris Voss is the FBI hostage negotiator. That’s the hardest cold calling job in the world.
Ron Brooks (00:32:53):
Right. I could imagine, right.
Chris Beall (00:32:56):
What’s your product? Well, a 20 year jail sentence. That’s my product. What do you think? That’s what I’m selling to you.
Ron Brooks (00:33:02):
When [crosstalk 00:33:03] you walk out of the room, we might shoot you and kill you, right? But the main point [crosstalk 00:33:06] it have a conversation.
Chris Beall (00:33:06):
Let’s have a conversation, right? All starts with a cold call right? He taught me two things that are super important. One-
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Chris Beall (00:33:58):
… he said, “You only have seven seconds and stick at somebody to trust you. That’d be it.” And second, he says, “They start off in a perfect place. You ambush them. They’re afraid of you. You think you’re afraid of the conversation. They’re afraid of you 100% of the time because you’re an invisible stranger and invisible strangers are the people from the other side of the river. And when they’re invisible, it’s night and they’re strangers. They’re here at night. That’s not good. They’re not bringing us a Bud Light. They are doing something else. They’re here to change the demographics of our village rather suddenly, right? We don’t like it and it’s great because it’s like a springboard. It’s like going out on a diving board. This is where it’s at its maximum compression. They’re afraid of us.
Chris Beall (00:34:39):
If we can relieve that fear by showing them that we see the world through their eyes and then immediately demonstrating we’re competent to solve a problem they have right now,” Chris Voss says, “They will trust us 100% of the time so we can make a seven second jump to trust in a human conversation, through the skillful application of two sentences. Sentence number one, “I know I’m an interruption.” Say it just like that. “I know I’m an interruption,” hammering the word, “Know.” Throw yourself under the bus and you are taking accountability for being the problem that they know you are so you’re saying, “I see the world your way.” And then secondly, change your voice to playful, curious immediately. This is hard and say, “Can I have 27 seconds to tell you why I called?” Playful, curious, goes up a couple of times.
Chris Beall (00:35:28):
And what you get is a statement you just made, which is, “I’m competent to solve the problem you have right now. The problem you have right now is me. I will go away in exchange for 27 seconds to tell you why I called,” for a purpose, “To tell you why I called.” And people will say, “Yes,” if it’s delivered correctly. Now how much information is this? Well, it’s that 20,000 bits times seven seconds. It’s a lot. It’s 140,000 bits of information. Very little in the words, very much in the tone. You get the tone and then you got to go to the hard part, which is, “How much do you believe in the value of what you’re offering?” If you don’t believe in the value of what you’re offering, which is a meeting, even if they’re never going to buy from you, if you don’t believe the meanings of value even are never going to, value to them, even if they’re never going to buy from you, you can’t sell it. You got to believe that.
Chris Beall (00:36:24):
There’s one of my customers who’s, I can’t say his name right now, chief sales officer of the number four or five biggest insurance brokerage in the world. He has himself, using ConnectAndSell with his team in a series of blitz and coaches, has invented a new mindset trick. It’s like the Jedi mind trick. It’s really something. He has told himself, honestly, that he believes the meeting that he has on offer, that he’s offering, is so important to this other person that he insists that they take it. Not that he asks that they take it. He insists for their own good. And he has to first make that mindset shift, right?
Ron Brooks (00:37:03):
Of course.
Chris Beall (00:37:05):
He is converting 20% plus of his conversations to meetings. Suddenly, his team, without adding one person, is four times bigger than a team that’s converting 5%, and 5% is the threshold for Market Dominance. 5% conversation in meeting conversion. Above that, you can dominate any market, if you can talk to enough people and that’s why you come to me, because then you can talk to 30 people a day or, you only have 30 minutes, you can talk to four people a day. Whatever it is, you’re going to dominate the market if you talk to enough people and you build enough trust and then you follow up with more conversation.
Chris Beall (00:37:45):
That’s a long answer, but that’s what we do, is we integrate the brute-force of having hundreds of agents navigating your phone calls for you in the background, but never talking to your targets. Seamless experience for the customer. They just answer the phone. I answer, “This is Chris,” and you know what I hear next? Your voice. Chris, Champ’Ron here. I know I’m an interruption. Can I have 27 seconds to tell you why I called,” and say, “Sure, go ahead. Shoot, man.” You’re in, right?
Ron Brooks (00:38:16):
And then [crosstalk 00:38:16].
Chris Beall (00:38:16):
Then you’re there, right? Your job when, as a ConnectAndSell customer is talk on the beep and say the right thing and say it the right way and say it effectively. That’s it. Why can you dominate markets doing this? And I don’t care what your market is, right? B2B, B2C… We tend to do B2B. We had a State Farm agent the other day do a B2C play using our connect on live voice protocol. And afterwards he says, “Chris, there isn’t another one of these in the insurance world. Do you understand what you have here?” I said, “Yeah. B2C, I’m not so sure of,” because of all the regulatory stuff around calling and all that, right?
Ron Brooks (00:38:51):
Right.
Chris Beall (00:38:52):
But if you have a market and you want to dominate it, you actually don’t have to do that much. If you can deliver, if you have the goods and you have the will to dominate, you actually just need to back up, make a list, and talk to people on that list with a simple message to set a meeting. If more than 5% of them accept the meeting, you’re assured of your market dominance, even if you don’t yet have a product. Simple. It’s simple. And everybody’s told a bunch of complex stuff. “You got to do this email thing, the social thing, this tool, that tool, the other tool.” Here’s the tool. It’s way inside of your brain. It’s your own brain and it’s talking to their own brain about something really human, which is, “Do I trust you? Do you trust me?”
Ron Brooks (00:39:42):
Yeah. Wow. And as simple as it is, it always marvels me, Chris, at just how downright complicated we make it, right?
Chris Beall (00:39:53):
Yeah.
Ron Brooks (00:39:55):
And when I say, “We,” I refer to particularly organizations. I can recall, early in my banking career, I went through the management training program and I remember going through the sales training. And I remember this big, thick ass book and it’s all this role play and all this complicated… We’re saying all this… It’s just all this stuff. It’s all this fluff, right? And this was at a time when banking, Chris, was… Banks were in this period, post-September 11th where they’re trying to take advantage of these technologies. The ATM’s starting to advance. And so, now they want to start getting people to use the ATM more and the tellers less. And they would come into meetings and say, “Oh, it’s not going to bother the tellers,” because we’d rise up and say, “Well, you’re going to put tellers out of work.” “No, we’re not. No, we’re not.” Of course, now, you look at what they’ve done, but this was the thing.
Ron Brooks (00:40:51):
But we would go through these sales training. You’d be there all day and it’s all this fluff stuff. And did you go back? For those that took action and try to do it in real life, you’re not really seeing this lift that you really expect to see. And so, you end up having all these layers of fluff because you’re putting pressure on people to perform on their sales goals but then they’re not really executing, at least the way that they should be because there’s all this fluff built into it. And I think what you described is… What had to happen over time is simplifying the conversation and, and focus on the conversation and not ourselves as the organization. One of the things I always had in the back of my mind is, “This is more about us. This is not about even the person I’m talking about. The person I’m talking about is just a means to an end for me to show up on the sales board and look good, or someone in finance to be, “Hey, look what we’ve done. We’re up 10%. Look at us. Let’s buy another yacht.”
Chris Beall (00:41:53):
Yeah, I know.
Ron Brooks (00:41:53):
Yeah, we’ve gone through all this fluff, Chris, and I think what it sounds like your organization helps organizations do is cut the BS, right? At the end of the day, what’s your true goal, right? You want to talk to the people that you can solve the most problems for, with whatever it is that you’re offering, your goods, service, whatever it is. That’s what you want to do, all right? Here’s a mechanism to do that because you’re paying these people salaries or by the hour, plus incentives, plus everything else that you pay people; salary, benefit, whatever. And you want them talking to the right people, right?
Ron Brooks (00:42:40):
You don’t want them hanging out all day so cutting out the fluff and the BS out of that sales conversation, and I think this transition not just to the… We’re talking about corporate companies, but I think those of you that are listening, MYB community, that have small businesses, maybe it’s just yourself, or maybe you got a few employees, maybe a handful of them, this still applies what Chris is saying, that you still have to have great conversations with the right people and you got to take the fluff out of it.
Chris Beall (00:43:13):
Yeah. I mean, it truly is that simple and people have a hard time believing it. That’s why we offer this thing called the Intensive Test Drive, is experience the simplicity of talking to tons of people and then realize you probably need to get better at it.
Ron Brooks (00:43:29):
Yes.
Chris Beall (00:43:30):
And if you want to get better at it, you’re going to have to practice, but you probably should have a framework for having those conversations that has a shot, that has something to do with something universal. Well, the only universal thing isn’t your product. Your product’s irrelevant. It’s human beings, right?
Ron Brooks (00:43:49):
Yes.
Chris Beall (00:43:49):
We actually can onboard a new salesperson into our organization in one day. The training consists of, “Here’s the script. Why should you believe that this meeting that you’re offering is so valuable that everybody should say, “Yes?”
Ron Brooks (00:44:07):
Sure.
Chris Beall (00:44:08):
That’s it. That’s it because you’re just selling the meeting and you just have to believe in it. Today, my team, for instance… I’m just looking here. I brought up another screen. We could share it, but I don’t think I will. Anybody who wants to see all this stuff, by the way, I’d be happy just to show them my team live. Live today, my team of 12, it is… What time is it? 10:10 in the morning on the Pacific Coast where most of them are, they’ve set 17 meetings and they’ve done that through 246 conversations. Their conversion rate isn’t great today at 6.91%. I happen to know why. Because they have a whole bunch of relatively new lists and so these are very cold calls today.
Chris Beall (00:44:53):
Very, very good dial to conversation today. 12.84 dials to get a conversation. Pretty good dial to meeting as a result, 185.82 dials to get a meeting and they’ve set 89 follow up conversations that’ll happen at some point in the future, in addition to the 17 meetings. And what they did not do was dial the phone, navigate phone systems, talk to gatekeepers and hang up on voicemail 3,159 times, which I don’t want to pay them to do. That’s not sales work. That’s just grunt work.
Ron Brooks (00:45:25):
Yeah, that’s just… Yeah, exactly.
Chris Beall (00:45:25):
It’s got to be done. Got to be done. Got to be done well, but really, let’s not these high value sales people do it. We have CEOs who use ConnectAndSell. I can think of one. Guy called me up and said, “Hey, I heard something about your product. I want to give it a try.” I said, “Okay, let’s do the test drive.” He’s calling ranchers, people who own ranches to buy the mineral rights underneath their ranch. That’s an interesting business.
Ron Brooks (00:45:52):
It is, oh yeah.
Chris Beall (00:45:52):
He came up with it. High school, he came up with this thing and he’s now maybe 35, 40 years old, has a very thriving business. And we worked on some scripting and this and that, and he did the test drive first and found out, “I need to get a little better.” He personally is doing the calls and he did so well, he had to go raise 52 million. Stop his business, go raise 52 million to buy all those mineral rights [crosstalk 00:46:22] . Now for me, I was like, “Okay, great,” because it was good for him so he stopped using ConnectAndSell for a while. We didn’t make any money off that, but that’s fine. His business thrived because of trust. Building conversation is certainly the key in getting somebody to talk to you about the mineral rights for their ranch that’s been in the family for 137 years. He’s a CEO, one man show at the time. Now he’s got a few people helping him out and the business is a little bit bigger.
Chris Beall (00:46:51):
By the way, the COVID thing you asked about, the pandemic thing, here’s the funny thing about it. Two things I think everybody should know. Well, three. One is the relationship between city and country. City and suburbs change forever. It’s done. The mouse trap is snapped. The mouse is dead. It’s done. And the reason is, people who make the decisions as to where their companies work, where their people work, have all moved and they’re not moving back and those are the decision makers and [inaudible 00:47:22]. It doesn’t matter that the CFO is also happy that they don’t have a lease anymore on a building in the city, which is also a big deal. The big deal is the senior staff all move to where they want to retire. Today-
Ron Brooks (00:47:39):
Yeah, that’s true.
Chris Beall (00:47:39):
… right now, I am now 14 minutes late to go over and meet with the inspector on a house that we decided to buy here in Green Valley, Arizona, and we made that decision one week ago today and found a house, had it under contract on Monday, and should close next week. Well, it’s people like myself and my fiance, but even bigger and badder people than that, much bigger and badder whose decisions affect the lives of thousands and thousands and thousands of employees. They’ve moved, and they’re not moving back, right? They don’t want the commute. If you’re an entrepreneur who has the opportunity to build businesses that serve people away from the old centers, you’ll do really, really well.
Chris Beall (00:48:27):
There’s now room in America for an extra probably, I don’t know, 10, $20 million business, or 10 to 20 million businesses that couldn’t have existed before because nobody was there to buy, but now they’re all working from home and they’ll buy locally. That’s part of it. Second, work from home, there’s so many services and products that could be provided to help folks manage their work-from-home workforce. It’s the biggest transition in the history of our economy, the fastest one that’s ever happened. It makes the internet look slow.
Ron Brooks (00:49:01):
Right, exactly. Exactly.
Chris Beall (00:49:03):
It does.
Ron Brooks (00:49:03):
Exactly.
Chris Beall (00:49:03):
Dot-com was nothing compared to WFH. We have evidence from 250 plus customers of ours who went work from home over about a 10-day period in March and we get to see all the numbers, every dial, every connect, every conversation, everything. It’s a real thing and it ain’t changing. If you have a business idea to help companies or individuals… I saw a company the other day that they build sheds. They take tough shed-like sheds and they turn them into offices and plant them in your yard, wire them up with internet and everything else under the sun, and now you have an office at home, away from the kids. Who doesn’t want to buy that, right? Brilliant entrepreneurship and in that one’s got to work in every place that people have moved in America, everywhere they already were and everywhere where got to work from home. That’s thing number two.
Chris Beall (00:49:56):
Thing number three is, all the opportunities that allow you to make great businesses always show up in times of maximum change, Always. This is the universal truth of entrepreneurship. I say, beta, uncertainty, volatility, what they call beta in financial markets. Not growth. Alpha is growth. Beta is volatility. Beta favors entrepreneurs. Beta favors entrepreneurs and beta hurts the big established companies. The opportunities all show up when there’s high beta and there is a ton of beta right now.
Ron Brooks (00:50:34):
Yeah, exactly. And the beta, like you said… I mean, the pandemic one, and then just the overall environment of everything is driving so much of that. That’s such tremendous example of an idea that you mentioned. I’ve heard some companies springing up that are helping people with this whole transition to WFH and you’re exactly right. There’s no going back. I think it just really just continues to evolve, just to say the least. And so yeah, you mentioned being late for looking at your house. I hate doing that to you, Chris. I don’t want [crosstalk 00:51:12].
Chris Beall (00:51:11):
I don’t mind. For the one thing, my fiance is the greatest house person on earth I’ve ever met. She’s so good. If she says, “It’s good,” I’m good with it. Plus, she’s better salesperson that I am. She carries a big, big, big quota for a big, big company. Five accounts, billion dollars so that-
Ron Brooks (00:51:34):
There you go.
Chris Beall (00:51:35):
She’s a beast. I’m in good hands. But talking with you is a lot more fun than talking to a house inspector.
Ron Brooks (00:51:47):
Yeah. Well, that’s good. That’s good to know, man. I appreciate that. As we do wrap up, because this has been a tremendous dialogue to say the least, Chris, talk about family and business. You talked about with your first wife and now your fiance and with everything that you’ve done professionally and that sort of thing, talk about just the impact of family and the importance of family as you go through your business. I think a lot of people always look to that, whether it’s to balance that or how to incorporate that or just make sure that you’re given the proper time to each. How has that been for you through your career as you’ve launched and exited businesses? What’s that role of family played in that?
Chris Beall (00:52:34):
Yeah. For me, I travel a lot. I used to travel a hundred plus days a year, so that’s hard because you’re away a lot, right? I think, however, you got to figure out how to counter some of that. For me, it was reading, I love to read. And so every night I was at home, and I mean every single night I was at home, I’d read to my kids and I wouldn’t read kids stuff to them. I’d try to give them that broader view of the world and let them go to sleep to my voice and did that every night so a hundred days a year out that still leaves 256 of them or something like that, 65, whatever. A little dyslexia there. I think you got to have a regular rhythm around doing something together.
Chris Beall (00:53:20):
And another thing is incorporating. I don’t know if it annoyed my kids or not, but they’re all business experts because they’ve listened to tons of conversations on speakerphone and they’ve postmortemed those conversations with me. Every one of my kids knows, without ever having to be given the business courses, they know what it’s like to run a business, to create a business, what the concerns are, what it’s really about. Why do you do business at all? Businesses, they’re there to help people do what they can’t conveniently do for themselves. That’s why we make businesses. And I think sharing that with your family so that your kids… Especially your kids who are getting an education about how the world works in a way they might decide… My kids aren’t all business people. My youngest is. He wants to be CEO of big company that he works for. He thinks it’s more fun to start at the bottom.
Chris Beall (00:54:24):
I have a daughter who I helped out her out a little bit, my first wife and I did, just recently to buy the business where she was the front desk clerk. She started literally as the salesperson and running the front desk of a scrub store and she now owns it. And so, something happened there. She’s a natural entrepreneur. But let your kids at least see, hear and feel the business itself rather than just your frustration, which is going to be a lot. And the other thing is, this is a hard one, I don’t know how you do it, but make sure you never let your frustration with business, which is universal, it’s the universal emotion of business is frustration, never let even a tiny amount of that leak over to how you respond to your kids, to your wife, to your husband, whatever, because if you can’t compartmentalize that away, you’re basically… I don’t know.
Chris Beall (00:55:28):
It’s like kicking the dog when you come home. Why would you do that? Why would you kick your family just because… Just look at it this way. The dominant emotion of business is frustration and that means you’re trying-
Ron Brooks (00:55:43):
Yes.
Chris Beall (00:55:44):
… so accept it. Accept it.
Ron Brooks (00:55:47):
Yeah, absolutely. No, that’s tremendous. That’s very rich, Chris, to say the least. You laid it heavy on us. I think a lot of times the frustration within business of… Whatever that is, right. It’s very simple to take that and apply it globally and you’re low hanging fruit can be your family because they’re there with you every day and it’s easy to lump them in as that source of frustration. And I think that’s something for all of us to take away is, as we get engulfed in business and as we do transactions, we’re building relationships and things happen in the course of doing that, that we’re able to be able to balance our mindset and not have the frustrations of one or the other impede what you’re trying to do and what you’re trying to accomplish.
Ron Brooks (00:56:44):
Working within the family unit and ensuring that you bring the proper positive energy and perspective to your family, no matter what’s taking place in your office, wherever that is, and then vice versa, not bringing the family issues into the office and making them a part of then the business, in that sense, I think, goes a long way to helping be able to keep clarity and understand how to turn off and shut off each one when it needs to be and when you have to focus, I think just goes a long way. And I’m speaking to those Chris, that are listening, that are coming into the new year and they’re looking to launch their business. They’re trying to keep their business going or maybe they’re seeing a lot of success, but sometimes they may not have that equal amount of success away from the office, at home, in the personal life.
Ron Brooks (00:57:45):
And one of the reasons is maybe there’s not the best of balance with that, the way you described it. I think that just goes a long way. I think that’s very rich and I think that helps us out. And I think that’s one of many things that I think we can all take away when we get done listening in doing this podcast is something we can go implement and that may be the one thing, like I talked to you offline, Chris, that may be the one thing that someone takes away from this and 2021 becomes just a bang out just from something that simple, right? And that’s one of the things I love about doing this particular podcast and then talking with great folks like yourself. I mean, this is definitely tremendous and that was very rich what you gave us.
Chris Beall (00:58:28):
Fantastic. I’m glad. By the way, one more little thing. Business is hard. It’s hard on the body. It’s hard on the body because we sit a lot and we tend to have more thoughts that are in the worry stress department than are good for our bodies. Young entrepreneurs, I think, tend to neglect their bodies and it’s a bad idea. Talk about a marathon. All businesses are marathons. They are by their nature. It takes 10 years to make a great business in the best case, and you just got to take care of your body. I’m old, as you can tell just by talking to me, right. I’m 66 and I go out and get in my 20,000 steps most days, barefoot, trotting around, and I do it while I’m holding meetings and I prioritize it because nobody else can take care of my body for me. My employees, my customers, oddly enough, they rely on me doing that. It looks like a selfish personal activity, but if I’m not physically there, I’m not mentally there.
Ron Brooks (00:59:34):
Yeah. Very true. Yeah, very true. Yeah. They all interconnect and relate so much, your spiritual, your mindset, the body. All of those things all have to be in alignment and I think that’s something that people are recognizing more and more, Chris. And not just recognizing it, but again, like we talked about throughout this episode, they’re taking action with it, right? I think people around are just… One of the things that the pandemic, I think, is going to… I guess because some of the end result is going to be people simplifying things much more, simplifying their life taking what’s actually meaningful into perspective, and again, cutting out the fluff and the BS.
Ron Brooks (01:00:22):
And so initially, and you saw this, initially when the pandemic hit, everybody was in this mad dash of, “Let me get back to normal,” right? And they go, “Well, the new normal,” blah, blah, blah.” But getting back to normal meant getting back to that stress. Let me get back to the stress, what I know, right? The stress, the disappointments, the negative… All those things. You become so familiar with it, right? There was this mad dash for the first six months of the pandemic and then people start to realize, “You know what? Yeah, sure. I’d like to have the vaccine, but look what this has changed. Look what I get to do now. Look at the autonomy that I get.”
Ron Brooks (01:01:02):
Now, there’s the other geopolitical piece of this, which we won’t necessarily get into of haves and have nots and what some of this creates that maybe a growing divide between people at different levels, and that’s another problem, I guess, that’s ongoing that we have to try to solve as a country. But nonetheless, I think that this has changed things and people are taking more stuff. Listen, I’m having conversations with bankers. Think of how conservative the banking industry is. I’m having conversations with a CFO while he’s jogging, or she’s jogging, and we’re talking about numbers. We’re talking about data, things like that. They’re sharing their screen as they’re walking the dog, or as they’re out doing some other activity, right? And there’s even some cases where they say, “Hey Ron, let’s revisit this in 15. I want to make sure I get these steps. I got this hill coming up,” whatever.
Ron Brooks (01:01:56):
And so then we’ll pause and then we come back after a little intermission, and we jump right back to it, right? That would’ve never happened a year, year and a half ago. CFO’s sitting there with a red shirt and… Well, I’m sorry, red shirt. White shirt, red tie, blue suit, that just sits there and stares at screens all day and goes to lunch for an hour and that’s it.
Chris Beall (01:02:20):
Yep. Now they’re in the sweats out trotting around and [crosstalk 01:02:24].
Ron Brooks (01:02:23):
Yeah, exactly. Yep, exactly. It’s way different. And so yeah, thank you for that. That’s very rich and authentic from you. And I think again, that helps us all, Chris. Listen, MYB, I’d like for you to continue this. I want you to reach out to Chris and his team. Make sure you go to connectandsell.com. I believe, from myself in this conversation with Chris, I think him and his company can really help your company. If you’re really trying to engage that relationship dialogue, if you really want to talk to the people that you need to talk to, as Chris described this noisy environment that we’re in, if you want to dominate, you want to talk to the right people, you should get with connectandsell.com. Make sure you go there.
Ron Brooks (01:03:11):
The link’s in the show notes. Click it, go, read a little bit more, connect, reach out to Chris and let them know that you heard him right here on the Minding Your Business podcast and don’t forget the marketdominanceguys.com. Don’t forget that podcast as well. Chris, this has been a pleasure, man. I appreciate it. I love your energy around it. I love the history you’re able to share with helping us understand perspective of business over time and I love your positive energy that you bring to the business, that approach. I could tell that cascades through your organization and we always toss around that word culture, but it definitely sounds like you guys are driving a very good, positive culture that you’re able to then solve problems for the rest of us. And so, that’s tremendous.
Chris Beall (01:04:02):
Thank you so much. What we say around here, “If you’re not having fun, you’re not taking this seriously enough.”
Ron Brooks (01:04:07):
Right. I like that. I like that, man. Listen, best wishes to you and the fiance on the new edition with the house. Shout out to you in your family and very best to 2021, and if you make it to Memphis, man, like I say, hit me up and I’d love to connect with you.
Chris Beall (01:04:27):
Fantastic, Champ’Ron. Thanks so much.
Ron Brooks (01:04:31):
All right. Thank you, Chris. Chris Beall was our guest today, the CEO of connectandsell.com, MYB. Just tremendous. It’s always great. I like to bring tremendous people to you guys that you can connect with, that you can feel that are authentic, not robotic, just human beings, right? And that’s what we thought, that was the essence of today’s conversation, right? How do we have human to human conversation? Even though we’re using technology, how do we use the technology to still enhance the human connection and I think you guys could see how that could be done. Don’t forget me. Text me 312-847-4071. Free e-book. I send out other information of value as well. When my various podcast guests have different things going on, webinars, workshops, things like that, I send those things out to you.
Ron Brooks (01:05:21):
No spam. No BS. I’d love to be able to keep you informed and keep you aware of what’s going on. Definitely do that and again, don’t forget me at champronbrooks.com. Listen, there’s three things that connect us no matter where we’re from, no matter what side of the tracks we come from. We all want to be a little bit better for ourselves, a little bit better for our families, and a little bit better for our communities. And if we can remember that when we interact with every person that we come across, we’ll all collectively make this place a little bit better.
Ron Brooks (01:05:50):
No matter who’s sitting in the White House and whether you agree with that or not, no matter again, where a person’s from, where you’re from, or what cards you’ve been dealt, those are three things we all have in common, right? If we focus on those commonalities versus the few differences that we have, we can all make this place a little bit better. Look forward to connecting with you again on the next episode. Thank you so much. I’m your host Champ’Ron. Thanks again to my guest today, Chris Beall, and we’ll catch it next time. Go be great
