#WFH – Sales Pros – Do You Stand Still, Learn More, or Dominate Your Market?

In this episode, Chris Beall and Corey Frank welcome co-author of Outbound Sales, No Fluff, and Sales Director, Ryan Reisert. In these uncertain times, sales pros are faced with waiting for the dust to settle, then try to regain their market or take this time to learn new skills and technologies.

There is a third option and that is to reframe conversations compassionately, patiently and gain control of your market. For a guide on how to come out of this restructured sales environment with everyone working from home, join Chris, Corey, and Ryan for your tips of the week. This episode is called #WFH Sales Pros – Wait, Learn, or Dominate Your Market.

Corey Frank (01:26):

Welcome to the latest episode of the Market Dominance Guys with your cohost, Corey Frank and the esteemed Chris Beall. So with us today, we have very special guests. We have Ryan Reisert most recently, the sales director at ConnectAndSell, and formally the co-founder of the sales developers and the author of one of the top 100 sales books of all time I should say, Outbound Sales, No Fluff.

Corey Frank (01:52):

So welcome Ryan to the Market Dominance Guys. I thought today, what we could talk about since it’s so pertinent and germane in the news is a little bit of a work from home and the future of work from home, as well as some of the tactical things and challenges and hiccups that we’re seeing. Chris, we were talking about it just earlier, as far as how to manage pipeline and how companies are dealing with the issue as sales reps, when we contact these folks. And some of the reasons they’re perhaps giving to either delay or cancel purchases altogether. So welcome Ryan and welcome as always Chris Beall.

Chris Beall (02:28):

Thank you.

Ryan Reisert (02:30):

Yeah. Well, thank you guys for having me today.

Chris Beall (02:32):

Ryan, I’ve got a question for you. Simple question. Have you employed a work-from-home strategy personally for a while? And if so, how long?

Ryan Reisert (02:41):

Yeah, so my last two companies before for joining ConnectAndSell, were 100% remote. Looking back into when I first started my career as a rep, I never thought I would be productive working from home. And as I worked my way up through leadership, especially I didn’t think my reps could be productive working from home, but as technology evolved and we looked at the ability to sell virtually, I realized that there’s an amazing opportunity to help create digital sellers.

Ryan Reisert (03:14):

That’s when I started Inside Sales Bootcamp and it was 100% remote, we were in eight different cities, built an online program, taught thousands of reps, 100% remote. Actually, my co-founder and I think met in person three times before we ended up selling that company in total, in-person.

Ryan Reisert (03:31):

And then same thing with the sales developers, Rex and I built that company 100% remote. Rex and I wrote a bestselling book without ever even meeting each other in person. It was all social interactions. The company was built up to just over 20 or so employees with a network of other researchers over the hundreds of researchers overseas, 100% remote. Now at I ConnectAndSell, have about a half a decade of experience working in a remote environment at this stage.

Chris Beall (03:59):

Fantastic. So Corey, what’s been on your mind, you’ve been thinking a lot about this whole business with the pandemic and how companies are responding to it beyond just work from home. I mean, what’s the burning question you have for Ryan what’s bugging you?

Corey Frank (04:15):

As we were talking about just the other day, Chris is when you have organizations that don’t necessarily know how to deal with a crisis, let alone a pandemic at this scale. And particularly with sales organizations and how they deal with prospects who understandably are under a lot of pressure and they’re under a cash crunch. But how do you maximize or increase the atomic weight of your sales team in environments like this? What are some of the things that a sales team could do to survive these gale-force winds of market change and actually come out of this potentially even a little bit stronger and leaner in the end?

Chris Beall (04:59):

That’s an interesting question. So if I think about gale-force winds, as soon as you say that, and I think, well, I’ve been sailing fairly recently, went out and did some sailing, and I’m a very novice sailor. My fiance Helen is a sailboat racer, so that’s pretty asymmetric. She and I went on a little 42 foot Beneteau off of Oahu for five days on the boat.

Chris Beall (05:24):

A Hawaiian winter is big waves, big winds. So not gale force, but a small craft warning force; eight-foot, nine-foot swells and all that. And I remember the main thing I took away from the first day was there are a few things that are being measured that you got to keep your eye on. That’s the number one thing is what is being measured that you got to keep your eye on in the sailboat.

Chris Beall (05:48):

And if you don’t keep your eye on it, you’re in trouble. So I’d asked Ryan, so Ryan, you ran work from home organizations and you did it under what I’ll call simulated out of pandemic, but similar stress, you had to start them fast. You had to do it with very little money, you guys were always bootstrapped and you had to figure it out. And there’s only a couple of you guys at the top. What did you pay attention to in terms of what was it that told you, what metrics or what measurements or what data was coming in that told you? Yeah, it’s going okay or I better slow down, stop, do whatever and intervene.

Ryan Reisert (06:28):

Yeah. It’s A great question. And I, I mean, I think this is something going back to, I’ve been talking about this for a while in general, in terms of the top of funnel when it comes to sales success. I think anyone who knows about sales, that the longterm indicator for longterm success is pipeline. Pipeline can be defined in a lot of different ways. And I think there’s a big challenge with the definition of pipeline where people think that pipeline equates to meetings. And because of that, there’s been a lot of unnecessary time, energy, and effort spent on getting people into meetings, whether that’s giving away gifts, sending postcards, enticing them to come to dinners, things like that.

Ryan Reisert (07:12):

That all is crazy to me. For me, whether you’re an early stage company or a later stage company, what it really comes down to is are we having conversations with the people we intend to want to do business with in the future?

Ryan Reisert (07:25):

And we may not know that they’re a fit now, but when you really look at long-term success and sales pipeline is that indicator. But the success metric that’s actually given me, if you’re going back to the sailboat boat example, I’m not a sailor myself, but I can imagine whatever that one indicator is on the boat. My one indicator is how many conversations am I having every single day with the intended people I want to be speaking to.

Ryan Reisert (07:50):

Furthermore, what are the outcomes of those conversations? And those outcomes don’t have to be meetings. Of course, that’s one outcome, but the total outcomes in general, how many of them are falling into the buckets of yes. How many of those are yes meeting maybe moving forward? No, and why? Why are they not a fit and what can we learn from that?

Ryan Reisert (08:08):

Maybe, well, why is it maybe? Is that a targeting thing? Is it a messaging thing? Is it a timing thing? And then, not now. And if it’s a not now again, why? Those four outcomes from those conversations are the things that I’m paying attention to. And I have to learn from those and getting into the math of that, making sure that the percentage of those outcomes are what I would like to see in any given market, which goes back to the buyer’s pyramid. We think about a total addressable market and who no, they’re not interested, doesn’t think they’re interested. They’re not really thinking about it, who are open to, and who are buying now.

Ryan Reisert (08:43):

Anywhere near those metrics, that’s what I’m looking at, conversations, outcomes of those conversations and ultimately, what can I learn and why? Those are the things that I’m going to use to make my slight adjustments, to make sure I’m on the right track. That’s if I’m just getting started, that’s also, if I’ve already had success and I’ve got a team underneath me, I’ve got to look at that data daily, and I have to be able to use that to make the necessary adjustments. And I think that one of the biggest challenges in all of this equation is that everybody else focuses on a meeting and that meeting having to be banned, qualified, et cetera, when we think about pipeline, but the reality is pipeline all starts with that conversation.

Chris Beall (09:22):

Got it, got it. And then you said daily?

Ryan Reisert (09:24):

Daily, yeah.

Chris Beall (09:25):

That’s interesting. I have a similar view by the way. I mean, this is something I’ve done for a long time too, but is around a work-from-home organization. In 2014 at ConnectAndSell we went home with the exception of having a little office in Denver and even that got dispersed and now is finally completely home. We were out of the last vestige of not work from home.

Chris Beall (10:51):

What I found is that the cycle time of checking that conversation, number those facts about conversations for me has actually shrunk. And I’m a CEO. I’m not even a sales manager. But for me, it’s shrunk. I’d like to share my screen. Can I do that Corey?

Corey Frank:

Yeah, go ahead.

Chris Beall (11:10):

Let me share the screen here. And I’ll show you what I actually look at on a regular basis.

Corey Frank (11:19):

So what are we looking at here, Chris?

Chris Beall (11:21):

So this is ConnectAndSell. This is how our team builds pipeline by having conversations. It’s how they have conversations. And right now it is 8:29 AM on the Pacific Coast. And most of these people reside to country West, but some of them are East. It’s pretty early in the morning. This is the beginning of the Workday. And I want to make sure we’re up and running.

Chris Beall (11:45):

Every one of these people is work from home. A little scroll here. Some of them are SDRs like David Gold here, and Brian Walters, some of them are AEs; [Soris McHodson 00:11:55] an AE, here’s Jerry Hill. I would say Ryan Reisert would be on that list except right now he’s busy on this podcast talking to us and what I look at very first that it’s always sorted descending by conversations is, is everybody having conversations? That’s my number one.

Chris Beall (12:13):

And I look at this about probably a little more frequently than once an hour. And then I asked myself this question for what I know about this rep, do I think that these outcomes look representative for them, the work that I suspect they’re doing? So yesterday, for instance, this person right here, Mark had, had 12 conversations and zero meetings. And I thought that’s interesting. So I went over to another report, which is here and it’s called the… I’ll have it come up here.

Chris Beall (12:49):

I went over to the rep performance report and I wanted to ask a simple question about Mark, which is what’s his busy call back later looked like? And a 20% of his conversations were less than 25 seconds long. And I wanted to listen to him. And what I heard was that he could have tuned his talk track up in order to actually be more empathetic about the work from home situation.

Chris Beall (13:19):

He apparently did that. I’m guessing that he did that. I’m going to go check. And today his first 10 conversations have resulted in two meetings. And while it’s not, as Ryan says, it’s not all about the meetings. It’s really about the conversations. It is also good to keep an eye on the outcomes and make sure not that you’re not driving something, you make sure first that you understand why, and is this characteristic or is it different?

Chris Beall (13:51):

And then the question is, is there an intervention in order or not? And I actually think it is like a sailboat. When you come over that big wave and you’re going down the other side, and now the wind’s just catching the top of the sail, the boat does something. It does something interesting, which is it steers hard into the wind. It’s called weather helm and you can’t just ignore it or else you’ll end up facing directly into the wind. And then you stop. And then you’re sideways to the waves sometimes. And that’s not something [crosstalk 00:14:16]

Corey Frank (14:16):

Oh, yeah.

Chris Beall (14:18):

Just like driving a car, you have to make subtle adjustments all the time to run anything rather than just have it run itself, which could be a bad thing. So anyway, Ryan and I do the same thing. Here’s how I do it. And it’s great that these folks look at David, he’s had 15 conversations this morning and two hours and seven minutes on the clock. That’s wonderful. But the main thing that I want to know is how’s it going? Are you having the conversations? And then did the conversation outcomes look? Reasonable, are they the kind of thing I would expect?

Ryan Reisert (14:54):

Yeah. Well-

Corey Frank (14:54):

So in a tough, challenging economy, like we’re having today with a lot of uncertainty as Ryan and I had spoke about before the call here, you guys are looking at certainly how much time am I on the phone? How many dials? How many conversations? How many meetings and outcomes to that? To your sailing analogy, Chris, if we also incorporate keeping in that same vein, this concept of tacking, right, and tacking as a sailing maneuver, of course, where my desired course is into the wind.

Corey Frank (15:28):

I need to turn my bow toward the wind so that the direction from where the wind is blowing changes from one side to the other and it zigzag into the wind. And I think that’s a good potential analogy here for what we’re facing as a sales team. And as homebound sales folks is how do you take these conditions, the wind, these gale force winds that are coming at us. And how do you describe tacking in a world that we live in today versus just driving straight into it?

Corey Frank (16:01):

So mass spamming everybody with email, or doing any other sorts of things by not incorporating empathy or nurturing conversation. So maybe we can talk a little bit about that, of how you take these stats that both you guys use and in this data analysis and use it for a concept with the conditions that we’re facing today.

Ryan Reisert (16:22):

… It’s really difficult to make informed decisions without conversation. Otherwise you are just driving forward. In this case, right now we’re living in a world where there are a lot of other things going on. My chances of responding to an email that’s self-serving and driving towards me, me, me, me obviously, is isn’t going to work in most environments and certainly isn’t going to work now, but even if you take time to craft something interesting, everyone else is doing the same thing.

Ryan Reisert (16:49):

Well, we’re worried about COVID and so on and so forth. So it’s easy to ignore that as well. So what I get is a bunch of activities may be some opens, which is, who knows what a response and likely not a lot of responses. And if you do get responses, because I’ve seen a lot of them, you get this confirmation bias that wow, people are going to be off when you reach out to them because, oh boy, look what they decided to write a whole paragraph on, on how bad I am as an individual.

Ryan Reisert (17:11):

However, when you have a conversation, when you actually pick up the phone and have a conversation with somebody, you get to those outcomes a lot faster and you actually get a lot more information from not just what the outcome was, but how that outcome was in terms of the conversation itself. What words were used? What was the length of the conversation as Chris already shared today? As well as again, you actually get real driving forces towards, is this a yes? Is this a no? Is it a not me? is it a not now? Again, if that’s all relating back to what your average is say, then you’re on track versus if something’s way off. So right now we see a ton of confirmation biased happening, in my opinion, around people doing a little bit, getting one signal and saying, ‘See.’ and that signal is negative.

Ryan Reisert (17:56):

We see that all the time in sales, by the way. The challenge that most folks have is that they’re not having enough data points in a period of time to actually make informed decisions. One of the things that we see all the time and I’ve been seeing it for the last, five years or so, working on ConnectAndSell training reps and then using it as an outsource partner, is that in a very short period of time, people see the nos as a negativity when reality is, that’s just a part of what’s going to happen. 60% of our outcomes are likely to be a no right out the gate because they don’t think they’re not that interested. They know that. That’s just the data. If I get six nos in a row, that’s average, that’s where I’m at.

Ryan Reisert (18:34):

I mean, we don’t have enough data yet. Now more than ever, people seem to take that rejection and even a hyper, amplified way and they want to run from it versus saying, ‘Hey, that’s okay, we’re still on track. We know this is going to be a rough patch. This is the best direction.’ So that’s how I see it. And I don’t know, Chris’s, how you think about that? You’re better with words than me, but the challenge is we don’t have that jacket and we can’t force through it because we don’t… Well, first of all, we don’t even know what we’re guiding ourselves towards. But second, we don’t know our numbers enough to make those informed decisions.

Chris Beall (19:08):

Yeah. I think all that was spot on. Confirmation bias is the single biggest problem in sales and sales performance, because it creates a runaway process, a negative confirmation bias that is, that doesn’t work, that won’t work, I won’t do it. Is that the number one way that salespeople fail and when they go home, they don’t have that person’s look at over in the next cube or they don’t have their boss to look at, or they can’t get up and go and talk to somebody in the coffee room or flow it off with a little ping pong game against some, one of their other sellers who should be talking to people.

Chris Beall (19:45):

They’re alone. And when you’re alone confirmation bias flow runoff with you, imagine I’ll go back to the sailing analogy. Imagine the difference between sailing say across the Atlantic Ocean in a small sailboat, with two people and with one person it’s radical.

Chris Beall (20:02):

You could imagine maybe with the partner jumping it, you get trained up, you could do it. You’d have each other’s support when things are tough. You don’t give up because you have your partner to cheer you on cheer you up and you’re responsible for them.

Chris Beall (20:15):

When you’re working from home, you feel alone. And when you feel alone, negative confirmation bias can take over very, very quickly. And there are 1,000 activities that can distract you. They can be preferable to making another call. So they feel preferable to it anyway, in terms of your business, they’re not. So I think from a manager’s perspective, one of the big work from home challenges is how do we interact with the rest of our crew on our sailboat that we’re responsible for in a way that keeps them of good cheer, strong, I’m not a big advocate of raa, raa in business.

Chris Beall (20:52):

I’m just not. Everybody knows I’m the guy that when the big deal is announced and everybody’s piling on and going, ‘Hey, Ryan, that was fantastic. What a super deal.’ Do you ever get an email from me piling on all that stuff and going, ‘Hey, everybody look at Ryan.’ I don’t do that. Not my thing, but I will send you a private note, Ryan that says, ‘Hey, I really think that’s a pretty good deal and what do you think is going to happen next?’ So I’ll do that, but I won’t do raa, raa but this is a case where it’s not raa, raa but it is helping folks deal with the natural tendency to go negative in the face of inevitable rejection. Rejection is simply part of search. We search on Google. We don’t get really upset if there’s stuff on the first page that we’re not going to click on, but sales is just search.

Chris Beall (21:39):

We’re searching for someone who has a need now, or in the future for our solution. Sales is just like Google, it’s just search mathematically it’s identical search. And that the sampling that we have to do in search, we have to look at each item. So Google does it in advance, they look at each website using automation and say, ‘Here’s what’s in it.’ And then they organize it in a way that when you search for it, you have a better chance of finding the ones that are relevant than not.

Chris Beall (22:05):

In sales. We do the same thing. We look at the data that’s out there. We make a list. That’s just we’re acting just like Google getting a set up, but now we have to actually see what’s inside of it. What’s relevant inside the equivalent of a website, which is our prospect what’s in there?

Chris Beall (22:21):

And the only way to find out what’s in there is to have a conversation. When we’re having conversations and sales, what we’re doing is searching the world or someone who has a need that matches our solution now or in the future. Everything else isn’t that that better not be a 100%. Would you be weirded out if every time you searched on Google, all you found was what was perfect. You start thinking, ‘I wonder what I’m missing. How did they do that? That’s not possible. They have to show me some good stuff and some bad stuff or else I know, I’m not sure I’m getting all this stuff.’ and sales is the same way we have to have positives and negatives. We have to have negative outcomes in order to be successful because it’s part of the math of sales.

Chris Beall (23:02):

The first part of the math of sales is we have to sample the space of potential buyers before we know who the prospective buyers are. And then we have to engage. That’s what we do. And when we do that, we have an issue. The issue is we’re wired up as JeffValenta said, ‘To experience something an objection, I don’t want to do that as rejection as personal.’ And if we don’t have somebody there to hold our hand and pat us on the back, look us in the eye and say, ‘Buck up.’ We tend to go with that. And when we go with that, then we give up. And when you give up, you’re done.

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