The Rise and Fall of the Sales Empire
The earliest civilizations on earth developed between the years of 4000 and 3000 BC. When the rise of agriculture and trade allowed people to have surplus food and economic stability, many people no longer had to practice farming, which allowed for a diverse array of professions and interests to flourish in a relatively confined geographic area. The use of fire, the [inaudible 00:01:02] of the wheel, learning to domesticate animals, all these plus a really cool thing called writing to record their progress. All became milestones as we climbed the civilization tree. And later you could say in the colonial rush of the mid 16th century, the Western Europeans brought even newer technologies and ideas and plants and animals that were new to the Americas that would transform people’s lives some as well, no, not necessarily for the better. Things such as guns are tools and weapons, but also Christianity and Roman law and sugarcane and horses and cattle all became hallmarks of what’s called civilized society.
But what about our sales profession? Can we say that sales has tracked at the same arc as the rest of civilizations’ trademarks? After all, one can probably argue that our craft of sales hasn’t really changed much in the past few thousand years as our market-dominant sales historian, Chris Beall is fond of reminding us sales used to be an interaction among strangers at the crossroads. Between two people who would likely never see each other again, once the transaction was complete. One may get miles away from the city after interacting with a salesperson only to realize that the thing that they purchased doesn’t do what the salesperson said it would. And what do you do? I mean, there’s no Amazon or Yelp reviews to post at this point after such a discouraging interaction, only more fear and suspicion from that sales experience that in turn, the next salesperson they ran into, that salesperson needed to overcome all that trust distrust in that, that fear and suspicion to secure their sale.
But today in the market dominance guys’ sales labs, we believe that sales does indeed have a shot at civilizing the world and how it would do this by forcing trust and sincerity to the forefront of how humans interact and conduct commerce. And they’ve really never been there, argues Chris, as you’ll hear. Sure we’ve had all sorts of societal mechanisms, things like duels. And we spoke in an earlier episode about the Colt 45 peacemaker as an indispensable tool to keep in hold politeness in honor and check because simply as you remember, if you weren’t polite to another person, then you’d be challenged to a duel. And if you were in enough duels, the math would eventually work against you and you’re eventually going to be dead or out of business. But the current world, we have the anti dual. We have the internet where no one can be polite, no business can be impolite for long, and expect to still stay in business.
But it’s the B2B buyer who will actually challenge you to the duals in today’s world. The B2B buyer, because of their strong need to not get fired due to the information gap that they want between buyers and sellers, they’re motivated to get information. Real and true and timely information. And nobody can or should with all the sales enablement, best practices that are out there today, no one should be as educated as any of your salespeople, simply because of the nature of specialization. But if you do insult that sales prospect or you’re insincere or you’re untrustworthy, or you exaggerate, and you give them any reason not to trust you, they are in essence, going to quote, kill you. And they have the easiest way in the world of killing you. And it’s got a great name too. It’s called ghosting.
And Chris reminds us that they are not the ones who become the ghost in that description. We become the damn ghost because we’re already dead to them. So in this week’s episode of the market dominance guys, we learn why we’re at the cusp of true importance for the roles of sales in today’s society. And to need to understand that the game has to move on from being a mere primitive game and instead become more of a sincere set of human intention actions based on universal principles. And the most universal of these probably is that somebody has to actually be part of the conversation at the point of fear, and springboard of fear. When you can generate trust out of that fear, then you’re going to win as long as you don’t blow it. So grab your Rosetta stone, grab your Flint and welcome to this week’s episode, entitled the rise and fall of the sales empire.
Speaker 4 (06:22):
As an SDR, if I have an SDR team, my average handling time, my average call time per call should be a minute and a half-ish, maybe two minutes. If I have an SDR team that has more than a two-minute average conversation, then I’m getting too deep in discovery and they’re going too far down the funnel. And that’s probably why my conversion rates are or were they are.
Chris Beal (06:46):
And your show rates are probably too high.
Speaker 4 (06:48):
And you show rates are too high. Yes.
Chris Beal (06:51):
What you try to do is, you want to get enough curiosity in order to get some energy coming towards you. You don’t want that energy to be high enough to always get over the hump. And the reason isn’t that you don’t want it there, is that the process of getting there overspends the trust that you’ve had, and therefore yields an unreliable result. That as you ended up cherry-picking and leaving a good part of the market for your competitors. As soon as you walk away from a situation that where they should have for their own good attended the discovery call, and you don’t give them the chance to make that choice themselves, you’ve done work for your competitor.
You have actually introduced into that person’s mind some new thinking about a problem. And now when your competitor shows up, they have an advantage. So if you want to work for your competitor overqualified during cold calls. You’re spending-
Speaker 4 (07:41):
Overqualified [inaudible 00:07:41]. Yes.
Chris Beal (07:42):
You’re spending money to work for your competitor at that point. You just don’t know when they’re going to harvest the result. Whereas if somebody doesn’t attend your meeting, they’re not going to attend the other guy’s meeting either. It’s fine. Let it ripen. They will ripen and you’ll get 60% of them over three years to attend your discovery calls. And then you own the market. It’s not which 60%, but this is the other thing that’s really funny. 40% will never attend your discovery calls. Great. That’s just fine. That includes the ones you’re talking to now. So the fact that you’re talking to somebody other than that, you should do your best to get them sufficiently curious to commit the commitment is when they go to their calendar, commitment isn’t is an action.
The action is the jump over to actually attending the discovery call. So there’s four steps we do in a cold call. Three of the four steps we do in a follow-up call. So cold call. We do fear, fear to trust, trust to curiosity, curiosity to commitment, commitment represented as something on your calendar and my calendar. So, that’s what we’re trying to accomplish.
Speaker 4 (08:51):
Fear to trust, trust to curiosity, curiosity commitment.
Chris Beal (08:55):
Yep. And that’s, as far as we want to go in the cold call. The prospect may want to turn that into action, but the setup is bad for action because the trust isn’t high enough. We need more trust. They got to qualify themselves further. By showing up at the meeting. The horse must approach me. I’m never going to chase the horse. The horse is always bigger than me. The horse can run away.
And even when its back has to me, it can kick me. It’s a bad place, right? They got stuff on both ends. I don’t want any of it. I don’t want [inaudible 00:09:27] to bite me. I don’t want them to kick me. I don’t want any of that. I want to live at another day because, by the way, I’m just like every other big animal I have to be careful of myself. I got to make sure I stay, but so I wanted to generate this little sequence right on the cold call on the follow-up call or the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth conversation. I don’t have to start anymore with the fear. There’s no fear. I actually get to start with whatever trust I have in the bank account from before. Then I amplify that trust slightly by referring to the previous conversation. You’re important. I remember when we spoke and what we talked about and what you said. A lot of you in there. We includes you.
We includes you again. And what you said is just you. I’m kind of a little more trustworthy when you answered the phone, you were neutral. I remind you of the previous conversation, which I don’t expect you to remember, but the reminding process should tells you that I care about. [inaudible 00:10:28] I remembered, [inaudible 00:10:29] I remember [inaudible 00:10:30] hearing act. That’s why do Memorial services. Even the dead preferred to be remembered and this person is still alive. So then when we get into discovery, we’re in a completely new world, because there’s enough trust that they came to us, if we’re really smart in discovery, we don’t actually start spending that trust right off the bat, by asking interrogation style questions. We actually don’t. First of all, we remind ourselves, what are the three things that this person is going to walk away with? Even if it’s only one of the three that will be a value to them for the rest of their life, no matter if we ever do these things together.
Because that’s what I sold them. I sold a meeting where they’re going to walk away with something of value and it’s not going to be a gift card. Somebody called me the other day and said, “what do you think Chris if we gave out [inaudible 00:11:21] what if we gave out a gift card for attending the discovery meeting?” It’s like, well, I don’t know. Did you marry your wife or do you just like pay her on a regular basis? It kind of depends on what kind of relationship you want, but if you’re going into business with somebody because you’re really going to help them over time, you probably marrying them. If you want to have a prostitution relationship with somebody, start with the gift card, but you better keep it up because if it takes a gift card to do one, it’s going to take discounting [inaudible 00:11:56].
So I’d be ready. I’d put that in my budget, right? Lots of gift cards going down this road. But they trusted you enough to show up without a gift card or what if it is [inaudible 00:12:07] improve my show rate. You don’t want an improve show rate from gift cards. You don’t want that little speed bump in the way now they showed up. The best way to open, and we could have a whole section on discovery, the best way to open a discovery call is first to remind yourself the most important step on a discovery call is inside yourself.
It’s like when I did that run on Sunday morning from here to Reno, the most important thing wasn’t making sure my feet were taped up and making sure I had water in my backpack. And then I had enough bars to eat on the way and all that. Most important thing was the gut check, is to look inside myself and ask myself fairly seriously, is this an undertaking which has an unknown amount of effort, pain, and uncertainty, and maybe danger. 64 years old. I don’t have a cardiologist. My friend Jim Haggard sent me a note, does your cardiologist approve of you cavorting around doing this? Right? And I had to answer my cardiologist, whoever he, or she might turn out to be in the future. [inaudible 00:13:16]
I have to be my own cardiologist. Right? So what if I was endangering myself? I’m endangering myself. What am I doing to the future of my kids? What am I doing to Helen? Who really kind of thinks it’s right to live the rest of our mutual lives together in some long kind of way. So I had to do the gut check. That’s what I do before every discovery call. I don’t go research this person. I don’t research their company. I check inside myself. I put in the sincerity dipstick. I want to know, do I sincerely believe that the odds are good. That whoever it is I’m meeting with has kind of learn something, in the economic realm, in the emotional realm, and in the strategic realm, even just one of those three sufficient that it will be worth their 15 minutes, even if we never do business together. That’s the key. That’s the product.
So as an SDR, I need to know I’m selling that product and what those three things are. And those with three features of the product. I don’t have to say them, but I have to know them. I have to believe them. And how often does anybody ever teach their SDRs the three things somebody is most likely to walk away from a discovery meeting with that will benefit them for the rest of their life and have nothing to do with buying our product.
Speaker 4 (14:30):
You’re talking about the economic and emotional and strategic realm?
Chris Beal (14:33):
Yeah. Something you might learn. [crosstalk 00:14:35]. Does anybody think about teaching their SDRs the importance of believing that the meeting itself that they’re selling has value independent of the product or is the meeting a stepping stone on the way to selling them a deal? In which case we know who it’s for. It’s not for them. It’s for us. And as soon as we start selling for us, not for them, we’re toast. That’s a mistake Jesus wouldn’t have made.
Speaker 4 (15:00):
Yeah, that’s right.
Chris Beal (15:01):
Right?
Speaker 4 (15:02):
That’s right.
Chris Beal (15:03):
I mean, that’s an error. That’s an error of kind that is commonly made and it’s made due to the ancient tradition of selling, which is sales was an interaction among strangers at the crossroads. You would never see each other again. So almost all sales in the ancient world were done where two roads came together. And therefore there was enough concentration of traffic that it was worth setting up your stall. And the salesperson always feigned sincerity and haggling became the order of the day. And all it was, was how desperate’s your need, what am I willing to part with this for? I know my inventory and my ability to replenish it.
You don’t know how much you’re going to need. We’re going to exploit the information asymmetry and send you on your way. And you’re going to find out how bad the product was I sold you later. Three days camel ride out. Sales as a profession was built at the crossroads. There are no crossroads anymore. We don’t say goodbye after the sale. The sale is the beginning. That’s to say hello. So sales has exactly the opposite meaning now than it used to, but we hold the old traditions. Actually, if you think about Sandler, Sandler was a breakthrough approach that said, and remember it came about from door to door, I might see the person again. It’s like, what if we did door to door in a way that allowed us to sell the same person again? That was the Sandler breakthrough.
Speaker 4 (16:23):
Yeah. I love Sandler. I think the school of sales, like for, this is a course, what you’re talking about. And again, the sales theory, this unified field theory of sales is a new generation of how to sell with that I can’t hide from you anymore. I’m on LinkedIn and even if I go from Cisco to Avaya and I try to call you again, I can pull up, “wait a minute. This motherfucker he tried to screw me at Cisco but now he’s over here” and “oh, I see. Hey Chris, I see that. You’re connected with John Mueller over here. Hey, listen, he called me again.” “Oh, I remember that guy.” So there is, like you said, there’s no crossroads any longer where you’re camel… There’s, no camel ride that’s long enough where it’s too far to reach you again. So this concept of reputation, even in SDR, I get a cold call from an SDR. I can pull you up on LinkedIn and say, “Listen, you’ve been there for a month. Your company’s been in business for two years.” The ability for me to get any information on your organization is so readily available. What do I have left?”
Chris Beal (17:29):
Right? Every STR has a story about how they came to believe.
Speaker 4 (17:34):
That’s a good one.
Chris Beal (17:35):
That’s a key. They have to have a story. If you want to cheat. And your company’s been around, keep your SDRs and keep them because they believe in the mission. The most important people in the entire company to believe in the mission of the company, are the SDRs. When you look at your investment in employee development, you should be weighing your investment heavily in your SDRs’, believing in the overall offering. And specifically that sincerity of overall mission, right? Alignment with the mission as a whole. And then specifically as a skill, very specific like point by point scale, they need to understand and therefore believe in the potential value of the meeting at it’s feature level of benefit level, which is, what are the three things that somebody is likely to walk away with If they pay attention to the meeting?
Well, then they’re all learners. So oddly enough, there’s only one universal product now, which is value through learning. That’s all there is. That’s the first product. The ultimate, monkey paw. Right? The meeting itself is the ultimate monkey’s paw. And it’s the way to destroy or hurt the value of that meeting is to turn it into a sales meeting. In which case now the poor SDR has nothing to sell. As soon as the purpose of the meeting is to push somebody to a deal, the SDR no longer has anything to sell sincerely. And that’s a broken value chain and broken value chains, open up gaps for competitors to walk in. And it’s always the same, which is, it doesn’t matter if it appears to be working for you. The question is, what if your competitor did it all the way? What if your competitor ran this program precisely? Because a small amount of competitive edge results in market domination,
Chris Beal (20:19):
Because the basic theory of market domination is, this is the new England Patriots approach to business, right? Why are they such a difficult team to deal with? Because they always play a long game. They play a long game. It’s a multi season-long game. And then within the season, it’s a long game. And then this game itself is going to be played as a long game. They just play a long game in which small advantages accumulate over the game in order to resolve the high probabilities of outcomes, especially seasoned level outcomes and dynasty level outcomes. Folks who do that dominate markets. It’s pretty simple really. Accumulate small advantages and build on them as a strategy because every advantage gives you a new place from which you can accumulate more advantage. It’s not exactly hard to understand. It’s very rare that you’re Genghis Khan and you’re the only guy with a bunch of people on horses. And everybody else [inaudible 00:21:11]
Speaker 4 (21:12):
[inaudible 00:21:12] Today that doesn’t much anymore. You’re right.
Chris Beal (21:14):
It doesn’t. It’s hard to be Genghis Khan now. So at some point, when we bring all this together and bring it all down to the big why, the big, why is market dominance without which we won’t have survival. That’s, what’s so interesting. Our alternatives are attenuated and being attenuated more, which is [inaudible 00:21:32]. We just don’t get to play that game anymore like we used to. I just talked to somebody, [inaudible 00:21:37] a company that sells to manufacturers. It’s called a strategic pricing SPA. And what they sell to manufacturers is fascinating. They sell the benefits of raising your costs. And so if you’re facing, especially if upcoming potential recession, we can increase your costs in a world where everybody is cost plus, and you [inaudible 00:22:00] sell effectively. Then your margins will go up.
Speaker 4 (22:03):
Well, the math works. In the restaurant business, you see this all the time is that two schools of thought. My business is going down, it’s Arizona, it’s the summer, what do I do? I have Groupon happy hour specials, try to cut cost, which is the opposite of what you should do. Because my traffic, which is the constant is now down. I have to now have four times the level of traffic to make up. Versus if I just increased my prices with the same little folks that would make it up.
Chris Beal (22:32):
Right. And if you increase your cost a little bit, so your cost might be, for instance, what are you spending on how the restaurant presents itself the moment you walk in? So say in order to make your restaurant more attractive in Phoenix in the summer, what you do is you put, and it’s on a street with a lot of other folks and say, you’re the first one to go all Palm Springs. And you put some little mist sprinklers out there, and those things cost you 5,000 bucks to install. Your cost went up and therefore your prices can go up.
Speaker 4 (23:09):
So you’re saying that costs go up to make the prices go up.
Chris Beal (23:12):
Yes. And it’s very [inaudible 00:23:14] intuitive but if the volume flow is going to be similar or even down a little bit, a slight increase in cost in a competitive world where everybody’s competing with each other, right? Manufacturers all competing with each other and distributors are the worst. So these guys first order they sell to distributors, right? And so that’s their first product, but their second product goes to the manufacturers and says, “we’re going to help your distributors, who you don’t want to have, make more money. We’re going to help them make more money because then they’ll actually pay [inaudible 00:23:43].” so there’s a hidden part of the equation, which is really how much money are you collecting dear manufacturer, not how much do you think you’re selling volume-wise and how much money are you making? So we’re going to go, you give us your distributors. We’re going to allow them to increase their costs so you can charge them more, by the way.
And as a result, their business is going to be more profitable. And it’s like, whoa, it’s mind-blowing, but they take you through the numbers and you go, yes. But I asked him, what’s so important about this for manufacturers. And he said it’s simple. M&A is getting killed. The manufacturers have got to move into markets now through organic growth because it’s getting too expensive to buy competence. And so now they’re actually getting investments from private equity firms. The money’s flowing the other way. They’re the ones being invested in. Now they’ve got bosses, Oh my God, the bosses are impatient. And meanwhile, their way out the side door, so to speak, which is to buy another company to grow their business is being out-competed by the private equity guys who don’t have the pain of integration and have a huge amount of money because of the concentration.
The fact is the ultra consultation wealth and society now has made private equity super strong because at the margin, if I’ve got a ton of money, how am I going to put it to work? Well, some of it’s going to go to work more as risk capital venture, some as less risky private equity, and some over here where everybody else is competing, how do I get an edge? I’m going to choose a hedge fund or a private equity fund is going to help me out, right? I’m at least get [crosstalk 00:25:13]. You had this, these macro things happen in society, which is liquidity of information, power of technology, the ability to close loop on regulations of laws. What happens when you have money, you can buy boats. All that stuff has led to this bubbling up of money, into the smaller numerically, smaller set of people.
Those people have access to the whole market. One of the places they must put their money is where money is made, which is companies doing real work. That’s called private equity. Private equity out-competes corporates every day of the week, because money that doesn’t have anything that it’s beholding to except its buy, sell value, is always more liquid than business, which means I have to buy your company and integrate it by operation somehow. So I can no longer as a manufacturer reliably play the market expansion game and buy the markets that I dominate. So now I must dominate them through organic growth, which means sales is no longer the old sales, not only in the crossroads sense but in the disposal of inventory sense to keep my machine. Now it has a new role, which is to get me market so I can survive. I know I’m not surviving so well on the private equity guys, get to buy into me.
That means I’m not getting enough money from the market and I’m having to take their money. I know I’m not going to leave this for my kids unless I put a growth engine on it that’s got [crosstalk 00:26:36] and that’s why I built it in the first place. So I’m about to blow my 35, 40 years of legacy work on a change of circumstance. So I must learn to sell. And what got me is that the SPA guy said, “this is the theme in manufacturing now, is organic growth has become a requirement of business.” And that’s fascinating to me because it means that this unified field theory, like everything, it’s got to have a place to apply it, right? So it’s like nuclear energy was interesting in terms of scaring the living daylights out of people by dropping a couple of bombs and then freezing the world up for a while with regard to global oppression.
But what made it really wild was the fact that you could make electricity and the world needed a lot more electricity because factories run on it. 80% of all the electricity in the world is used to turn machines in factories to turn motors and nuclear energy is just one heck of a cool way to do it. Now I didn’t [crosstalk 00:27:36] reputational issue and all that. But the reason that that’s [inaudible 00:27:39] in the fifties was not that we scared the living daylights of everybody and I managed to use it to Institute this cold war that froze up a bunch of latent, voluntary, aggressive power that would’ve gotten unleashed on the world. We would have, I’m sure would have had world war three by, I don’t know, 1962, because Korea was an attempt at it to get it going. And it’s like, no, we’re all too scared.
We can’t do that. Sorry. So that was a nice effect. But the real effect was you can manufacture electricity for nothing. And that’s an amazing thing. Now, solar is the new nuclear because when the cost came down enough, you can manufacture electricity for nothing [crosstalk 00:28:18] solar [inaudible 00:28:20] solar is now like 32% of Great Britain’s total energy supply and was predicted at this point to be like 2%. Why? Because when the time comes, the time comes. When the time has come for a sales theory that addresses the problem of directed organic growth. It’s a different business problem that you’re solving with sales directed, organic growth must result in market dominance if it’s going to increase survival. And so what do you base that on? What’s got to be based on 100% reliables. It’s like nuclear energy is 100% reliable. Statistically, whether it’s made of uranium 235 or it’s plutonium, either one statistically will behave exactly the same as you predict. That is I can’t say I know this atom is going to fission, but I can say that I know the rate of fission.
That’s going to be in this collection of atoms if they have neutrons of certain velocity. I can say that to a point [inaudible 00:29:26] decimal points. I can say how that’s going to work. We need a unified theory of sales that tells us statistically, what’s going to happen so that we can direct that energy beam that we can create with that level of certainty at a market. And oddly enough, the twin pillars of this thing are trust and sincerity. The thing I believe about all this is that sales finally if the conditions continue to obtain, sales has a shot at civilizing the world by forcing trust and sincerity to the front of human interactions. And they’ve never been there. We had to have all sorts of societal mechanisms. Duels. We talked a little about Romeo and Juliet. How did we use to enforce even just politeness? Well, because if you weren’t polite to a gentleman, then you’d be challenged to a duel.
And if you’re in enough duels, you’re going to be dead. They have to [inaudible 00:30:25] out of this now. Musicals, just to remind us of what that’s like. Well, in the current world, we have the anti-duel. We have the internet. Everybody can be impolite. Now the question is where do you have to go above politeness all the way to sincerity so you get trust? Only in sales. You can design products without sincerity. You can manufacture products without sincerity. You just have to be good, right? Technically good. You can assess need without sincerity. You can statistically analyze [inaudible 00:30:55] responses on the internet. You can do all this stuff without sincerity, but the B2B buyer because of their need to not get fired, because the information asymmetry between buyers and sellers that obtains now and will always obtain, no buyer can ever be as educated as any seller.
Impossible because of the nature of specialization. The B2B buyer is the guy who will challenge you to the duel in the modern society. The guy with the sword is the B2B buyer. And if you insult that person, you’re insincere. You [inaudible 00:31:29] many reasons not to trust you. They’re going to kill you. And by the way, they have the easiest way in the world of killing you. It’s got a great name. It’s called ghosting you. We [crosstalk 00:31:39] say ghosting like they become a ghost. They don’t become a ghost. You become the damn ghost because you’re already dead to them.
Speaker 4 (31:47):
That’s awesome. You’re the ghost not them.
Chris Beal (31:49):
That’s the big surround [inaudible 00:31:51] the unified field theory. Otherwise, it’s unimportant, but it’s actually, we’re at the cusp of importance for the role of sales in society. And the game has to go from being a game, to being a sincere set of actions based on universal principles that have to also be true. And the most universal of them is, somebody is going to actually be able to start at fear. If you can make trust out of fear, you win. As long as you don’t blow it, but you have to do it sincerely. And the rest of this is nothing more than how to make a nuclear reactor. Don’t just pile up a bunch of uranium and hope for the best. It doesn’t work out. There’s only two States [inaudible 00:32:36] one is called meltdown and the other was called nothing. Warm. [crosstalk 00:32:42]
Can’t make money off those little puppies [inaudible 00:32:43]. But if you can assemble the nuclear reactor, which you make up out of the pieces we’ve been talking about, you can actually go and… You can survive in a very, very tough world. So that’s what [crosstalk 00:32:59] it’s interesting and I don’t know how we package all of this. It works but once we get the book together, it’s going to be really interesting because I’m practicing now a 22-minute talk that I’ve now given at dinner. So I’m going to do a lot of dinners, [inaudible 00:33:14] breakfasts where people generate their own breakthrough script a little lighter. Like here’s the basic theory, now let’s do it. Right? because at breakfast time, people are capable of doing that kind of work. Dinnertime [inaudible 00:33:25] that work. All they can do is listen, then have a discussion and then see if they remember anything after all the alcohol. Right?
But the dinner speech, the idea is that it starts with an assumption that no one will challenge, which is market dominance is required for survival. All the reasons that we got there, they’re very light, they’re just touched on [inaudible 00:33:46]. Like, Oh yeah, because primarily, because the old way of doing it, which is M&A is being impinged upon by private equity. Everybody knows private equity has too much money for comfort. If you’re a buyer of companies and you’re not a private equity firm, they have too much money. They have too easy a job because they have to buy it. Kind of do a couple of little things and sell it, whereas you got to buy it integrated. So the price is higher for you and your costs are higher to get to the same point. And then you still don’t have the option they had, which is just to sell it because you kind of ruin it.
Its overhead is the problem you’re going to solve when you synergize it out. But you sell it, you have to sell it with the overhead because it’s not a functioning company. Right. So that [inaudible 00:34:25] gone. That doesn’t take long. That takes like a minute, minute, and a half to get into it. And that’s like, so what is the implication? And what does it all come down to? And the surprising answer, the first seven seconds of a cold call on the telephone. That’s the surprise. And people get it. [Inaudible 00:34:42] Whoa. They don’t know what to do with it but it’s like, Whoa. And that’s what I want out of this book because I want people going, Oh, and then there’s a cookbook. You can actually do this. Yeah. And it’s not easy.
Speaker 4 (34:54):
There’s a Terrence Malick. I don’t feel like him as a director and a writer, right. I think he’s just genius. He did a movie a few years ago with Brad Pitt and this dynamic with his father and he did Thin Red Line. He’s got a movie coming out in December about an Austrian saint who was conscientious objector in the Nazi army. And when the Catholic tradition became who’s about to become a saint and is beatified and… But he has this habit in these movies to take the eye off of the… The camera off of the character and then move to something in nature and study it. And in this movie with Brad Pitt, it went from this dynamic with this father, the son, and changed to like 10 minutes of the big bang theory and the universe in its creation. And for some folks it’s way too esoteric, right?
And he just kind of had to study, it’s like why? And it’s going to the origin of, like you were saying, the origin of sales is that two strangers come against each other at this crossroads. And one wants something that the other has. And in order for survival, they both have to come to some sense of fairness and then go on their merry way. And because they’re a stranger, they have to either fame this sincerity, or it has to be genuine. And I like what you’re saying that really what we’re talking about here is also this origin story of trust. And you think about all the things in technology, the tech stack, I can have 50 things in my tech and my marketing stack. I can have $40 per square foot, real estate overlooking Lake Travis in Austin, or overlooking the golden gate bridge. I can have Zig Ziglar, the reincarnation of himself come and be my Monday morning motivating spiritual guide. But when it comes down to is seven seconds with you and your voice and your tone. It’s so human. It’s so counterintuitive at that point, that the very definition of your ability to dominate your market in 2019 comes down to the very same thing that it came down to in 2019 BC.
Chris Beal (37:12):
Exactly. In the village, but not at the crossroads. That’s what’s so interesting. At the crossroads we fake it. In the village, we can’t because there’s nowhere to go. And we’re all in the village now. There’s nowhere to go. [crosstalk 00:37:24] We’re stuck in the village. So the question now becomes, how do you civilize a village with seven billion inhabitants? What is the repeatable requirement? The repeatable benefit, the repeatable principle to be applied that could civilize a world where that is essentially a village with seven billion inhabitants. And I believe the answer, oddly enough, it’s not B to C. B to C sales doesn’t do it. It’s too transactional. It’s too cold.
The irony is when I buy products for myself, I’m not risking very much. You have to have risk on the table to have tension and the fundamental risk that will remain in society for a long time is the risk to the individual decision-maker buyer in business to business. And that risk ain’t going anywhere. And it sets up the entire thing. The whole thing is set up from that. And from there, you can actually the rest of it, you can reason your way to, with no experience about anything, except for knowing one thing for this particular solution which is, human beings are afraid of human beings they can’t see that they don’t know. That’s pretty obvious, but people tend not to think of as [inaudible 00:38:35] but it turns out to be what’s important.
