The We’re Set Objection and Why Introverts Make the Best Salespeople.

Marketing can step in and help sales overcome it.

1. Beginning: listen to discovery conversations.

2. Middle: look at support tickets to see the unvarnished truth.

3. End: work on getting the pipeline to be seen as an asset, it belongs on the balance sheet. Ask to be measured on the value we are contributing to help steer my efforts based on results that are being produced.

1. I want to know upfront what’s going on – attribution

2. in the middle – discovery

3. at the end – support tickets and we should want to know this first hand.

BONUS SEGMENT: Introverts tend to make the best salespeople.
Why? They have time to THINK before they act and put deep thought into their approach to securing the meeting. Listen to the second half of this episode to confirm why you want more of them on your sales team.

Chris Beall (00:35):

Yes, it’s kind of funny. Sales and marketing alignment as an issue has an assumption. And the assumption is actually the inverse assumption that is if sales and marketing were aligned and by sales and marketing alignment people mean, do they share the same goals, do they have the same metrics, the metrics interlock? So if marketing does their thing and they do as much of their thing as they have committed to the company to do and if sales does their thing and they do enough with marketing’s leads that they generate, their marketing qualified leads, as they’ve committed to do, then all good things happen, but there’s one good thing that doesn’t happen and that is information flow coming back from sales attempts to turn marketing qualified leads into actual sales opportunities, and marketing’s attempts to go out and get more marketing qualified leads. That is, it’s an open-loop process. And the reason it’s an open-loop process is twofold. One is just raw, and that is only up about 9% at maximum of marketing qualified leads of MQL, so never spoken with, never have an actual human conversation.

Corey Frank (01:48):

In sales and marketing alignment, we’ll end where we started with the virtual world that we live in today with companies. I can’t just go down to the marketing team and the marketing team can’t just sit on the sales floor. What do you see here? Is it easier now that we live in the world that we do? Or is it a little bit more challenging? Certainly, I would think that you can get better than 9%. So there’s arguably only one way to go there. But what’s your final thoughts on that?

Chris Beall (02:21):

Yeah. I think that there’s always developments that are going to improve stuff. We have one of them for sales and marketing alignment. People don’t think of it as that. Some people think of it as a sales tool, which is I bristle at. I insist on calling it a weapon of [crosstalk 00:02:35].

Corey Frank (02:35):

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Chris Beall (02:36):

But say you did consider it as another tool that’s out there and say, “Well, what does it do?” Well, let’s talk to a lot more people, but it also lets marketing people listen to what salespeople are saying. That alone, to have marketing folks listen to what salespeople are saying so that they can take that information and do two things with that. One is the obvious which is improve the marketing message. Now, generally, people think it’s the other way around, marketing needs to improve the sales message. But we know that sales psychology forbids marketing language from entering sales conversations safely. Marketing language in a sales conversation has the quality that it tends to be insulting and telling that person that they are not doing their job particularly well, or they’re not diligent and they’re not competent because they don’t know about this thing everybody knows about.

After all, marketing language starts the category. Category is always broad. If I’m telling somebody they don’t know about the category, I’m really insulting them. And if I’m saying you don’t know about this important differentiated offering in the category, I’m telling them they’re not keeping up. They were waiting for me to come along. So you’ll tend to get the weird set objection. And the weird set objection is the worst objection in the world of customer interactions. Because now to fight that, you kind of have to say, “No, you’re not.” And you’re telling somebody that you know more about their world than they do. And that’s not a good place to go in a sales conversation. But marketing can make huge use of what they learn in sales conversations, huge use. They can find examples. They can find nuggets.

They can find stories, opportunities for amplification and by the way, people to go back and talk to in order to get deeper understanding. One thing marketing has a hard time getting is primary research. Primary research, when you go to the source and you talk to him, and who better to talk to than folks your sales folks have already talked to? You got some information back. Now, go have those conversations. So I think that would help. It’ll also help marketing’s credibility. So these recording technologies like Chorus, Gong, and ExecVision are really powerful because they are generally used in discovery from marketing, to listen, to discovering conversations and see what’s being discovered. You’re discovering truths from customers and what could marketing value more than truths from customers and prospective customers? It’s kind of similar to ticketing systems. Now as a CEO, one of my marketing jobs is to know what’s going on so that I can direct our future regardless of how we’re going to position.

So I read every support ticket and some people think that’s just crazy. We’re not a tiny company. As you know, we’re pretty active. Once you get up to 50 or 60 million of something you do a year that people pay for, you probably have a lot going on.

Corey Frank (02:36):

That’s right.

Chris Beall (05:26):

And then those kind of [crosstalk 00:05:27] some things that didn’t work that well on any given day. But I read those tickets. They take two or three seconds in order to just kind of look at it. And I’m looking for insights like where are we missing it? Where are we doing something that adds friction that might go away? And where is there something fantastic happening that everybody else might see as negative, but I might see it as different, I might see it as an opportunity? So that’s something that I can do. It’s very inexpensive. Marketing people can do it too.

If I were a marketing person only and I am a marketing person in addition to a bunch of other things, I would start with two things. I would listen to discovery conversations and pay a lot of attention to those. That’d be number one. And then I’d also be looking at support tickets because I’d want to find out what are the truths that are flowing in the interactions with our customers when it’s not varnished? And they’re telling the truth. And then another thing I would do is I would work on getting the pipeline to be seen as an asset. And this is something we could do a whole episode on and probably should. Your pipeline ought to be on your balance sheet as a number. And I don’t mean adding up all the opportunities. That doesn’t make any sense because the early-stage opportunities have a lower probability of close.

But if you multiply each opportunity by its eventual probability of close, and by the way, the probabilities you have on today are BS. You have to go back historically and see what the actual probability of stage one closing, stage two closing, et cetera, et cetera. If you’d look at that and just add it up, you can actually tell whether your marketing is doing any good without waiting for closed one business to happen. That cycle time is too long to be usable. If your cycle time to learning whether your marketing program has an impact is the marketing program was run, the median of that run so that’s a six-week program, so now three full weeks in, and then I’ve got to start looking at results, but I have to wait until they turn into closed one business, I’m screwed.

But if I don’t look at the magnitudes, I’m screwed also. So how do I do it? Well, all I have to do is look at the opportunities, look at the lead source for the opportunity, map it back to whatever the activity was and voila, I can actually say I invested X in this marketing activity and I got Y out. Now, some people will complain and they go, “Oh, but you’re going to double count.” Yes, you’re going to double count because guess what? If I say hello and I shake your hand, I don’t know which one of those made the difference, but I’m not going to be able to do the easy experiment of saying hello ad well, now I could do it without shaking your hand. We could elbow bump, or we could stay in Zoom. Right? Well, back in the day, I was going to do both.

So it’s okay for me to say my investment in this yielded X, my investment in this other thing yielded Y, and not have my two investments add up to this total investment yield that X plus Y yields the union at the sets X and Y. That’s just how set theory works.

Corey Frank (08:31):

That’s right.

Chris Beall (08:32):

And I’ll get myself a really good idea of what’s working. So as a marketing person, I would go to the CFO and say, “Hey, I want to be measured based on the value that we’re contributing. And I want to be measured in real-time, not at the end of the year, because I think that the company needs to be able to steer my efforts. And I need to be able to steer my efforts based on results that are being produced. And since my results are in the pipeline, in the creation of pipeline, ultimately, I want to know.” So what I’m saying is I want to know upfront, what’s going on. That’s that particular thing, attribution is what it’s called. I want to know in the middle of what’s going on, which is discovery. And I want to know at the end what’s going on, which is support tickets. And I want to know firsthand and all of us in our roles should want those things.

If I’m selling, I’m the head of sales, I want to know upfront what’s going on, that’s the conversations that are happening, relevant conversation, the flow rate of conversations. I want to know in the middle of what’s going on because I want to listen to discovery conversations and see if we’re holding them well. Are we being open-minded? Are we being curious? Are we allowing the prospect to talk to us about their world? Are we getting everything or only are we getting what we’re looking for?

That’s a question that I would be asking in discovery. And then I want to know at the end what’s going on, which is actually interestingly enough in the support tickets again. The closed one is easy. That’s part of the process. If I do a great job everywhere else, I’m going to close a bunch of business. I might want to pay attention to that, but that’s probably not it. So everybody has three things they could be looking for, something at the beginning, something in the middle, and something at the end, probably take… Well, here’s my investment. I like to overcook the discovery meetings. So my average per day is three. So I prescribed one. I actually execute three. It’s like my prescription for barefoot running is I think anybody who has feet should get out there and run maybe a half a mile barefoot a day. But I prefer to do about eight miles a day because I think it’s really good for you.

I think discovery meetings are really good for you. So three a day is better than doing one and one [crosstalk 00:10:50].

Corey Frank (10:50):

That’s right. That’s right.

Chris Beall (10:51):

I read probably 70 support tickets a day. I want to see what happens to those. Some of that’s of interest. And with regard to the what’s going on at the beginning, what’s going on at the beginning is really one more exploratory, right? I want to have just for me, and this a CEO thing perhaps, I want to have one exploratory conversation per day that I’m pretty sure it’s going to lead nowhere. Just if I have a day without that, I’m disappointed. I want to have one that on the face of it if I had to explain to somebody why I was doing it, I’d be embarrassed.

Corey Frank (11:27):

I do that a lot with many of the functions that I operate on throughout the day. So it sounds like if we had to condense the last couple of last 90 minutes or so, it’s your perfect day, one thing we know is eight miles barefoot, is a helping of support tickets, a healthy ladle full of discovery calls, and three fingers of scotch. And if we had to look at all the different problems we’ve solved in the world here or addressed today, we went from sales and marketing alignment to the value of your pipeline, to CEOs making calls, to how to make scotch and of course, with flip-flops in this elusive and very important and scientific line of demarcation, which is now called the flip-flop line, I think we’ve covered quite a bit here in these episodes, Chris. So as always, it never disappoints. You put the quarter in and you listen to not just one song, but we get a whole bunch of songs here for our values. So thanks for the time today as always. This is another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with Chris Beall and Corey Frank.

Corey Frank (13:23):

Welcome to another episode of the market dominance guys with Corey Frank and the sage of sales, Chris Beall with all things market dominant. I’d be curious to see from a CEO perspective, because a lot of us, right? We’ve talked certainly several times now about the change in organizations when they’re moving remotely and the role in sales where I have to be around your, as you say, my three-pound brain has to be around in the vicinity of somebody else with a three-pound brain and particularly in sales with the collaboration and the energy and the day activity tracking. But I’m curious, it would be interesting to explore what that does to the CEO as well when his whole entire organization is virtual now, right? You’re used to it certainly at ConnectAndSell. You guys have had a headstart.

But for a lot of CEOs, right? They’re used to having the security blanket of a staff around them to kind of go from meeting, to meeting, to meeting, to have this echo chamber as we called it, right? Of feedback flowing up. And now I wonder if CEOs actually have more time on their hands. And so there’s even less of an excuse not to make these types of discovery calls or customer calls to kind of fill those gaps.

Chris Beall (14:44):

Well, they certainly have more time that they’re not traveling and I can speak as… Maybe I traveled an unusual amount, but I don’t think so. I was on the road in business 108 days last year. So that’s a lot of time. Now you could say it’s productive. Time to read, time to talk to people. I met random people here and there and not a small number of deals get made. I have a certain propensity for picking up deals in bars, so to speak, but still, that’s a lot of time. Think of each trip. There’s half an hour to an hour to get to the airport. There’s an hour and a half to go through all the junk at the airport. There’s the occasional missed flight. There’s the four hours plus. To get to the other end, there’s the Uber, there’s this, there’s that. Yes, all waste. That’s all pure waste. So that time has been freed up. By the way, that money’s freed up too. So in our company, $40,000 a month of travel is freed up.

Corey Frank (14:44):

That’s right.

Chris Beall (15:40):

40,000 a month’s a lot of money to find. Talk about change found in the couch cushions. Oh, look, there’s 40 grand. I wonder if we could do something with it. Well, let’s put it away for a few minutes and then think about that attack, right?

Corey Frank (15:55):

Right. Right. Right.

Chris Beall (15:56):

So the time is certainly there. And yes, I think that one of the things is there’s an egalitarianism of a good kind that shows up in these Zoom meetings. Zoom flattens the meeting. The meeting’s no longer in my office. One thing I always hated when I moved, so to speak up, I never could figure out why I call it up, in organizations is you get the big office and I hated the big office.

I’ve always hated the big office. I remember I had a big office at a biggish company I worked at, not big by anybody’s standards you think you know, a company that had been a billion dollar a year company that had kind of moved into being sort of under secular pressure from the internet of $350 million a year company. I was hired as the head of innovation. It gave me this big, big office, big corner office on the eighth floor overlooking, I don’t know what, like a cornfield or something. And I’m pretty sure I went in there six times during the year I worked there. And one of them was on the very last day when we sat around drinking some Chinese whiskey because I had all Chinese team, the most wonderful team I’ve ever had in my life and they were very kind. So that was one time.

So five times to do anything else, but I refused all the meeting in there because why do I want to encourage people to lie to me? And that’s a terrible thing. The hardest thing to get is the truth. And you might get it at lunch. You might get it at somebody else’s desk, but you’re not going to get it on your own turf in that big office. So now nobody has a big office anymore. So maybe there’s a little more truth flowing around. There is also who talks. You want your introverts to dominate the conversation over time. They’re the most thoughtful people in your company.

Corey Frank (17:44):

Oh. Okay.

Chris Beall (17:45):

They’re also your best salespeople. So your introverts actually didn’t like it in the raw, raw sales floor that you would run. So your best salespeople tend to be introverts. Your best salespeople really cringe at all that banging of the gong and high-fiving and all that stuff. They’ll go along with it but they have to go relax and then try to kind of rest afterward because that stuff hurts when you’re an introvert. It really does. It’s like, “Oh my God, I have to do that.” And yet introverts tend to make the very best salespeople and on your staff, they tend to have the most thoughtful observations. After all, they have thinking time. They’re introverts, right?

Corey Frank (18:24):

Yes. Yes.

Chris Beall (18:25):

They get their energy from kind of inside, from what’s going on inside. So I think that’s flattening. I’ll call it the Zoom flattening that’s occurred is a good thing. And that everybody tends to get to speak, they’re all in the same office, right? It’s also in each person’s phone, which has got an interesting intimacy. Some folks complain, “Oh, the kids walk behind. I had to take a moment.” But that’s the good stuff. That’s the human stuff.

That’s where we soften up with regard to each other sufficiently to maybe tell our own truth or to listen to somebody a little bit differently because until we’re empathetic, we’re not much. And it’s hard not to be empathetic with somebody who’s got the same problems that you have, the problems of home.

In the big office, I don’t have any problems. You come into my office with all the staff, meaning you sit there and you sit there, you sit there. The pecking order is established by all of that. We go in a certain order. The important stuff is first. The dog meat stuff is at the end. And if we run out of time, you don’t get to talk. Whoever you happen to be, you weren’t important because you’re probably the introvert who had the most valuable thing to say.

Corey Frank (19:37):

That’s right.

Chris Beall (19:37):

So I think we’ve gotten a lot of good, not just in the raw productivity that Prodoscore is measuring and that Microsoft is measuring in Microsoft workplace analytics. They measure definite productivity increase in meaningful activity from work from home. That’s at the individual level, nobody’s come up yet and measured what’s happening at the socio-cultural level with regard to what I’ll call the Zoom egalitarianism and the Zoom flattening. I am going to make a prediction that when somebody does this work, they’re going to find out that introverts are making a bigger contribution than they used to and a bigger contribution than the extroverts.