Would it Help if I Perform a Haka Before My Cold Calls?

By any measure, you can confidently claim that the New Zealand All Blacks rugby team are the world’s most successful sports organization in the world and famed for starting any game with their intimidating black jerseys and their dramatic and cultural symbolic haka, which is a traditional Maori warrior challenge to the plain opposition, they have amassed a track record that is truly unequaled by any other team in sport. And in more than a century of playing, they started in 1903 by the way, the All Blacks have won almost 75% of their 580+ matches in history. It’s often said that the All Blacks remember their defeats more than their actual victories. And they accomplish this domination despite New Zealand only having a population of about 4.5 million people. With their financial and limited player resources being dwarfed by England, and France, and Australia, and South Africa, and so many others, they truly punch above their weight class and make every match, and every player, and every training session count.

And just to show you that domination in your market does not have to equate to inflated egos or the proverbial spiking of the football against your opponent, the All Blacks continue to enjoy enormous global success with their grounded sense of humility and character. And one of the most dramatic illustrations of this was at the end of the 2015 Rugby World Cup when New Zealand soundly beat Australia. And at the end of the match, Sonny Bill Williams, one of the All Black’s best players, gave his winning gold medal to a young boy named Charlie Line. You see Charlie had snuck onto the field at the end of the match to celebrate with his team and was soon swarmed by security guards. Feeling sympathy for the young fan, Sonny stepped in very quickly and promptly gave his hard-earned medal to the young Charlie, a kid he had never met before. He later said, “Rather than have the medal hanging up and collecting dust at home, it’s going to be hanging around that young fella’s neck and he can tell that story for a long time to come.”

The players on his market-dominant team are driven, not to become merely a good All Black, but a great All Black. And in this week’s episode of the Market Dominance Guys, ConnectAndSell’s broken down version of their own Sonny Bill Williams, my co-host Chris Beall, takes us on a logical field journey of how market dominance happens on an exponential level and not in a linear fashion. The All Blacks clearly recruited, and trained, and played their competition in exactly such a manner of exponential growth and it has shown results for 116 years. So, welcome to the Market Dominance Guys, in this week’s episode entitled, Would it Help if I Perform a Haka Before My Cold Calls?

Here is the full transcript for this episode:

Chris Beall (03:58):

Markets work by a process that says if you win one, your opponent is weaker across all future games you’re going to play. When you win two, your opponent is weaker yet. Why? Because you have two references and they have zero. When you have three, they’re weaker yet. It’s harder for them to get their first one. And then, they’ve got to go to the margin. It’s like being a stallion controlling a harem of mares. The other stallions, the guys who don’t have a harem, are out on the outside. They get an occasional make a fall here or there. You’re dominating the market. Why? Because the mares like to be around the guys dominating mares, that’s why. It’s safe for them. It’s a good play. And market dominance works like that. Market dominance works non-linearly and yet sales compensation, sales plans, business plans, all this stuff are linear.

They miss the main point. The main point is not to go, “Oh, we’re going to have this growth that goes like this because our activities go like this.” It’s, “Oh, it gets easier, lower risk, cheaper, faster; the faster we go at the beginning and our denominator is time.”

Corey Frank (05:22):

So, if you had… and this is a conversation for another time too, is redesigning the comp plan for the future, the sales comp plan, the sales leadership comp plan, the CEO’s comp plan. What I hear you saying is that it should be designed more or less from what we were talking about earlier about myopia that most folks have when they start a company about their own numbers, their own goals, and instead, more of globalist perspective on compensated on their penetration for market share.

Chris Beall (05:57):

Yes.

Corey Frank (05:58):

That will inherently help the individual, the organization hit its goals, but if you’re not setting your comp plans out, your incentive plans based off of market dominance, you’re living in your own world when there are other visitors in your own universe and you choose not to accept it.

Chris Beall (06:16):

Yeah. You’re simply hoping that somebody doesn’t go faster than you within your market.

Corey Frank (06:21):

That’s a great point [crosstalk 00:06:22].

Chris Beall (06:22):

It’s a capturing lockup. Hope truly is your strategy if you execute a standard go-to-market. All standard go-to markets are based simply on the hope that somebody else doesn’t get in there and go faster than you. Because it’s a runaway. If they win, they win. If they start to win, unless they blow it, they’re going to win. And so, what should you compensate for early? Logo capture, referenceable accounts. So, your hunter should be compensated for capturing logos and your customer success people should be compensated for turning those logos into referenceable accounts. And you need to be objective about both of those. And by the way, your pricing model should be designed to capture logos. And your financing plan is a consequence of the application of that logo capturing pricing model applied to your market.

So, once you go out and you figure out how many… say you’re doing this with the phone, how many dials does it take to get a meeting in this market? How many meetings does it take to get a net new opportunity in this market? Right? How does that really work in our market? “Oh, look, now I have those conversion numbers. I can take those numbers and say, these are the worst case. This is my early case. This is only going to get better. It’s going to get easier because I’m going to have my referenceable customers.” Applied time to reference ability from first engagement. And what are the issues around reference ability? Am I addressing all of the issues around reference ability or hoping somebody else addresses some? So, at ConnectAndSell, for instance, we made a serious error or omission in our own go-to-market. We said, “Well, certainly it’s obvious that there’s a big factor,” which is when somebody’s using ConnectAndSell and we’ve amped up their number of dials and therefore the number of conversations, “Surely they will be able to handle those conversations and do as well with them as they do with their current conversations.”

Well, first of all, we found out they weren’t having enough current conversations [inaudible 00:08:26] to know how they’re doing. Secondly, we found out, “Oh, their messaging is terrible.” Thirdly, we found out there was a huge talent spread between the top and the bottom, which suddenly was material. The best reps were actually producing at a rate that would allow market dominance to take place with no problem whatsoever. But unfortunately, most of the pool of reps was not doing that or anything; we call them the zeros. You’ve been through this with me. Why do we have the zeros? Why do we tolerate the zeros? And so we went through a process of… it took years, by the way, we were so dumb at it, of learning the ecosystem, our customers, the trainers, the books, the online information, this desire of people to be better. All that’s done enough.

It turns out we got to bite the bullet and do it. We did something radical. We said, “Okay, if that’s needed, it’s needed in order to get referenceable customers for the acceleration effective ConnectAndSell, not for something else, therefore we’re going to provide messaging workshops, which I personally do. Why do I do those? Because I’m really not trying to get their message correct. I’m trying to get their management to decide that this was worth managing too. So, I have to get a mindset change almost like a religious conversion place. In management, where they say, “Oh, I get it a cold call that works from a foundation of recognizing that the starting point is fear. And I’ve got to turn fear into trust and trust into curiosity and curiosity into commitment and commitment into action. Once I know that, and I believe it, then what the words are and how the words are said means something to me as a business and now I’ll manage to it and I won’t be tolerant of drift.”

That’s actually why I do the messaging workshop; is to get management to the point where they’ll work with us. So, I’m trying to create a piece of the ecosystem… management that works as a piece of our infrastructure for their market dominance, because if they don’t take that point of view, the alternative, which we’ve learned the hard way, is the refs.

Corey Frank (10:41):

How often do you do those?

Chris Beall (10:43):

I do an average of two a day, 2.5 a day. So, I’m manufacturing converts. I normally get three to four people on these, sometimes more, but 10 people a day. So, it’s about three, 4,000 people a year who are going through this process of going from, “I think I know what a cold call is or what it’s all about, how the dynamics work,” to, “I have a completely different view of that whole process and I get that it’s… I could be under my control and I could use it as the spear point for market dominance.”

Corey Frank (11:19):

Can you invite me to the next one that you do?

Chris Beall (11:22):

Sure, absolutely. I can also give you tons of recordings.

Corey Frank (11:26):

Oh, yeah, I’d love to- [crosstalk 00:11:27].

Yeah, sure that’d be great.

Chris Beall (11:28):

Yeah, we could take one of those recordings and take it apart and anonymize it. Just edit it down and let that be probably four or five episodes.

Corey Frank (11:40):

Well, that’s what I have on here is I have part one and part two, the messaging workshop podcast in that or four parts. Jocko just did an incredible podcast with probably… You all hear war stories and you hear folks who are in precarious situations and got out the nick of time and the Huey lands and they’re hanging on to the rift of the skiff as they’re flying away. And then Jocko had a four-part… He took his podcast divided into four parts. So, it’s about five hours with this incredible guy named John Stryker Meyer. And Stryker, or Tilt as they call him, was in a covert operation in Laos.

So, much of what he experienced he couldn’t communicate until recently. But those stories are just cliffhangers and the hours fly by. And I imagine a messaging workshop that is pertinent to a lot of the data and the cold cognition data that you talk about and now to see how it comes into place like you had said to prevent drift. So, you don’t just employ a technology, drop it off and then pop smoke, and then get out of there. There is a fair amount of training on the why, not just a what and that training on the why is as critical as the, what otherwise drift will occur; your math won’t work, right? You’re going to fill up your dataset.

Chris Beall (13:08):

Exactly. It’s got to be polluted with performance numbers that are coincidental, not driven.

Corey Frank (13:16):

That’s great.

Chris Beall (13:17):

Sometimes you get lucky, right? The blind pig and all that.

Corey Frank (13:21):

Yeah, and you start falling in love with a chance. And you assume that chance, with no statistical validity, is the new normal is the [crosstalk 00:13:30] path

Chris Beall (13:30):

I love that phrase, “You start falling in love with chance.” I believe the entire sales profession is fundamentally in love with chance. That’s why they celebrate wins. In our company when somebody closes a deal and there’s a win and there’s all this jumping around, congratulations. First of all, I noticed that the congratulations always go to the salesperson, not the customer success person who was actually on the ground [crosstalk 00:13:55] in the test garage making it happen.

And secondly, I noticed that I never say anything about it. Because to me, the wins are the lucky outcomes from the thing that really counts, which is, “Did you push the button? Did you have the conversations? Did you convert those into meetings? Did you eat the false positives and do that with grace and in an uncomplaining way?” Because they have to be there and we should do a whole session on just false positives, the importance of false positives; why you must have them, why you must not try to get rid of them.

In fact, I’ll jump onto that for just a moment. This is the single biggest fallacy in the entire world of sales. I was talking to somebody who really knows the stuff. The other day, I was talking to Roy Raanani at the big exit conference. And we’re just standing there in the hall, kind of catching up and we’re talking about qualifying in a cold call. And he said something about how the good rep qualifies in the cold call. And I said, “Roy if you qualify in the cold call, you destroy the integrity of your list.” And he said, “how’s that?” I said, “Well, the list has a certain quality associated with it.” If you decide to change that quality, say you have 10 reps and each one is qualifying.

Each one has a little bit different idea of qualifying and then the emotional state of the prospect is different because you’ve ambushed them. So, some are more or less ready for those qualifying questions. Some will tell you the truth and some won’t. So, you have this huge amount of variety you’ve just introduced in a process. And meanwhile, one step downstream in discovery, you have a hundred percent fidelity for qualification.

So, you jumped the gun and tried to qualify with a variety of inputs, with a variety of circumstances, with a variety of processors. And what you’ve done is you’ve effectively made your original list, which had one set of queries or one set of processes to make it. And you’re now effectively turned it at random into 10 or 50 or a hundred different lists of which the quality is completely unknown because you weren’t patient enough to wait for the step of a process where you actually can qualify this designed for qualification and you’ve done it because you want to manage the emotional state of your sales rep of your account executive, but they don’t have to do the company’s work. They can only do their work. And you need to remind your folks, “There’s a reason we pay you a base salary to do the company’s work.”

It’s not like a welfare state. You don’t get a base salary because, “Well, people need money to live off,” you have a base salary because we are paying you, Dear account executive to do the company’s work and one of the most important things we need to do is we need to assess the quality of our list because our list is the expression of our understanding of our market. And if we don’t understand how well we’re expressing an understanding of our market in the form of this list, we can never improve our list. All we can do is celebrate luck.

Corey Frank (17:07):

So, if I have a house file of 2.5 million, but I’m not able to articulate any demographic, SIT persona data in that 2.5 million, on prow that I have a house file of 2.5 million, when really it’s just noise, it’s garbage, it’s named; it’s not a list. You just say, “what is a list?” A list truly is… I like that. Your list is an understanding of your market.

Chris Beall (18:39):

It’s a hypothesis and the processing list is simple. What you’re trying to do is to get elements of the list… the people who are on the list, into a process where they can be qualified or disqualified. And if they’re qualified, there’ll be interested in moving forward… By the very nature of it; if they’re qualified and you have something of value, it’s not very hard to move them forward. And discovery is where we can qualify because of the trust relationship. That’s different. When you ambush somebody, they don’t trust you. They fear you. When they fear you, they won’t tell you the truth. They’ll tell you whatever it takes to make you go away. So, qualifying questions fundamentally can’t work in a reliable way in an ambush conversation. Therefore, we should not use an ambush conversation to qualify. Unless qualifying is unimportant if it’s unimportant and we should do it all the time.

Corey Frank (19:34):

But most sales managers would say… and I’m sure you had this conversation, right? Devil’s advocate and the hallway are, “Listen, Chris, I understand that I may tarnish my list, but they were interested and they were open. They were receptive. They wanted to. They asked me questions about the product and they showed interest enough where I could venture in the cold call, into the discovery and have that blended into one sit-down session. Why is that so wrong?”

Chris Beall (20:06):

That’s a different error or action. So, that error is the error of trying to hold the entire discovery conversation by a quick transition from ambush to a mutual agreement, that’s really bad. There’s the flavor of it though, which is to go from ambush to quick qualified, “Let me ask you three qualifying questions. Oh, Just to make sure the meeting’s great, right?” Well, I’m making an assumption. My assumption is you’re going to tell me the truth. Now, there is a place you can pull it off right after they accept the meeting and they put it in their calendar.

You’re actually on a ledge where you can explore that safely if you’re really good at it. But the fact is, it’s pointless. And the reason it’s pointless is you still getting quality information relative to what you would get in discovery. So, take it into discovery and be consistent. There’s a rule in manufacturing. I don’t ever split a process between two workstations; one of which feeds another. I execute a process for the workstation, I produce an intermediate output, and that output, with known characteristics, goes to the next workstation in my assembly line. I don’t say, “Oh, wait, I have a few minutes. I know the next station is supposed to be the one that stamps the head flat. But I got a minute. I’ll go grab a hammer and whack it a few times and see if it works.” You don’t make stuff like that. You don’t do things in manufacturing because I have a minute, because I happened to have that part in hand, you do it with [crosstalk 00:21:36] the machines that are designed to do it.

Corey Frank (21:37):

But there’s this insecurity that I’m going to elongate the sales cycle when I don’t necessarily need to.

Chris Beall (21:44):

Yeah, you are. False positives in all manufacturing processes. False positives are a requirement. They’re a mathematical requirement because, at every step of the process, you’re gaining information. So, you can’t pretend rationally that you must’ve had that information before. When I make the list there’s information I don’t have. When I invite somebody through a five-sentence process to come to a discovery meeting, I learn one thing: are they interested enough to come to the discovery meeting? I manufacture that one piece of information, which is actually pretty valuable because 95% of the list isn’t interested and won’t attend the meeting. So, now I’ve got this amazing 20 to 1 improvement. I don’t really need to make it like 20.3 to 1. I got my 20 to 1. Is there going to be some stuff in there that we’ll discover won’t move forward to the next step? Absolutely. Should there be? There must be a false positive.

Corey Frank (22:43):

[inaudible 00:22:43] market. So, this is good stuff. This is another topic I just wrote down there. Are you saying that in most situations, B2B software selling products, it doesn’t have to be… the truck, a client of yours is a good example. But in B2B is that I should never do… When I’m doing cold calling, I should never have one call, one discovery call process.

Chris Beall (23:11):

Exactly.

Corey Frank (23:11):

Yes, I need to do in order to have developed that fear into trust and move that flywheel, as we talked about before.

Chris Beall (23:22):

Exactly. The point is, process at each step what that step is designed to process and produce outputs from one step to another, that within the boundaries of what you need to know about that output; its characteristics, most of the time, you’re within some set of parameters. You make it ostensive. Keep your opinion out of it. Taking a meeting is objective. Having an opinion about whether it’s a great meeting or not that’s going to happen, is not objective. So, when a rep says, “I had a great meeting,” I go, “That’s nice. Did you get a test drive?” “Well, no. They said they had to go back and talk to somebody.”

Like, I had a meeting today and you would have listened to that and gone, “What a great meeting.” Anybody would say it was a great meeting, “Wow. That guy’s got… he answered all the questions, they moved in their understanding, they seem to have a need, they express with a tone of voice that indicates they’re going to go forward.” That meeting produced nothing because it didn’t produce a test drive, which is what the discovery process is designed to do. So, now the process is going into one of its alternative forms which are, “They’re going to get back to me. I failed as a sales person to get the next step.” But if they come back now, that meeting, after the fact became a great meeting. Why? Because it produced a test. That’s it. Everything needs to be objective, as you go down, opinions don’t need to apply. No opinion needs to come into the process. I don’t know why sales managers listen to the opinion of their reps on any subject whatsoever. It’s of no value.

Chop your process up into pieces that produce intermediate outputs that are completely objective and have to do with the prospect’s action, not your response to what they said.

Corey Frank (25:21):

The subjective nature needs to be in the presentation; in the pitch. The objective has been ironclad since the manufacturing age about what that equals.

Chris Beall (25:31):

And the manufacturing revolution was built on a few great concepts. One of which is, push quality upstream. My vendors must… my suppliers must deliver to me stuff that’s of high enough quality that I don’t have to inspect it. That’s the objective standard. I can use what they deliver to my dock without inspection. How do I discover that? I don’t discover it by inspection. I discover it by looking at yields.