Your Sales People Are Brain Surgeons

What do you do if you have a group of 25 or so folks on your sales team, and you want to really make a splash in the first quarter of the new year? Due to the on-going pandemic, we all know that connecting with customers face to face at trade shows is no longer an option. No doubt, your reps are still working from home, most of them researching their prospects and trying a little social media marketing, but all of them eventually doing the traditional dialing, dialing, dialing, and praying, praying, praying that someone will pick up the phone. How, in the name of all that’s financially holy, are your reps going to help your company dominate its market if they simply continue to use the same old methods during this brave new year we are entering?

Our two Market Dominance Guys, Chris and Corey, along with this week’s guest, ConnectAndSell Customer Success Manager Donny Crawford, diagnose the problem of what’s keeping companies from the market domination they desire. These three cold-calling practitioners offer their insights into what works best to get the greatest number of conversations with decision makers — despite cold call outcomes like “Not me,” “Not now,” “Not interested,” “Call back later,” or even the dreaded hang-up. Wait till you hear Donny’s proven method for how to turn repeated hang-ups from a prospect into the appointment you’re after.

Chris compares the work of a salesperson to that of a brain surgeon, first cracking open a company’s “skull” by getting that first appointment, and then exploring what’s wrong inside the “brains” of a company by having a discovery conversation. Join Chris, Corey, and Donny as they guide you through that operation during this episode of Market Dominance guys, “Your Sales People are Brain Surgeons.”

Corey Frank (00:43):

Welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with your host, Corey Frank, and your co-host, the Sage of sales, the prophet of profits, Chris Beall, CEO of ConnectAndSell. And today we have another guest. I think we’re on a roll Chris. We’ve had, normally we say, I think we had a rule, no guests, but in the last couple of months or so we had Oren Klaff, had certainly Ryan Reisert. And so we’re going to dig deep into the connoisseurs of our craft in your own backyard. We have Donny Crawford, the customer success manager over at ConnectAndSell. And Donny’s been with ConnectAndSell for several years, I think over five years, I think you had mentioned Donny, and you’re originally from the main streets of San Jose, but now you live in the rarefied air somewhere in a nondescript location in Utah, having spent we’ll get out of them.

Corey Frank (01:37):

But one of the talks with Donny today, Chris, I think too, we were talking about market dominance, certainly for the last 60 plus episodes. Can’t believe it’s over 60 episodes now. And one of the questions we get oftentimes is, well, how do you put this actually into practice? Can we interview and talk with somebody who puts ConnectAndSell into practice? The theory of market dominance into practice and who lives it at scale? Now, Chris and I, Chris was my guide and my Sherpa here in the days of my previous company, where I was a degenerate gambler. And when I got ConnectAndSell, I just kept spending and spending and spending those dials and eight, nine hours a day. And now I understand from Donny that there’s a right way to do it. And I was doing absolutely the 179 degrees away from the right way to actually properly use ConnectAndSell, if I’m going to have an internal team, that’s going to be coached up here. So Donny, welcome to the Market Dominance Guys.

Donny Crawford (02:41):

Happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Corey Frank (02:42):

Great. So, Chris, I think we can probably throw it over to you. And when you look at a lot of the folks who are trying to be practitioners of our craft of market dominance, especially if they have their own internal and they want to hit some of these numbers, they’re looking at a new year coming up and say, do I need to hire five, 10 more folks? Do I need to take my trade show dollars that are going to be used in 2021? And maybe put them into SEO. Maybe I should put them into what obviously there’s a lot of red meats there. And I think that he can set Donny up here by talking a little bit about, what would I do if I have a team of 25 or so folks on the inside? Maybe 30 or 40 folks.

Corey Frank (03:31):

And I want to really make a splash in Q1 and I don’t want to do the traditional digital. I don’t want to just throw something at my tech stack. I can’t do trade shows any longer. My field reps are really working from home and now they got to use the phone, but I still need this thing called market dominance. What are some of the things that maybe we can tee Donny up since he sees it every day to kind of guide the average person like me on how to get to the next level?

Chris Beall (04:02):

Thanks, Corey. Yeah. That’s, it’s fascinating putting this stuff into practice ain’t easy, right? Otherwise, there’d only be one episode of Market Dominance Guys, which we’d say is pretty much let me review the bidding here. Talk to everybody in your market, generate trust in seven seconds, harvest that trust over a three-year period. Turn it into meetings when you can and turn it into follow-ups when you can’t, that’s it. Now that you get into subtle stuff off, if it doesn’t work, tweak the message.

Corey Frank (04:32):

Right.

Chris Beall (04:32):

If that doesn’t work, tweak your list. I think we’re done. But obviously, we’re not done.

Corey Frank (04:36):

If that doesn’t work call Youngblood Works and we’ll do all that for you.

Chris Beall (04:39):

Yeah. That’s exactly right. So the next possibility is, well, maybe it’s not that you’re doing it wrong, maybe you’re just the wrong folks to be doing it. And what you really need is somebody to open the market for you. I compare this to brain surgery. So your salespeople are the brain surgeons, but opening somebody’s skull isn’t brain surgery, it’s just different. And Corey’s folks over at Youngblood Works are specialists at getting in there with the drill and the saw and everything and opening the patient’s skull without killing them so that you, the brain surgeon can then go in and do the cutting that is going to cause them to have a new personality or a little less cancer or whatever it is that they’re looking for that day. So that’s great. You can do it that way. I highly recommend it.

Chris Beall (05:23):

If you don’t test drive with Corey’s group anyway, you’re probably kind of not seeing the whole picture, but so you want that level of intimacy, I suppose, that comes from having your own people, have those conversations or say you want to hybridize and you want to use Youngblood Works folks that we would call, by the way, Youngblood Works it’s called finishing school for future CEOs. In case you want to know because you can’t become a CEO, unless you can have conversations with strangers and they polish up some of the best business graduates in the world at Grand Canyon University to become those CEOs by going through a program where they learn how to cold call by really doing it. Great. They get a lot of calls. They use ConnectAndSell. Life is good, but say you want to have your own folks doing it.

Chris Beall (06:08):

There’s sort of two ways to go. One is that you’re going to just say here, just go. And there you go, you get what you get, right? Here’s what you are likely to find out. Some of them are what we call weasels. They don’t want to talk to people. Some are what we call faux weasels. They say they don’t want to talk to people, but they really do want to talk to people. They just don’t know what it would be like to talk to people because they haven’t tried it. So those are like fake fur, it’s like fake fur weasels, right? So those exist too. Then we have these people we call pigs, conversation pigs, and they’re hungry for the next conversation, no matter what the last one tasted like, but some pigs can sing and some pigs can’t sing, that is some pigs can use their voice to great effect.

Chris Beall (06:52):

As we’ve said, the script is the surfboard. Your voice is the surfer. Well, if the pig squeals an ugly squeal, you’re not going to get many meetings and you’re not going to get a lot of trust. So the question is what is really, it’s better than just turning them loose. And we learned this really fast. It only took us 13 years to learn that, after doing this for a while, really folks need the help. And so Donny is our lead at ConnectAndSell on providing that help in two ways. One is structured learning through a messaging workshop and a multi-session thing we call Flight School that I’ll let him describe. He’s the master of delivering that. And second through structured blitzes. And interestingly, I think Donny, you have a story going way back into your past when you were a young buck sales rep and you were on plan.

Chris Beall (07:46):

And I don’t know, I’ve never been put on plan before guys, by the way, never. Whenever anybody gets close to that with me, I get a note on my coffee cup like I got in 2001 that said, “Chris, see me, Lou.” And what it meant was you’re fired. Nobody ever puts my on plan. They just fire me, immediately. But Donny is such a great guy that he had a sales job once where he was put on plan. And you can tell us that story. So Donny, welcome to the show. Market dominance, you do it every day. You’re a true practitioner. You help other people do it. So what’s that story.

Donny Crawford (08:24):

Yeah. Thanks for bringing that up. I appreciate that. You’re right. I was really new to tech sales in San Jose and I was in a team of probably seven to 10 inside sales reps. We were supporting a senior sales team and setting appointments for them. And I’m telling you, the pain you feel every day coming to work and having to make 100 manual tiles is just, it wears on you, right? I mean, at that point, I was super burnt out of it. Yep. You’re right, I was put on plan by a new inside sales manager, total stud, I really enjoyed working with them. And he, I think did it because he did like me, but he wanted me to succeed and needed to put a fire under my belt. So I needed to make sure I stepped it up and I’m glad he did it because there’s nothing worse in my life than knowing that I’m not performing like I should. And I was pissed. I need to step it up. We also, fortunately, just recently before that had started adopting ConnectAndSell.

Donny Crawford (09:30):

So our team and our fantastic, one of our first sales reps at ConnectAndSell John Jackson sold it to our company. And Sharmeen was our customer success manager and taught us how to perform really well on the ConnectAndSell platform. And our inside sales manager instituted a weekly blitz. And this is when I really became a really big believer in the power of ConnectAndSell in the weekly blitz, there was a cash prize or gift card at the end of each of these two to three-hour blitzes that we would do as a team, every Thursday. And I learned very quickly how to manipulate winning almost every single one of these blitzes.

Chris Beall (10:11):

Really?

Donny Crawford (10:12):

And that’s how I did it. And then it actually ended up making me become a massive believer in ConnectAndSell. I started sandbagging every single one of my follow-ups to be run on Thursdays during the blitz. The rest of the team would come to the table with a bunch of cold calls, the big list, the Excel sheet of numbers to call, and try to get ahold of people. I put every single person that I had spoken to before and I intended to speak with again, and I called those during my blitzes.

Donny Crawford (11:20):

And lo and behold conversion happens with follow-up. And if you get ahold of someone you’ve spoken to before, and you just say, “Hey, what’s up, we talked a week ago, we talked a month ago. We’d love to get some time with you.” People are more readily open to actually set a meeting with you and-

Corey Frank (11:35):

These are the folks you talk to, maybe weren’t ready to fall in the bucket of a demo. Just needed to be romanced a little bit. You would set all those follow-ups for the same time on Thursday or for the same day on Thursday.

Donny Crawford (11:49):

Every Thursday.

Corey Frank (11:50):

And then just knock them down.

Donny Crawford (11:51):

That’s right. Every Thursday. And so I look at the world very simply. There’s two kinds of people in the world. It’s weird. You’re going to classify the human race. Yes. There’s two kinds of people. People I’ve never spoken to and people who I have spoken to, that’s it, that’s all that matters to me. If I’ve never spoken to you, I know exactly what I want to say to you, to introduce myself, give you some value and hopefully introduce you into my process of learning something valuable for your business. The second class of people are all the follow-ups, it’s all the people who I already spoke to before. So I don’t need to worry about the cold-calling angst. I’m just going to call you again. You know me now, all you have to do is just get to know me a little bit more and accept the fact that I want to help your business within this follow-up call and just trying to schedule that appointment.

Corey Frank (12:39):

See where it sounds like where I screwed up at scale because I do everything at scale. Even my screw-ups are at scale, is that I just used, if I get an email system, if I get outreach or if I do anything, a HubSpot or an act on, I’m going to just throw a ton of money at it and just do that one thing.

Chris Beall (12:57):

Right.

Corey Frank (12:57):

And it sounds like what I screwed up with ConnectAndSell is I just did the cold calls and I did bucketize if you will the follow-up process. So how effective is that? Ryan Reisert, I know, our colleague and he’s been a guest here. He’s a big advocate. Sean is a big advocate. So talk a little bit Donny from your perspective as the flight manager, you’re on the flight line directing, how many companies come to these flight schools? 10 at a time? How many can it handle? 20 at a time?

Donny Crawford (13:31):

Yeah. Yeah. We can handle a lot of reps in a Flight School. So, I mean, we are basically training reps in a series of four, very closely orchestrated coach and blitz sessions with anywhere up to 20, 25, 30 people in a flight school blitz in that program, we could probably even cross a few different companies to introduce them into a blitz.

Corey Frank (13:56):

Even though there’s all these different industries with all these different organizations in the Flight School, the fundamentals of cold calling and follow up and using it as a strategic blitz. Let’s talk a little bit about that. Maybe some of the results that you’ve seen from doing this.

Donny Crawford (14:13):

Yeah, absolutely. If you are really intent on increasing the productivity of your team, especially let allowing them to learn together, we believe true social selling is not going necessarily into your social network and sending LinkedIn invites and things like that. You can do that and you should, but true social selling is getting together with a bunch of sales reps and selling together, like being social with your team about this, get your management involved, your leadership involved, get them excited about actually now hearing the conversations that the team is having, not just one at a time one-on-one focused information, but now with ConnectAndSell, you essentially are able to get a team together, listen to 50, 100 conversations in an hour from your entire team, and really start to diagnose whether some are capturing the vision of the initial conversation with someone. Creating effective followups and hearing the differences in the styles, the tones, the tempos, the belief that your team is able to actually portray during a first conversation and then diagnose whether they’re being truly intentional on how they’re going to follow up with prospects.

Donny Crawford (15:37):

We as sales reps, we oftentimes feel like objections are rejections. So when we get someone to hang up on us during a cold call, we’re like, Oh, that guy doesn’t want to hear back from me. No, in a month they’re not even going to know who you are. So follow-up with them.

Corey Frank (15:49):

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Donny Crawford (15:50):

Teaching sales reps, how to do that has actually, it’s a lot easier than I think leadership realizes. It’s just necessary to be repetitive and to be teaching very simple and executable principles. And I think that’s what [crosstalk 00:16:07].

Corey Frank (16:06):

Just so I understand. So when you said you see the world with two sets of eyes, right? One people who you haven’t talked to, you’ve spoken to, people that you have. Once I’ve spoken with somebody, whether they’re a hangup or reject or not now, or you caught me in the car driving my daughter to softball practice, or what have you, they go into the buckets, they go into the process that needs a little bit more conversational nurturing. Is that what I under understand you to say?

Donny Crawford (16:40):

Absolutely. When you have an initial conversation with someone, you get so many bits of information about the type of person that person is when you’ve had a conversation with them that you actually, all of us instinctually have this gut feeling on the right time and way to approach someone else. It’s instinctual. We all get it. Sometimes it’s just like, I would not set up an appointment with that person in three days if my life depended on it, because they’re just going to recognize me and they’re going to yell at me if I call them back in three days. So that gut feeling tells me, Hey, let me make sure that I design a strategic way to go after that individual again. If I have a call with them, “Hey, I know I’m an interruption. Can I have 27 seconds to tell you why I called?” And they’re like, “No, I’m not interested,” and they hang up on you.

Donny Crawford (17:30):

It’s like a lot of sales rep would be like, that guy I don’t need to talk to again. I don’t want to, but my gut tells me, Oh, that’s a perfect person to approach in a month. And what am I going to say to that person in a month? I’m going to say, “Hey, on December 11th,” or whenever it was that I spoke with the person, right? “Hey, when I talked to you on December 11th, I think I caught you at a bad time is now a better time.” And they’re going to be like, “Oh yeah, I got a little time now, what was this about?” You can just go into that conversation in a nice soft way where you actually have informed them I’ve spoken with you before. We know each other.

Corey Frank (18:10):

That trust factor as Chris talks about that, that meter’s moved a little bit closer.

Donny Crawford (18:15):

Absolutely, it has.

Corey Frank (18:16):

You’re not an abject frigid stranger. You’re still a little bit of stranger, but you drop something social from the conversation we had. And I think more importantly from your kind of bucket analogy here, Donny, it sounds like I know they’re a picker-upper.

Donny Crawford (18:31):

Absolutely important.

Corey Frank (18:31):

I don’t know what the technical name is for that, but I want to separate the picker-uppers because not everybody who has a phone who’s on my Zoom or Lucia or SalesIntel list is a picker-upper.

Donny Crawford (18:42):

True.

Corey Frank (18:43):

So it’s nice to know who picks up. Even if they’re going to yell at me, they’re still a picker-upper and they have a higher score than maybe who doesn’t.

Donny Crawford (18:50):

Yeah, absolutely true. In fact, In my follow-up bucket of lists of contacts to go back after, I have notes for individuals who have hung up on me in January 15th and March 11th, and May 21st. I have a list of the times they’ve hung up on me. And at one point during a follow-up, it’s like, “Hey, so-and-so. I’m so glad I got you on the phone again here. On January 15th, you hung up on me, on March 11th you did. You’re a really busy guy. Every time I get ahold of you, you just don’t have time to chat. I’m curious when a better time to talk to you would be.” I don’t even mind letting them go again, because when you bring their mind to the fact that you’re not going to give up on them, there’s a certain amount of respect people start to give you. When you come across as a trusted advisor, someone who truly is invested in helping them and won’t give up on them. Even if they’re being really, really difficult.

Corey Frank (19:52):

Well, I’ll tell you what, if we ever create a way back machine or uncle Rico perfect it, I’d bring it back to my high school days because calling the girls, trying to find a date for prom, that approach of keeping track of the hangups I could have cleaned up. So maybe you moonlight a little bit as a high school guidance counselor, right? To show guys that-

Donny Crawford (20:12):

Just like wear them down.

Corey Frank (20:13):

Of course-

Donny Crawford (20:14):

And eventually, you’ll get that date.

Corey Frank (20:15):

But do kids even call each other in high school anymore? I don’t know Chris. It sounds like they probably do Instagram or something. They don’t even pick up the phone and the gauntlet of getting past the father to ask the daughter. I don’t know if that angst exists anymore for these poor kids.

Chris Beall (20:32):

I actually think those who do use the voice, dominate their markets, just like in any other market.

Donny Crawford (20:38):

That’s true.

Corey Frank (20:39):

It doesn’t matter if you’re dominating the father of your target or the person you’re trying to get ahold to in IT.

Chris Beall (20:46):

Well, let’s face it, what Donny’s talking about here is predicated on something that in a way, if I were just listening to this, I’d go, well, still Donny, you’re kind of crazy, right? So you’re going to let somebody go and then you’re going to have this task that’s in Salesforce. And now you have to go look at the task when it shows up and then you’re going to dial them and then they’re not going to be there and you’re going to get their voicemail. And then you’re either going to leave a voicemail or not, and then give yourself another task. But clearly that’s not what you’re doing. So are you saying that ConnectAndSell has a mechanism in it that sort of does this for you? That as this the task exists, let’s talk to this person in the future, starting on this date would be one I’d like to try, here’s what I’m going to say to them, but you don’t have to execute the task. By some magic does ConnectAndSell thing does that for you?

Donny Crawford (21:37):

Yeah. If you recall, even from Ryan’s discussion, the buckets are so important. And even with his buckets, you can segment into two groups. One is a cold calling bucket or an initial conversation bucket. People who you’ve never spoken to before, but you’ve verified and it’s been a good bucket. The next bucket are people who you have spoken to. And that the priority of going after that list is so highly important. And yeah, luckily in ConnectAndSell it’s literally just running your open tasks until you get ahold of those people. And it’s just automatically running. It’s just, I’m going to be able to call on them and if they don’t pick up the first time and I try to attempt them, that’s fine. I’ll call them tomorrow. I’ll call them tomorrow two or three times until they pick up.

Donny Crawford (22:22):

But it’s important for me to always go after this list because it’s always going to convert higher. And luckily there’s a mechanism that even if I don’t get ahold of them two times, five times when trying to get them back on the phone, 10 times eventually they’re going to answer the phone and I will have a little mechanism called the teleprompts. I think Sean McLaren is the designer of the teleprompts. It’s like giving a speech to the person when you get them on the phone. And it’s exactly what you want to say to them. And if you design that the right way, the teleprompt is honed in exactly what you want to say and the purposes of the call, it’s magic. That is your magic list. That is the best bucket you could ever go after is your follow-ups.

Chris Beall (23:04):

Actually, it’s not, I disagree. The best bucket you cannot ever go after are the folks that you went through a discovery process with and did not move forward with you because now you have something really special. You know a lot about them. So with regard to getting them into a process, that is the best list. The very best list is your closed lost.

Donny Crawford (23:28):

I agree.

Chris Beall (23:29):

The very best of all.

Donny Crawford (23:32):

But if you were to simplify the two buckets of people I’ve never spoken to, and people who I have, even those closed lost are going to start to fall into our followups.

Chris Beall (23:42):

They’re all in that one, they’re just the cream of the crop.

Donny Crawford (23:44):

Exactly.

Chris Beall (23:44):

The other cream of the crop that people don’t call, which is in the first list is folks who are inbounds, that they haven’t spoken with.

Donny Crawford (23:53):

[inaudible 00:23:53].

Chris Beall (23:53):

Because they tried them once or twice and gave up. And remember, we did an experiment once, an experiment, we did a diving catch once with a company down in Chandler, Arizona. And they told us they were 750 meetings behind per month to be able to make their business plan, which called for this going public. When I visited them, they had a football field inside of a building set up as a football field for entertainment purposes, for people to exercise. That’s how much money they were spending, so sure they were going public, but at 750 meetings a month behind plan, it wasn’t so great. So I asked him a question. I said, “Do you have a list of folks that came inbound, that’s more than a year old that you never spoke with?” And he said, “Well, why would you want that? That’s just garbage.” “Well, we’ll find out if it’s garbage, I’ve got some guys over here are willing to do some calling on your behalf.” We had scheduled 735 meetings for them in 11 business days. And why? Because these are people who are fundamentally interested and all they needed was a conversation.