Think Sales Live with Jeff Gunsberg and Jon Dwoskin Lose the Zoom Fatigue and Get Back to the Phone

Think Sales Live hosts, Jon and Jeff talk with Chris about how you can grow your sales!

Here is the full transcript from this episode:

Jon (00:00):

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to this live episode of ThinkSales with Jeff Gunsberg and myself. We’re looking forward to talking with Chris Beall, who’s up very early in the morning. We appreciate that.

Jeff (00:10):

Oh, yeah. I forgot about that. It’s 5:30 AM.

Jon (00:13):

That is not a backdrop behind Chris. It is actually dark outside. So Chris, we appreciate you being on the show.

Jeff (00:13):

Definitely.

Jon (00:21):

Chris is the CEO at ConnectAndSell, Conversations On Demand. They basically work with sales reps to get 10 times more conversations with decision-makers with zero effort. I mean, when I first read that, Chris, I have to say, it sounds too good to be true, right? And so dive in and I mean, how? I think that’s my first question. How?

Jeff (00:45):

I know.

Chris (00:46):

That’s a darn good question.

Jon (00:47):

Thank you. We only ask good question here on ThinkSales. [crosstalk 00:00:50]. Right.

Chris (00:50):

So yeah, the why’s obvious, right? I mean, sales reps need to talk to people. Conversations are how we make business work. The problem nowadays is-

Jon (01:02):

Can I pause that for one second? I’m sorry to say that, but I just want to say that I think more than ever now being on the phone, talking to people, people are having Zoom fatigue even though we’re kind of high demand right now, but people are having Zoom fatigues, but even regardless of fatigue, the phone is I think the most important tool for any salesperson always.

Chris (01:24):

Right.

Jon (01:24):

So I just want to emphasize that before you kind of dive in.

Chris (01:28):

Well, that’s sort of the point. I mean, the phone was what we built the latter part of the 20th century on in business and that’s that let us get out of the out of town and so to speak and talk to people in other places and business became national and global using the phone. And then the phone went away in about 2003 to 2005 because voicemail became ubiquitous and everybody let their calls go to voicemail and that didn’t bother to listen to them. And it’s just because computer storage got cheap. So suddenly you went from a world where three, four, five phone calls get you somebody and you’d talk to their admin. And life was good to a world that now looks like this where it’s 27 dial attempts before you finally get something on the voicemail. Voicemail is a dead letter box.

So what we do at ConnectAndSell is just get rid of all that junk. You push a button, you wait a little bit, you should about four or five minutes, sometimes less, sometimes longer and bloop. It’s a tone in your ear. You’re talking to somebody on your list, always a target on your list. Never a gatekeeper, never voicemail, never a phone system. So that’s the how from a rep perspective and reps go from talking to two people a day to talking to 30 or 40 or 50 with literally no effort other unless you count pushing a button, that’s not that hard.

Jeff (02:40):

For some it is. [crosstalk 00:02:46]

Jon (02:46):

It’s true, but is very true, right? You expect me to push a button.

Chris (02:51):

Yeah, it’s pretty tough. I had an experience a couple of years ago where Gerhard Gschwandtner ran this peak performance mindset sort of a retreat. And one of the things we could do we’d get in a Ferrari or something like that, take it out on a Formula One course. I’ve been driving now for 50 years. You’d think I’d know how to drive a car, right? And I get in that thing and my hands are sweating and I’m shaking a little bit and that car doesn’t look familiar to me at all even though it’s just a steering wheel and accelerator and a brake, that’s kind of all you have to do.

And it’s the same thing. I mean, you’re going to talk to somebody for sure, from pushing the button suddenly it’s hard to push the button and it was hard to get that Ferrari out on the racetrack. But after three times around being yelled at a lot with this kid who only seemed to say two things, brake hard, brake hard. But other than that, I got used to it. And that’s the same thing with ConnectAndSell. First couple of times you use a couple of button pushes. We call it the famous deer in the headlights thing. You push the button and then you go, boom. But about the third time you start to get it. And then the addiction sets in.

Jeff (03:57):

Right. So you mentioned, I’m glad you mentioned your conversation with Gerhard. Was that the sales 3.0 conference?

Chris (04:07):

Yeah, it’s a jump to it. He or something he does in addition. He does these peak performance mindset retreat. He hasn’t done very many recently because of COVID.

Jeff (04:16):

Right.

Chris (04:17):

You go and you kind of delve into what is it that keeps you from being a peak performer? What can you do about it? So just to make sure you’re actually checking out what peak performance is about you get in a race car and you drive it around, you jump out of an airplane, you do some things like that and pretty good.

Jon (04:34):

Making calls when you jump out of the airplane or is that just to [inaudible 00:04:40].

Chris (04:39):

I made one very loud call on the way down and I think I was heard all of Los Angeles County.

Jeff (04:45):

Yeah. So I watched some of that interview. There’s some clips and I was studying up on so I started just getting interested there. And in one of the interesting things, I think I kind of feel like it’d be interesting to hear, and I don’t even know what this is exactly. But you started off as a Fuller Brush sales on a door-to-door salesman. And in Arizona, I wondering how that may be kind of molded your mindset into moving into what you do now and how you do it?

Chris (05:19):

Yeah, it changed my life in a funny way. My first wife had had a miscarriage. We were very young. We had medical bills when to leave Arizona, go to Colorado and needed to pay the bills. So I needed a job literally that day. So I found myself sitting in a Denny’s restaurant with the guy who was not sufficiently disreputable for me to avoid joining. And I signed up as a Fuller Brush man. They train to me, which was interesting. And I just thought this doesn’t work what they’re trying to do here. But I was a physics, math, psychology guy. And I thought, well, I’m going to apply some math and some psychology and do this differently. So what I did is I’d knock on doors, it was Arizona in August, right? It’s 110 degrees out. Nobody wants to open their door. So I’d knock on the door.

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 that was my opener. And everybody kept the door open. Now my mom slammed the door in the face of every single person whoever solicited our house for my whole life. So I was used, I was ready for that, but everybody kept the door open. And then I just asked him one question, which is I said, “I don’t know anything about our products. Rumor is that we have some products that are exceptional around the house that can’t be bought in stores. If I find one or two of these that I think will change your life, can I come back and share them with you for five minutes?” Everybody said yes. And I became the number one Fuller Brush man in Arizona in two weeks.

Jeff (06:47):

Wow. Do you think because you didn’t try and sell them something right at that moment?

Chris (06:51):

Yes.

Jeff (06:52):

Because that’s what I get from what you’re saying.

Chris (06:54):

The key to what I learned and now we’ve codified at ConnectAndSell because all we do at ConnectAndSell is push you push a button, you talk to somebody. Now what, right? And it took us a long time to realize, “Oh, we need to teach people how to talk.” So we went on this journey of trying to figure out what should happen in a cold call. I mean, got it right. But we didn’t know why it worked until Chris Voss told me one night why it worked. And I asked him, “How long do we have to get trust in a cold call?” And I figure a guy who sells 20-year jail sentences to hostage-takers probably knows the answer to that, right? And so he says, “Seven seconds.” I said, “Really, our research says eight seconds.” He says, “Your research is wrong. It’s seven seconds.”

So I asked him, “What do you have to do in those seven seconds?” He said, “Oh, that’s easy. All you have to do is show the other person we see the world through their eyes. Call it tactical empathy. And then we have to demonstrate that we’re competent to solve a problem they have right now.” And at that point I realized, “Oh, now I know why this works is the problem they have right now is me.” I’m the problem, not their business problem. We make a huge mistake in sales, by narcissistically projecting on our prospect, the notion that they should be thinking about the business problem that we can solve right now. But what they’re really thinking about is getting rid of us.

Jeff (08:12):

Yeah.

Chris (08:13):

So you can get trust in seven seconds. And if you reverse the normal order of operations, normally we say to salespeople, look, engage, get some level of rapport, then show value.

And by showing value, you can eventually get to a trusted advisor kind of position. And we believe that’s dead wrong, or at least suboptimal it’s what’s optimal is ambush, creating fear and turn that fear into trust in seven seconds, and then build on the trust to get to curiosity. And from curiosity, you can get to commitment and action, and it’s a different way of doing it. But if you run that play 30 or 40 times a day, you can dominate markets. You can dominate an entire market of say 10,000 target, 10,000 targets as one person and let them off.

Jon (09:04):

Amen to that.

Jeff (09:05):

Yeah.

Jon (09:08):

I want to talk a little bit about consistency, which is kind of built in here, but also the person in the seat who actually has to do the work, who has to train continually train, build their muscle. And you still got to put in the dials, right? Every thousand calls, you’re going to get better and you’re going to grow your skillset. But it still requires an actual human being to constantly grow, grow their level of consciousness, grow their skill set, grow their listening skills, grow their empathy, grow all of that. And so and I think sometimes people fall short because they want it so fast, fast, fast, fast, fast, but they’re not willing to put in the consistency that’s needed. So you have this built-in consistency from a scientific standpoint the technology, but how do you find the right people that actually can use it?

Chris (10:00):

Well, it’s like anything else. It’s a search process. You see an example. And the way we do it is we run this thing called an intensive test drive for free for one day. You get in the race car and you drive it around all day and it separates the what we call the pigs from the weasels. So pigs are good conversation. Pigs want the next conversation, no matter what the last one tasted like. And weasels we don’t like so much because they don’t waste a lot but the only thing he has to do in sales for sure, which is talk to people. And they’d rather hide behind email or hope that at some social outreach magically takes care of the problem of sales. So once you’ve kind of separated the pigs from the weasels and take them the ones in the middle and shown them away that they can become a pig which is fantastic, then they need to learn. And it’s only five sentences.

You have to come up with the value part of their script. We call it the breakthrough script. They have to practice it. It takes usually 30 repetitions eyeball to eyeball with somebody. They should never role-play. Role-play is the dumbest thing in the world to do early in learning something in sales because the idea is to trip you up. Role-play is generally an ego trip on the part of whoever is the prospect playing the role of the prospect. So they can show you how hard this is. It’s not that hard, but you do have to get the muscle memory right and the underlying beliefs right. You get all that right, you start to get success. Then you need a coach to listen to you. So we run a thing called flight school.

This is all free by the way. We run a thing called flight school. It’s four sessions of blitz and coach. And just to get a sense of the precision, you’re doing the whole thing. You’re selling the meeting, the whole that entire two hours of using flight school for the first go. And we coached you on the first seven seconds. The second session of two hours maybe the next week after you’ve had a bunch of practice and your coach is paying attention to you, then we coach you on what we call the 27 seconds, the value part. Then we coach you on the next session on how to actually ask for the meeting. I mean, these things sound simple. You watch your brain surgeon, it looks simple, right? “What is it?” “I don’t know. I drill it into your head and I use a knife.”

How hard could it be? Well, it kind of depends on what you want the outcome to be here, right? So this is precision stuff. And then we teach them how to handle objections. And there was only three objections in a cold call. So they have to learn how to avoid one of them and handle the other two. So we call it takeoff, free flight, landing, and turbulence. And you can make somebody through that process if they’re open-minded and they have a good soul, they have to be sincere. I mean, if you’re not sincere, you’re doomed in sales, but if they sincerely believe in the potential value of that meeting they’re selling, that human being they’re talking with in the downside case where no business is ever going to be done, if they believe in that, then rest of this can sit on top of it just fine. If they’re trying to trick somebody, well, sorry, human beings are really good at not being tricked.

Jeff (12:56):

So you, excuse me, you mentioned that it’s really simple stuff, right? And on the surface, it’s super simple. I think one of the main things that stops people from doing what you’ve created in cold calling is fear. And I just wonder how you address that with people and how you deal with them and kind of overcoming that aspect of it?

Chris (13:28):

Yeah, that’s really important. There’s two elements to it. And one is we just encourage them at the very beginning of the test drive to go ahead and push the button. It’s going to suck. We just tell them it’s going to be a train wreck the first time you do it. They’ll go beep in your ear, pop up on the screen so you’ll hear talking with and you’ll go buy blah. So that’s fun that everybody feels that I still feel it. I don’t know anybody who use our product who isn’t a little shaky on the first button push. I know one guy, his CEO puts his feet up on the desk and starts reading a book business book. When he gets into the right mood, he doesn’t look, he reaches over and hits the button. He goes back to reading. So you can get in the right frame of mind. So that part of it.

But the way you overcome the fear is you realize the fear is in the wrong place. It’s the other party who’s afraid because you ambushed them. When you answer a cold call and you realize that it’s not who you thought it was going to be. And that’s what happens, right? You’re going into a meeting you’re too busy not to answer or getting on a plane and you’re in a car. You can’t even look, you answer. And then it’s not your kid from their college town or whatever. It’s like, “Oh man.” You’re actually afraid of that person because they’re an invisible stranger. And in the environment of evolution, the village and the invisible stranger are those people from across the river. And we’re civilized, right? We paint our faces vertical and we put a bone in our nose and we eat the right kind of food.

And those people paint their faces horizontal. They put bones in their ears. They’re so terrible. And when they’re invisible, it’s nighttime and they’ve showed up not to bring us a bud light, but to change the demographics of our village, usually using big sticks or spears or something. And so we don’t like invisible strangers and nobody wants to be one. And that’s what we’re afraid of. Once you realize that’s the dynamic because you’re just afraid of being the scary thing, then your fear isn’t the issue anymore. The prospect’s fear is the issue. And that’s the advantage because now you know where they’re starting from because if you can alleviate the fear, you get trust and that’s what you want.

Jon (15:36):

Let me ask you a question. So explain… Thank you for that. Explain exactly how this works. I’m curious. I think everyone listening would like to know the product itself, yeah.

Chris (15:49):

Oh, okay. Sure, sure. So the way it works on the outside is for the rep you get in through a browser, regular old application. It gives you a phone number to call you. Call that phone number with any phone. This isn’t like a telephone, right? You can use whatever to call a soft phone-

Jeff (16:05):

I mean, not to stop you. How do you get the phone? Are these targets that you the individual would load in there or are these?

Chris (16:15):

Yes.

Jeff (16:15):

Okay.

Chris (16:15):

You load your own data in. So firs, you got to have some data, right? Normally it comes out of your CRM, but it could be a funnel where you load up whatever.

Jon (16:27):

[crosstalk 00:16:27] Quick question. Can you export from a CRM and import it into your service?

Chris (16:31):

Yeah, you can do that or you can just hook it up to the CRM either way.

Jon (16:34):

Okay so easy is my [PI’s 00:16:36] want to ease of use.

Chris (16:37):

Super easy. I mean the whole hookup to something like Salesforce or Dynamics is 15 to 30 minutes and it’s just a couple of config options.

Jon (16:44):

What about Pipedrive?

Chris (16:46):

We actually don’t have a pre-wired integration to Pipe drive, but Pipedrive is actually pretty friendly for export and import of results. So it works just fine.

Jon (16:55):

Okay.

Chris (16:55):

So there you are. You got your list and you dial one phone number. That’s the only phone number you’re going to dial that day. It’s us. You dial into a conference bridge just like this except you’re in there for the purpose of that conference bridge being smart enough to dial your list. So then when you want to talk to somebody who’s a big green go button and it’s like, “Oh God. Now I want to talk to somebody.” Click the button and then you wait. And the hard part is the waiting. It’s like waiting for an Uber. Because you’re going to have to talk to somebody, right? You’re going to get to, but you have to also, so you wait and it shows you who it’s dialing.

And it’s generally dialing five to seven folks at the same time. Dialing is not the problem. Navigating phone systems to voicemail is the problem so we have human beings. And at this instant right now. What time is it? It is 5:53 here on the West Coast. So we have 457 people at this moment who are navigating phone calls for people. And they do it in the background. And the one thing they never do is talk to your target. So if I’m on your list, Jeff, and you push the button and I answer, “This is Chris.” I hear you next. I don’t. So nobody introduces me. There’s no pause. There’s no clicks. There’s no weirdness. It’s just-

Jeff (18:12):

You find your people are finding the person that I need.

Chris (18:15):

Yeah, it’s actually a search process using human beings who are navigating phone calls doing it in parallel. It’s fast because well, five calls at a time is five times faster than you. And it’s even faster than that because these folks are specialists using software not phones and the software Smart. So it’s about 10 to 15 times faster than dialing in navigating manually. So you take about one to two hours of grinding, frustrating, stupid non-sales work, which we actually teach people to do and tell them it was a great idea. We don’t teach them that, but in the world of sales, they’re taught that and you just make that go away and it turns into push a button. And while you’re waiting, this is maybe the best part. You can do something else. You can do email, you can do social, you can pet your dog, whatever it is you want to do because that little beep tells you it’s showtime and then you talk.

Jon (19:09):

I love it. What a product. And yeah, it sounds like it’s helping a lot of people, especially in today’s world where we got to call a lot of people. I mean, and there’s less callbacks like you were talking about and you got to touch people 27 times before they’ll even connect. Hey, Chris, I just have one additional question piggybacking off of Jeff’s question about the fear when you have somebody who’s waiting, right? So I love what you said. While you’re waiting, you can do social, you can do this.

One of the things I find salespeople do is they’re not good with the waiting, right? So they’ll sit and wait and do nothing and just wait for the bleep versus take the two minutes here and the one minute here and the 30 seconds here to actually do something. And so all you take away all that time of waiting and it’s 400 hours a year of waiting. How do you get, how do you encourage the salespeople to shift their perspective and their mindset to actually do that 32-second thing, do that 45-second thing while you’re waiting, and be more productive.

Chris (20:26):

Well there’s two ways to do it. One is to actually give them something to do. And the best thing to do is send an email to somebody you just spoke with. Never send an email to somebody you haven’t spoken with. Always send an email that somebody you just spoke with. They will open that email and they’ll respond to it. Your open rates and your response rates go up by a factor of say 10. If you’re using Outreach or SalesLoft or Sant or whatever, you should wire it up to ConnectAndSell and we call it talk to sequence or talk to send and make sure that you personalize just a little bit, your template email for that particular call outcome. So now you can have work to do, and it’s good work. And it takes about three minutes, which is perfect for that next wait time.

So now you have an interleaved process where you’re getting the most out of your investment, your investment in ConnectAndSell and your rep because they’re talking as much as they can and listening and your investment in those other tools like Outreach and SalesLoft and Sant because now those emails are actually getting read, which are great. The other thing is, it’s just getting used to it at first, you stare at the screen because you’re just freaking out, right? It’s like, “What is going on here? What’s going to happen.” But it is just like driving a car. The very beginning when you learn to drive, you’re hyper-focused. You’re like, “What’s going to happen here?” And after a while you can drive along in a freeway. Think about what we do driving on freeways. It should be impossible, right? While we’re talking to people and thinking about all sorts of stuff, it comes naturally after a while because you will get used to it.

Jon (21:58):

I love it. One quick question before we go into a quick 60-second speed round. Someone dialed in and said, they want to know, is the software different from a Mojo or Redex dialer?

Chris (22:12):

Yes, radically different. It has human beings inside of it who are doing all the work for you. So there’s really two choices either you’re going to navigate those funds systems, in which case you’re fully occupied doing that, or somebody else is going to do it. I guess nothing get done as the other thing, but that’s not good.

Jon (22:29):

All right. All right, Chris, this has been a pleasure. I’ve loved this conversation. I’d love talking about how salespeople can be more productive. We have a 30-second speed round. Are you ready?

Chris (22:37):

Always.

Jon (22:38):

All right. You seem always ready. I’m going to go into combat with Chris-

Jeff (22:45):

Ready to push that button.

Jon (22:48):

Favorite book and why?

Chris (22:50):

A favorite book, Never Split the Difference, Chris Voss. He tells us how to really sell. Sales 20 year jail sentences. Tough product sells it well. People dive into entails.

Jon (23:00):

Yeah, love it.

Jeff (23:02):

Toughest sales lesson that you’ve ever learned.

Chris (23:05):

Toughest sales lesson I ever learned is an overreach. It wasn’t me. It was a colleague overreached on a deal. We lost $75 million in 15 minutes. And then we lost our $120 million a year customer.

Jon (23:18):

All right, wow. That’s a good lesson. Press the button, all right. Chris, tell everybody how to connect with you.

Chris (23:26):

So two ways. Go out and connect me on LinkedIn, Chris, eight, six, four, nine, Chris Beall, easy to find I’m yappy out there. The other thing is go to my podcast Market Dominance Guys, and you can connect to me by listening to 57 episodes, me telling you exactly a cookbook on how to dominate markets using conversations.

Jon (23:45):

And where can that be found?

Chris (23:46):

Market Dominance Guys, all one word dot com.

Jon (23:50):

All right. Hey Chris, I can’t thank you enough. You are the real Chris Beall. We, I appreciate it. I want to keep in touch with you. I’m going to follow up with you on a couple things I want to talk to you about, but I can’t thank you enough today for creating and providing the tool that helps people, salespeople be more productive because salespeople make the world go round. And so I appreciate it. So thanks so much for your wisdom and your thoughts and I’ll let Jeff close the shop. I just want to thank everybody for listening and Jeff, I’ll let you close it.

Jeff (24:21):

Yeah. Thanks everybody too for listening and thanks Chris for getting up early and being on. But I think in today’s market, this is a necessary tool and using the phone is going to become more and more and more important and finding an efficient way to do that is amazing. So I’m going to be in touch with you after myself as well. Thank you so much for your time.

Jon (24:48):

[crosstalk 00:24:48] Always find Chris. Thanks so much. We’ll be in touch real soon. Thanks. Bye.

Chris (24:52):

Bye.

Jeff (24:53):

Thanks guys.