Worthy Intent Will Fill Your Funnel

Today on Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall has a discussion about first conversations with Mark Allen Roberts, CEO and founder of OTB Solutions. Mark and Chris compare notes on how things were in the old days of sales, back in the 1980s, when they got started in this area of business. Mark recalls that in the old days, you weren’t allowed to go out and sell until you were trained. Nowadays though, most salespeople aren’t trained. Many don’t even know the purpose of the call they’re making. Their knee jerk reaction to getting someone on the phone is to immediately start pitching their product. And so they totally miss the opportunity to use the first seven seconds of a conversation to establish trust and thus begin in relationship that may eventually lead to setting a meeting or making a sale.

Mark further explains why the pitch-first approach is a mistake. “When you’re reaching out on the phone,” he says, “it’s all about worthy intent. Are you reaching out to help somebody? Or are you just trying to hit your numbers?” Your prospects can tell the difference and will react accordingly. If no trust has been established, they will continue to feel ambushed and will maneuver to end the call quickly. Avoid this disaster by learning all there is to know about first conversations from these two experts in this week’s episode of the Market Dominance Guys, “Worthy Intent Will Fill Your Funnel.”

Announcer (01:25):

Mark further explains why the pitch first approach is a mistake. “When you’re reaching out on the phone, he says, it’s all about worthy intent. Are you reaching out to help somebody or are you just trying to hit your numbers?” Your prospects can tell the difference and will react accordingly. If no trust has been established, they will continue to feel ambushed and will maneuver to end the call quickly. Avoid the disaster by learning all there is to know about first conversations from these two experts. In this week’s episode of Market Dominance Guys, worthy intent will fill your funnel.

Chris Beall (02:03):

Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys. This is Chris Beall here. I am not with my normal co-host. That would be [Corey Frank 00:02:16]. So today I’m with Mark Roberts, and Mark is the founder, CEO of OTB Solutions, and he’s working with the CEOs and sales leaders of manufacturing companies in order to help them do what they need to do in order to handle the world as we find it today, which has a lot of change in it. Mark’s history in the sales world goes back as far as mine. And he’s the guy who actually was doing real work in the early eighties. For some of you watching this, that would be before when you were born, which is just fine. There was sales going on back then, there was real business. Believe it or not, we even had technology. I think I was busy working on my first ERP system for manufacturers in 1983 when Mark started working for, I think Frito-Lay. So welcome, Mark. Good to have you on Market Dominance Guys.

Mark Allen Roberts (03:10):

Thanks for inviting me. I look forward to our discussion.

Chris Beall (03:13):

Fantastic. And we miss Corey. He brings such, first of all, his sartorial splendor is really something. He dresses like… You went and put a nice shirt on. This is as good as I can do. But people just have to listen to the words. So Mark, what our audience has been listening to for the past 80 episodes, those who have hung in there with us, is conversations about market dominance from the perspective of a process that we believe actually is consistent. This sort of process can be run over and over with great results. And that is if you have the goods and the will to dominate a market, then all you really have to do, and I’m not trivializing this, but all you really have to do is make a list of the companies in that market. And again, this is all B2B. List the companies in that market. And then for each company, one or more folks that you want to start with in terms of having conversations. Get phone numbers for those people, hold conversations, and follow those that want to move forward with you now into sales processes. Those who don’t want to move forward now, talk to them repeatedly until they do. And then also keep learning about your market through these conversations and learning things like who went where and what’s going on with these jobs and these people and all that kind of stuff.

Chris Beall (04:30):

And the idea is that what you’re manufacturing in those first conversations, those cold calls, is not business opportunities, but trust. That you’re manufacturing trust. You’re doing it very quickly in about a seven second process. You’re doing it reliably about 100% of the time. And then you’re effectively harvesting that trust over the amount of time it takes before they finally decide to do business with you or you decide you’re never going to do business with them. So that’s what the conversation’s been about. And that’s the catch-up. So I guess we didn’t really need the 2.3 million words so far on Market Dominance Guys. We could have just done that, backed up, and said, “Okay, everybody you’re done. Go do it, nothing more to learn here, nothing more to see. But there’s more to it.”

Chris Beall (05:13):

So I’m curious as you’re looking two ways, one back all the way to 1983, when you started and just thinking about how has the world of sales for manufacturing and the role of sales, that business role of sales, which I will claim used to be to dispose of inventory at sufficient profit to keep the company going and maybe let it expand. And that that role has changed to primarily penetrating new markets, characterizing them, understanding them, and getting the new stuff that you can really make money on. New logos, new opportunities, new markets, and so forth. And that’s a pretty different role. Kind of like what is the role of sales and capitalism with manufacturing representing the place where capitalism really requires capital. You’ve got to make plant equipment and do all that kind of stuff. And so it’s not like software, right? I’ve run software companies. They know real capital there. Not really. That’s just money, right?

Mark Allen Roberts (06:08):

Right.

Chris Beall (06:08):

Capital is when you turn it into plant equipment and all that kind of good stuff. So how do you see that evolution from your perspective since way back when? And then we just had this massive disruption happen that I think disrupted the hotel industry, airline industry, bunch of other industries, big time. But it also disrupted manufacturing in ways that I think are more subtle and more interesting. But yet I believe you think that there are, as you’ve seen and are getting feedback that says, there’s kind of a universal need that was always there, but now it’s come to the fore that’s interesting. Who would have predicted COVID would have created a need for prospecting where so many companies responded to COVID by stopping prospecting?

Mark Allen Roberts (06:53):

Right.

Chris Beall (06:54):

That was sort of their response was, “Okay into the foxhole.” So with all of that, [inaudible 00:07:00] forth.

Mark Allen Roberts (07:00):

Well again, thank you for inviting me. And when I first started out in sales, like you said, back in the 80’s where I’m dating myself, there were no cell phones. There were no computers. I mean, you had to meet with people. You can call them on the telephone, you’d have a conversation. If they qualified as a potential, you’d go out and meet them. We didn’t have GPSes. But the focus was always to win new business and then grow that business once you’ve got your foot in the door. Now we fast forward into COVID. Prior to COVID, one of the biggest challenges most manufacturers had as well as distributors was finding people. Just keeping up. But what COVID did was created such a disruption and it actually exposed a lot of weaknesses that companies were aware of, but they were so busy they weren’t trying to fix. They knew they needed to get more into digital marketing.

Mark Allen Roberts (07:55):

They knew a lot of their sales skills weren’t where they needed to be. They were living off of current customers and trying to grow share of wallet. And they knew the value would have been to add new logos and increase market share. But it’s like what Warren Buffet said, “You can tell who’s swimming naked when the tide goes out.” Well, the tide went out. And very quickly, all of those little things that were on your radar for some day became super urgent now. And what we found was, back in the day, you weren’t allowed to go out and sell until you were trained. You were trained, you had a leader, they coached you, you had a mentor. There’s a lot of people in my business that are in sales that have never been trained, over 50%.

Mark Allen Roberts (08:42):

So when COVID hit, they didn’t have that foundational skills training to go back to. We have face-to-face sellers, as high as 60% of face-to-face sellers are now struggling to sell virtually because they lack the foundational skills of how to have a commercial conversation. So what I’ve been doing is helping my clients build those skills, create conversations, and help them pick up the phone and start making calls again. I think you’ve got data, and I’ve seen other data. The first thing people did when they went to COVID was started doing these email blasts. But they don’t work. And 92% of emails won’t be opened if you don’t know the person. So again, let’s get back to the fundamentals. I call my content no smoke and mirrors just because it’s very basic. It’s getting back to those fundamentals that every salesperson had to learn back in the day, which is reach out, contact people, understand the business.

Mark Allen Roberts (09:47):

With your podcast, you talk about creating good lists. I can’t tell you how many companies don’t even have lists. Their salespeople are just randomly trying to reach out. They don’t understand, for example, who their ideal customers are. What I’ve seen with COVID is some people just hunkered down and they stopped prospecting. They pretty much stopped everything. Some people strategically pivoted, and they came out of this stronger. I think McKinsey just had a study and said 27% of companies actually improved through COVID because they saw an opportunity and they went after it. But I continue to see a high number of once face-to-face salespeople struggling to grow current customers and open new customers. I don’t think manufacturing is unique, but the idea of prospecting and getting new customers is usually the last thing on their list every day. And therefore they never get to it. So there’s a tremendous opportunity to help train, coach, and give salespeople the tools to make those calls and create those commercial conversations.

Chris Beall (11:35):

Yeah, it’s interesting. I mean, what we’ve been in the business of, as you know, at ConnectAndSell for 15 years, is taking just this one little part of the process called getting a conversation…

Mark Allen Roberts (11:44):

Right.

Chris Beall (11:45):

And taking it from what’s become rather painful, about an hour to two hours of dialing and navigating phone systems per conversation, and just make it really effortless and trivial in a way. It’s like you push a button, you talk to somebody. So suddenly the bottleneck in a way… If the bottleneck for most companies is at the top of their funnel, because they’re not talking to enough people, then the bottleneck of that bottleneck has been just getting people on the phone, into conversations. And I always hesitate to call it the phone, because if you just use a phone, you’re an hour to two hours away from your next conversation. Whereas with our stuff, you just push a button and talk to somebody in for four minutes.

Chris Beall (12:21):

But suddenly you have a problem, which is okay… Well, two problems. What are you going to say? And to what purpose? What are you trying to actually accomplish? How would you count a success from a first conversation? What’s called a cold call. I call them ambush calls, because I think clarifies matters a little bit.

Mark Allen Roberts (12:39):

Yep.

Chris Beall (12:39):

And what would you say in a second conversation, a third conversation, a fourth one before a meeting has actually been scheduled? Assuming that the purpose is to schedule a meeting, so you can actually get into it far enough to see if somebody is qualified or not or if you should continue or not. It seems like that’s the purpose. First of all, as you just look at that part of the process, I mean… You and I go back far enough, when I started in the computer hardware industry in 1979, it would have been bizarre to have a system that you push a button and talk to somebody.

Chris Beall (13:13):

Because I could pick up the phone and always talk to, if that person was important, their admin, their secretary, as they called them, or their receptionist. And that person would always take a message on a little pink slip. And I would always get called back. I was a junior guy working at NCR. I could call anybody that I had a legitimate reason to speak with and there was no such thing as voicemail. And there was a human being who would take a message. And when that person got that message and had a moment, they’d have a stack of them and they’d go through a part of the day where they’d call people back. That was part of your life as an executive, you’d call people back. It’s like, “I got my stack of little pink messages.” Or you’d say to your admin, “Hey, get so-and-so on the phone.” And then you go about your thing and you had somebody calling for you and when Mary or Sue, or sometimes Bob, got that person on the phone, then you had the transfer take place, and it would ring on your desk, and it would light up, and you pick it up and he’d say, “Hey George, how’s it going?”

Chris Beall (14:13):

It was so easy to get to talk to people back then. I don’t think we realized that we built an economy around that ease. I just don’t think we got it. And it went away. We just relaxed. And it was like… You talked to people. And now here we are in a more modern world, but it’s harder to talk to people. And once you get them, you don’t know… I mean, I’m assuming, guessing that the people you work with, if you were to give them ConnectAndSell and give them 30, 40, 50 conversations a day or eight an hour or whatever it is that they want, they would not know what to say. And most of them wouldn’t even know the purpose of the conversation until you train them. Is that correct?

Mark Allen Roberts (14:52):

Absolutely. What I find when I join coaching calls is what I call premature pitching. Pick up the call, they finally get somebody on the call, and then they start pitching immediately. They’ve not created any trust. They haven’t demonstrated any competence. And again, what was the purpose of the call? Was it to book a meeting? Or was it to start a relationship of trust with somebody? That’s a pretty big interruption for a lot of salespeople. They’re just so thrilled to be talking to a live person. Chances are they weren’t trained, so they really don’t have a script or even a planned conversation. And the calls typically don’t go very well.

Mark Allen Roberts (15:31):

Often I ask, “What’s the reason for the call? Is it to book a meeting, give information, get information, close an opportunity? What stage of the sale is it in?” And what I like about ConnectAndSell is it solves one of the biggest problems I see in the funnel, which is starting the first conversation. Most manufacturers have really strong salespeople, sales engineers. If they have a meaningful conversation booked, they’ll do a great job. Where they struggle is the outreach and that fear of rejection and doing all the multiple dials and all that. Where your system, having used it myself, is pretty simple. I mean, you can crush how many dials an hour. I mean, you know the statistics, but it really shocked me how many dials you can have, how many conversations, and how many of those conversations actually turn into a meeting.

Chris Beall (16:24):

Yeah. It’s quite interesting when you look at it, to me anyway from the perspective of, I always think theory of constraints, right?

Mark Allen Roberts (16:31):

Right.

Chris Beall (16:32):

Where in the entire business… And again, you and I lived in the world of manufacturing for our whole careers. I am now doing this thing, but for a long time I built manufacturing software. And so I was out on plant floors, helping people to use that software in order to make things or to ship things. I had distribution software also that I was responsible for making at one point in my life. And I always both made it, and sold it, and went out and followed into the field. And one of the things I learned, I think it was in the 80’s from me Eli Goldratt and the geniuses over there in theory of constraints land is there’s only one bottleneck in a business. There’s only one bottleneck in a process. In anything that’s a system that’s making stuff or flowing stuff through it or hoping to get some outcome. The math says there’s one and only one place that, at this moment, is worth investing in.

Chris Beall (17:25):

And I believe, by the way that that bottleneck is right at the top of the funnel. First conversation with somebody who might make a good potential customer or partner for your business. I actually think that’s the bottleneck. And it showed up because of voicemail. Voicemail becoming universal caused the scarce resource that feeds that bottleneck, which is just a feeder resource actually. The actual answering of the phone by the relevant party. It’s not the thing. It’s a component you need in order to manufacture a conversation. And it’s had a supply issue that’s gotten worse and worse and worse since about 2003, when voicemail became ubiquitous. And then we think of them as gatekeepers, they think of themselves as admins and facilitators, became more scarce and suddenly conversations became scarce.

Chris Beall (18:17):

But I’m wondering, you talk to lots of CEOs of manufacturing companies. That’s kind of your target as far as I understand, right?

Mark Allen Roberts (18:24):

Correct.

Chris Beall (18:24):

You work for CEOs to anything else.

Mark Allen Roberts (18:26):

Right.

Chris Beall (18:27):

And I’m going to ask you why in a moment, because I think you told me something about some times sales leaders, see what you provide is more helpful to the CEO and more scary to them.

Mark Allen Roberts (18:38):

Correct.

Chris Beall (18:38):

But you like CEOs. What percentage of manufacturing CEOs do you think understand that the single bottleneck of their entire business is not out on the floor, it’s actually in getting, and holding first conversations that lead to potential new business?

Mark Allen Roberts (18:58):

I would say it’s less than 10%. When CEOs finally have a relationship of trust with me, it’s not unusual, particularly with manufacturing CEOs, to hear them say something that sounds like this when they’re frustrated and they have to go into a board meeting. “Why can’t my sales run like my plant? Why can’t I have predictable results? Why can’t I know what inputs to drive, what things to move, what gauges to turn, and have a predictable forecast?” It’s like a dark art to them. Most of the CEOs in manufacturing that I work with grew up through operations or finance. They’re used to having a very clean project flow map. And sales, quite frankly, frustrates them. Now they know they have a problem as far as net new logos, because they track that. But what I like about our discussion is I think we need to figure out what problem you’re trying to solve.

Mark Allen Roberts (19:55):

“We need more new business.” Okay. How many new conversations are you having a day? Who’s tracking that? Okay. So you got the conversation and you booked a meeting. Okay. You had the meeting. How did the meeting go? What percentage of those meetings turned into future discovery, calls, quotes, opportunities? Or did they fall flat? Were you prepared for that? And then let’s say you had the opportunity, you did a good job, you identified something, you created a business case, and then it still didn’t close. So what we’re starting to do is we have the ability to add some science to sales. And that’s really what I hear CEOs wanting. “Help me understand where it’s broke.” Or as you put it, “the bottleneck.” Let’s clear that bottleneck. And what I’m seeing today is a lot of people have mindsets that really aren’t serving them in sales, particularly in manufacturing.

Mark Allen Roberts (20:50):

If I had a dollar for every salesperson that told me, “Mark, you don’t understand. I can’t make a sales call virtually. I’ve got to be face-to-face.” So they’re kind of in like a sales coma. So that’s why I created the virtual selling courses. And then I created all kinds of data. If you look at the Salesforce data, 50% of buyers are buying at or above what they were buying pre-COVID. Then you look at the Harvard article, 45% of purchasing managers have said they have supply chain interruptions right now. What better time to prospect than right now? And yet there’s that mindset that says, “Oh, I can’t prospect. I’ve got to meet them face to face.” Well, that’s because you don’t have the skills to uncover opportunities with questions that you’re used to seeing face to face. But once we give them that skill and we give them a tool, so they can go through hundreds and hundreds of dials and have conversations, I think they’re going to embrace prospecting. Because your tool actually makes prospecting fun again.

Chris Beall (21:56):

I think that’s so key. And here’s my guess. If you took that 10%, that actually kind of get it. If CEOs of manufacturing companies who get that the bottleneck, the constraint of their entire business, is right there in first conversations. They’re just not having enough first conversations with potentially relevant folks. And then if you were to ask and “What would the key indicator, the true key performance indicator be that you are making progress in addressing that?” None of them would say, “Oh, it would be that my reps would be having fun prospecting.” And yet I know Matt McCorkle over at Kaeser Compressors, we asked him to do a little testimonial ad for us, and what he focused on was “Look, this thing you guys have at ConnectAndSell made it fun to do what needed to be done. And that made all the difference.” Do you think that you could get 2% of the 10% spontaneously to say, “You know what we really need to do? We need to make prospecting fun.”

Chris Beall (23:04):

They’d be shocked if you could show them how, quite frankly. You think about manufacturing companies, they’re usually salespeople and sales roles grew up through engineering. Maybe they grew up through operations. Sometimes I even see people from accounting in sales roles. They never met to be in sales. I mean, what kid eight years old is saying, “I want to grow up and be a salesperson.” Maybe a few. So they already have this mindset, this limiting belief that salespeople are bothering people. In reality, when I reset those mindsets, you’re reaching out to help people. And what better time than right now to help a lot of people. That’s a pretty big statistic. 45% of supply chain people are telling us they’re having interruptions right now. You’re not bothering them. You’re actually… You could be the call that makes their day.

Chris Beall (23:58):

Yeah. You could be the call that saves their business. It’s amazing when you think about it that way. So what you’ve just said, if I looked at it in a macro sense, is well, we live in an economy that calls itself a services economy. We found out also through COVID that… And I’ll talk about America right now. People who are listening to this in other countries, pardon me for narrowing my scope for a moment. But in America we found out that supply chains for really important stuff that were extended overseas, were prone to massive disruption from the side effect of a global pandemic. And I’m pretty sure this isn’t the last global pandemic we’ll ever see. And I’m pretty sure it’s not the last disaster that can impact supply chains around the globe. We know some others. People have been known to have conflicts. Those can be problematic. They’ve been known to have changes in the rules. Those can be problematic.

Chris Beall (24:54):

So if you look at it and say, “Okay, so manufacturing is vital to the American innovation economy because innovations ultimately become products and products have to be made.” What you have just said basically is, “Oh, and the folks who are responsible for that sector by and large” what did we do get 2% or 1% of 10%. So “less than one 10th of 1% of the people running those companies either know where the bottleneck of therefore the innovation economy is, nor do they know what to do about it.” That’s what you’re saying, right?

Mark Allen Roberts (25:32):

I would agree with that.

Chris Beall (25:34):

Doesn’t that make this like a matter of national importance?

Mark Allen Roberts (25:38):

Well pretty much.

Chris Beall (25:38):

Seems like a big deal.

Mark Allen Roberts (25:39):

For a long time, when the business was really good, it was like that Kevin Costner movie, “Build it and they will come.” But now when business got tough during COVID, it really started to show the organizations that had strong skills, and systems, and technology, and those that didn’t. There’s no shock there’s a race right now to digitalization, right? Why is that? Well, back in the day, when you and I started selling, we were the keepers of the keys. We had all the information, we had the sell sheets and our three inch binders, and people had to meet with us to learn. Today, what is it, 76% of the sales process is over before somebody engages with a salesperson. But again, when you’re reaching out on the phone, it’s all about worthy intent.

Mark Allen Roberts (26:28):

There’s an author named Ed Wallace who wrote a book on how to build business relationships. And he leads with worthy intent. Are you reaching out to help somebody? They can tell in your voice. They can tell in your mannerism and your tone. Or are you just trying to hit your numbers? Are you going through the motions because your sales manager said, “I want 50 calls today.” Or are you actually trying to start relationships based on your experience and build some trust? It’s a whole different way of selling. I think it was Florida State did a study and they asked buyers “In a one hour meeting with a sales person, how many minutes were valuable to you?” As a trainer, it was like an arrow through my heart. They said six minutes. No wonder nobody wants to take your call, because there’s a ton of people out there making calls terribly. So again, my point is, with some training, coaching, and the right tools, the right technology, even somebody who’s never prospected before could be tremendously successful, particularly at some of the manufacturing companies.

Chris Beall (27:36):

Well, maybe even never prospected before as a positive. I’m looking right now, I won’t share my screen because it’s proprietary information, but here’s some numbers from a manufacturer that I personally am the rep on this deal. I’m a believer the CEO should sell regular deals. I just think that’s how you stay in contact with your business and understand it. And every once in a while, the money you bring in can be useful too, if you’re bootstrapped like us. So here I’m looking at a group of salespeople for an industrial company. Makes a product that they sell to folks with factories for the most part. And here are their COVID year numbers. So if I look at the number of reps, it’s roughly speaking 100. When I met them, they’d never prospected. As far as I could tell, no phone prospecting at all.

Chris Beall (28:25):

So last year without replanning due to COVID, they just kept their number locked. We helped them by doing 557,242 fully navigated dials for them and connected 21,000. Yeah. 21,098 conversations. And out of those 21,098 conversations, they set 2,135 meetings with folks that were new that they wanted to do business with, and 8,446, a follow-ups. Those are opportunities for us to get them on the phone again and see if they were more ready. And the effort they put into it was… Well, this group of 100, must’ve pressed this button that we have 21,000 times. So that’s what roughly 2000 times each over the year, never dialed the phone once. They spent a little less than 3000 hours total. So a little less than 30 hours each over the year. 30 total hours each. And they push a button and wait for five minutes exactly. By the way, on the nose, which is pretty funny. And have good conversations. Now we train them. But it shows me that here’s a company that gets that their bottleneck is right there at the top of the funnel.

Chris Beall (29:41):

I believe they’re better than most because they had never prospected before and so they were open-minded about how to do it once they decided it could be done. That’s my view is I like those that haven’t done it, haven’t been prospecting, because they’re ready to listen. I don’t know. Do you find that inverted correlation between almost like the naive non-prospector might be the best prospector once they’re trained?

Mark Allen Roberts (30:09):

Absolutely. I was on a call today with a manufacturer and again, I’ve got an NDA, so I can’t say their name, but what they sell, the machinery that they build is typically anywhere from one to $4 million each machine. And I just assessed their sales team. And what was the big aha for the CEO was one of their newest salespeople is outselling their seasoned team almost four to one. And when we started looking at it…

Chris Beall (30:38):

Wow.

Mark Allen Roberts (30:39):

He’s following what we taught. He’s doing it each stage what we taught and he has no limiting beliefs. He has no belief that, “Oh, buyers in our industry won’t take calls.” He’s just doing what we’re asking them to do and he’s having tremendous success. The other people that are really doing well that were face-to-face sellers are those seasoned salespeople. If they could just learn how to start that beginning conversation, they have so much knowledge, and experience, and applications experience that when they get the meeting, they’ll totally help the customer. But where there’s a lack of skill is in starting that conversation.