Experience sales thought leadership that leaves you shaking inside with Market
Dominance Guys, the definitive podcast for B2B sales excellence. Industry veterans
Chris Beall (ConnectAndSell founder/CEO) and Corey Frank (Branch49 CEO)
deliver unfiltered insights from decades of sales leadership and market domination
experience. Unlock the secrets behind successful cold calling campaigns, and
pipeline generation strategies used by top-performing sales organizations. Learn
from real practitioners who’ve generated millions in revenue through authentic
conversations, trust-based relationships, and systematic market penetration.
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EP259: Chris Squared - When AI Masters Your Sales Methods
Épisode 259
mercredi 5 novembre 2025 • Durée 18:31
Welcome to another Market Dominance Guys episode, and today we're trying something completely different. What happens when you spend four hours in a studio recording sales training content, and then someone creates an AI version of you? Well, you're about to find out.
Our Chris Beall recently worked with Alex Kutsishin from myfuel.io to create AI-powered training experiences. The result? An AI Chris that sounds remarkably like the real thing – maybe a younger version – and knows everything Chris teaches about cold calling, market dominance, and the psychology of trust.
In this experimental episode, the real Chris interviews his AI counterpart, diving into First to Converse principles, list-building strategies, and how to master the emotional journey of cold calling. It's enlightening, it's creative, and yes, it's a little weird hearing Chris talk to himself. But it showcases an efficient new way for sales teams and enterprises to access expert training 24/7.
Let's listen in as human meets algorithm in the pursuit of sales excellence.
Alex Kutsishin, Chief Executive Officer
Alex Kutsishin is co-founder and CEO of FUEL !nc, the world's first Performance-as-a-Service platform for sales teams and leadership designed to redefine business education and performance standards. With an entrepreneurial spirit evident since his youth, he has co-founded ten companies — from pioneering medical offices in Washington, D.C. to introducing the first American-based low-code, no-code platform for custom mobile websites. Kutsishin has won numerous awards, including EY Entrepreneur of the Year.
EP258: Micro Pivoting - The Split Second Skills That Separate Elite Sales Performers
Saison 6 · Épisode 258
mercredi 27 août 2025 • Durée 08:28
We'd signed off. Thanked everyone. Sam Daish was probably ready to start his day in Auckland, and we were wrapping up what had already been a dense conversation about AI in sales. But then Chris started talking about something he calls "micro pivoting" - those split-second adjustments that separate elite salespeople from everyone else - and none of us wanted to hang up.
What followed was Chris dissecting the athletic nature of top sales performance, using Cherryl Turner's cold calling mastery as a case study. The insight about how elite reps make tiny voice and timing adjustments that most of us would never notice, and how those microscopic moments determine whether a conversation continues or dies. This wasn't planned content - it was pure discovery happening in real time, the kind of conversation that makes you realize the real secrets are hiding in plain sight.
Sometimes the best episodes happen when you think you're done recording.
EP249: Mozart, Jazz, and the 0.01% - Why Most Sales Teams Are Playing Out of Tune
Épisode 249
mardi 10 décembre 2024 • Durée 01:03:51
Today they welcome Helen Fanucci, author of "Love Your Team" and CEO/Co-Founder of Pipeline Power, for a candid look at why sales coaching fails - and how to fix it.
The stats are startling: only 0.01% of recorded sales conversations are ever reviewed, and 83% of sales managers have never received formal training. Through their discussion, the trio reveals practical solutions, including Helen's upcoming AI-powered coaching platform allowing sales managers to practice difficult conversations in a safe environment.
From Branch 49's "finishing school for future CEOs" approach to why cultural transformation must precede digital transformation, this conversation challenges conventional wisdom about sales leadership. Whether you're a seasoned CSO or a newly minted sales manager, you'll gain fresh perspectives on building and nurturing high-performing sales teams through systematic coaching.
EP159: Join the Band - How Sales Professionals Are Like Lyricists
Saison 4 · Épisode 159
mercredi 7 décembre 2022 • Durée 34:30
A company’s leadership – the lead singer, picks up the pieces and fills in the holes in a performance. Their drummers keep the rhythm of the deal moving forward so everyone can stay in time. But what about the sale professional making the calls – the lyricist? The correct tone of a single syllable can make or break a conversation before it starts. Corey and Chris continue their conversation with Paula S. White of Side B Consulting. They compare the ways different cultures start a cold call. We have more in common with all of our varying cultures than you may think when we start the call admitting we are an interruption and that we have never met the prospect on the other end. Paula takes us through the skill of being an unexpected listener and where that is valuable in every business encounter. The good news is it can be learned, like a memorable piece of music or a favorite song that takes us back to a favorite memory. Join these sales musicians in this episode, “Join the Band – How Sales Professionals Are like Lyricists.”
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About Our Guest
Paula S. White is the Leadership DJ of Side B Consulting in New Albany, Ohio. Side B Consulting helps leaders combine their business-minded skills with their relationship-based people skills to more effectively lead their teams.
Full Transcript here:
A company’s leadership – the lead singer, picks up the pieces and fills in the holes in a performance. Their drummers keep the rhythm of the deal moving forward so everyone can stay in time. But what about the sale professional making the calls – the lyricist? The correct tone of a single syllable can make or break a conversation before it starts. Corey and Chris continue their conversation with Paula S. White of Side B Consulting. They compare the ways different cultures start a cold call. We have more in common with all of our varying cultures than you may think when we start the call admitting we are an interruption and that we have never met the prospect on the other end. Paula takes us through the skill of being an unexpected listener and where that is valuable in every business encounter. The good news is, it can be learned, like a memorable piece of music or a favorite song that takes us back to a favorite memory. Join these sales musicians in this episode, “Join the Band – How Sales Professionals Are like Lyricists.”
EP158: Your “Side B” Is a Leadership Tool
Saison 4 · Épisode 158
mercredi 30 novembre 2022 • Durée 32:58
What helps make someone an effective leader? According to our guest, Paula White, the Leadership DJ of Side B Consulting, it’s all about employing a leader’s human side along with their business side when they connect with their team. Using music and musician metaphors, Paula helps leaders discover the aspects of their flip side — Side B — which define their humanity, and how they can combine their Side B aspects with their business side to become intentionally connected with their team members. Our hosts, Corey Frank and Chris Beall, bring their own experiences as team leaders to this topic, discussing with Paula how an imbalance of power can often impede an honest exchange between a leader and his team members, and how the application of a leader’s Side B traits can diminish this. Curious to discover your own Side B? Get some insights from today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Your ‘Side B’ Is a Leadership Tool.”
About Our Guest
Paula S. White is the Leadership DJ of Side B Consulting in New Albany, Ohio. Side B Consulting helps leaders combine their business-minded skills with their relationship-based people skills to more effectively lead their teams.
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Full episode transcript below:
Corey Frank (01:20):
We're back, post-Thanksgiving version of the Market Dominance Guys. Welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with Corey Frank, and, as always, the sage of sales, the prophet of profit, my personal favorite, the Stephen Hawking of hawking, right, Chris Beall. And here we have another incredible special guest. We have Miss Paula White from the Leadership DJ, raise your leadership style, and always, Chris, because generally you sit with the most interesting people at either trade shows or on a plane, or you're introduced to some of the most interesting people in sales and sales leadership today, so I can't wait to hear how you met Paula. But first, Chris, how was your Thanksgiving, good time all around?
Chris Beall (02:05):
It was grand, it was grand. And, Paula, it's fabulous to have you here. Paula, we can try to remember how we met. Paula's the only person who's ever succeeded in getting me to jump on a plane and go to Columbus, Ohio, just to have breakfast
EP157: Hold Everything!
Épisode 157
mardi 22 novembre 2022 • Durée 33:22
When you’re nearing the end of the quarter, especially the fourth quarter, do you tend to panic and offer a discount in order to close any deals hanging fire? Oren Klaff, New York Times bestselling author of Pitch Anything and Flip The Script, discusses the downside of this neediness on today’s Market Dominance Guys podcast. Our two hosts, Chris Beall and Corey Frank, explore with Oren what happens to the status you have so carefully built with your prospective customer if you blatantly display just how needy and desperate you are to close the deal. Does showing your soft underbelly increase your chance of closing the deal? Or does your neediness kill the deal altogether? Oren’s advice is to stick to the sales process — and HOLD, no matter what. Join these three sales analysts as they caution the sales reps of the world about the pitfalls of a needy mindset when a sales deadline is looming on today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Hold Everything!”
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More Marketet Dominance Guys episodes with Oren Klaff here:
Oren Klaff is one of the world's leading experts on sales, raising capital, and negotiation. He is the New York Times bestselling author of two sales-related books, Flip The Script and Pitch Anything: An Innovative Method for Presenting, Persuading, and Winning the Deal. Employing his securities markets experience in capital-raising advisory leadership, Oren is Managing Director of Capital Markets at the investment bank Intersection Capital, where he manages its capital-raising platform. Since 2005, Oren has grown the firm to approximately $2 billion in aggregate trade volume across a diversified portfolio of companies and transactions.
Full episode transcript below:
EP156: Focus on Over-Delivery
Saison 4 · Épisode 156
jeudi 17 novembre 2022 • Durée 28:54
“It costs five times more to get a new client than to keep one you already have.” Today, Rick Elmore, Founder and CEO of Simply Noted, elaborates on his commitment to customer retention and to his company’s practice of over-delivery with our Market Dominance Guys’ host, Chris Beall. Rick believes that building relationships with clients is vital to any company’s success, so he begins by onboarding each new customer himself, answering all the frequently asked questions, and personally checking back to make sure the customer’s initial experience with Simply Noted’s products and services is a happy one. “When you’re truly on your client’s side, they’ll hear it in your voice,” Rick explains. Listen to this podcast, and you too will hear the commitment to customer retention in Rick’s voice in today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Focus on Over-Delivery.”
About Our Guest
Rick Elmore is founder and CEO of Simply Noted in Tempe, Arizona, a company that utilizes software and robotic technology to create personalized handwritten notes for its 300,000 monthly users.
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Full episode transcript below:
Announcer (00:06):
Welcome to another session with the Market Dominance Guys. A program exploring all the high-stakes speed bumps and off ramps of driving to the top of your market, with our host Chris Beall from ConnectAndSell and Corey Frank from Branch 49.
(00:23):
It costs five times more to get a new client than to keep one you already have. Today, Rick Elmore, Founder and CEO of Simply Noted elaborates on his commitment to customer retention and to his company's practice of over-delivery with our Market Dominance Guys' host, Chris Beall. Rick believes that building relationships with clients is vital to any company's success, so he begins by onboarding each new customer himself, answering all the frequently asked questions and personally checking back to make sure the customer's initial experience with Simply Noted's products and services is a happy one. "When you're truly on your client's side, they'll hear it in your voice." Rick explains. Listen to this podcast, and you too will hear the commitment to customer retention in Rick's voice in today's Market Dominance Guys' episode, Focus on Over-Delivery.
EP155: Duly and Simply Noted
Saison 4 · Épisode 155
mardi 8 novembre 2022 • Durée 25:46
Who would have guessed that hand writing a note to 500 prospects would be a highly successful marketing campaign? Our guest, Rick Elmore, did! Founder and CEO of Simply Noted, Rick joins our host, Chris Beall, today to discuss his career path from college, to professional NFL football player, to a job in medical device sales and marketing, to a startup company now in its fourth year. It was the success of his handwritten-notes campaign that encouraged Rick to found his own business, offering this same service — now automated — to help individuals and companies utilize the personal touch of what looks like a handwritten note to reach out to their customers. Rick and Chris talk about the open rate of these notes versus the open rate of cold — or even warm — emails. You’ll want to hear it with your own ears on this Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Duly and Simply Noted.”
About Our Guest
Rick Elmore is the founder and CEO of Simply Noted in Tempe, Arizona. Simply Noted is a company that utilizes software and robotic technology to create personalized handwritten notes for its 300,000 monthly users.
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Full episode transcript below:
Chris Beall (01:20):
Okay everybody, this is Chris Beall. This is yet another episode of Market Dominance Guys. You'll note that at the moment, I am not here with Corey Frank, and those of you who are used to Market Dominance Guys at this point, know what we talk about. We talk about the practical world of dominating markets using the human voice, but today we have with us Rick Elmore, Founder and CEO of Simply Noted, and it's actually analogous, I believe. I'm going to have Rick talk about it, but we're into the human voice. We believe you have conversations, you create trust, and you can pave markets with trust and harvest that trust at your leisure while your competitors try to get in where they can't go anymore because the market trusts you. Rick's actually got a very similar business. Rick, thank you so much for jumping on Market Dominance Guys today. I am really, really excited to hear what you have to say.
Rick Elmore (02:14):
Thanks so much, Chris, for having me here. This is great.
EP154: Discover the Power of Discovery
Saison 4 · Épisode 154
mercredi 2 novembre 2022 • Durée 35:29
Most sales reps think discovery isn’t sexy: Closing the deal is. But “Deals are won or lost in discovery,” cautions Sales Gravy CEO Jeb Blount, today’s podcast guest. This successful author of 15 sales-related books advises that “80% of your time in the sales process should be in discovery,” especially during a recession, when the discovery call becomes even more important. In this second of two interviews with Jeb, our Market Dominance Guys’ hosts, Corey Frank and Chris Beall, share sales-success nuggets taken from Jeb’s most recent book, Selling in a Crisis: 55 Ways to Stay Motivated and Increase Sales in Volatile Times. You’ll want to listen closely as these three like-minded sales gurus explain their own discovery-call practices for establishing trust and how they get prospects to open up to them. All of this and so much more in today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Discover the Power of Discovery.”
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Jeb Blount is CEO at Sales Gravy, Inc., which is a global leader in sales acceleration and customer experience enablement solutions. He is the author of 15 sales-related books, including his most recent release, Selling in a Crisis: 55 Ways to Stay Motivated and Increase Sales in Volatile Times. Jeb is also the host of the Sales Gravy Podcast, the world’s most downloaded sales podcast.
Full episode transcript below:
Corey Frank (01:19):
Getting to discovery is one of the things that we certainly do here at Branch 49 and Chris's insistence all those years ago is we're not just a revenue ops agency, top of funnel, but we also do discovery as a service. And Chris has identified that years ago as one of the key frontline bottlenecks in organizations discovery. So I was pleased buttress by the fact Jeb, that you dive quite deeply into this as well, is that if you say that deals are one and lost in discovery, not in a presentation or the closes or even the negotiation, but in you have to learn to increase sales to do discovery better. And so let's talk a little bit about that, Chris. I know you have some opinions on that too, but what do you mean by we have to learn to discover better and to do discovery calls a little bit better than we're doing today?
EP153: How to Dominate Your Market in a Crisis with Jeb Blount
Saison 4 · Épisode 153
mardi 25 octobre 2022 • Durée 33:34
What changes should you make when you’re selling in an economic-downturn period? Today’s podcast guest, Jeb Blount, is CEO of Sales Gravy and a successful author and podcaster. With 15 books to his name, including his latest, Selling in a Crisis: 55 Ways to Stay Motivated and Increase Sales in Volatile Times, it’s obvious that Jeb knows what he’s talking about when discussing sales techniques during these troubled times. His suggestion? You’ve got to pay close attention to patterns, as well as the signals you’re getting from prospects and customers. In this first of two interviews with our Market Dominance Guys’ hosts, Corey Frank and Chris Beall, Jeb shares his advice about selling a price increase to customers, and about honing and re-honing your message as fears about the current economy’s impact are revealed in your prospects’ objections. Jeb’s also a firm believer in selling alongside his sales team and listening to his reps’ calls to provide just-in-time coaching. Get ready to take notes as this master of selling practices lets you in on what works and what doesn’t in today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “How to Dominate Your Market in a Crisis.”
About Our Guest
Jeb Blount is CEO at Sales Gravy, Inc., which is a global leader in sales acceleration and customer experience enablement solutions. He is the author of 15 sales-related books, including his most recent release, Selling in a Crisis: 55 Ways to Stay Motivated and Increase Sales in Volatile Times. Jeb is also the host of the Sales Gravy Podcast, the world’s most downloaded sales podcast.
So what are these challenges that you see in companies? Cuz I would bet that there are folks maybe at the C level who wanna be more in touch with side B to communicate, to retain talent, to inspire more creativity. And you probably have folks who say, Hey listen, I didn't sign on for this. I thought you hired me for my resume. I thought you hired me for my experience. How do you help workshop that out? So they do sing the same song.
So interestingly enough, it again all comes down to culture and you're gonna see resumes changing very, very shortly where some of those things, those side B traits are starting to show up on resumes. They're looking for cultures of accountability, they're looking for cultures that are going to give back. They're looking for cultures who believe in their people. So how do you take what you have now and ensure that everyone is singing on the same page? I think it's just getting in the studio. We have to get all ideas out on the paper or the whiteboard and start coming together as a band and making sure each instrument is represented for their own strengths.
How is that facilitated? Do you expect that the leaders will drive that facilitation? I know certainly that's what your practice is all about, but when the conductor leaves the building such as you and your team, how am I empowered or instilled with this sheet music to make sure that hey, drummer plays this, bass player plays this, et cetera?
That's a great question because after most workshops, people do tend to forget, right? Facilitating something really takes time. And there is a monthly plan that I do connect with the CEO or the leader that put the workshop together to ensure these things are still happening within the organization. But the most important part is really taking the survey for each person to understand what their intentionality and what they are on the inside is brought out. And if that is known by everybody, then we can hold each other accountable to being open-minded creative, to being experimental, to being laser logical. If we have a person who is laser logical, let's use that and let's create it together so that everyone knows what their skill sets are. Yes, it sounds great in a workshop and it can facilitate afterwards. And I tend to take the next six months and we take the next six months to ensure that that continues to go through the organization.
, . No, that's great. I think I keep coming back to this element of having the courage to do it. Yeah, because we read, right Chris, we read a lot of books, we listen to a lot of podcasts, we adhere to the philosophies of a lot of speakers where it's about technique and not necessarily the connection. And certainly what Helen talks about and certainly Paula, what I hear from I understand from what your practice does is really we try to have that catalyst, that spark of that connection. And that's what certain people are better at it than others. How do I develop that connection, that intentionality that you spoke about earlier?
Well first you gotta really understand what that connection is within you. And we talked about that a little bit. It may not be vulnerability. Your connection may be that you are helpful or that you like to experiment with ideas. So understanding yourself first gets to the point of seeing yourself what hasn't been seen before in this survey . And we take those three essential traits and three desirable traits and then we kind of pie fit them. What resonates with you? How are we to get you to be more open-minded because that is what is in you. So how do we get that to connect with your people? And we have different questionnaires and different things that people can do to become more open-minded, right? There's different lessons in all of that. And I think what you're asking mostly is one of the part of the workshops that I absolutely love is understanding how to become an unexpected listener.
There are levels of listening. So the first phase of listening is listening. You go in ready to defend your ideas and all you're listening for is an opening. Next level is active listening. You're gonna actively listen to somebody, show them that you care. But you still have that little ticker tape going down at the bottom of the screen that is in your back of your mind, but you're listening to them cuz they're up on top of the screen . And then the unexpected listener actually reacts on what their people are saying takes the time to do, takes the time to react and do what is being asked of or listening to what they need.
I always have this question about anything where there's change. So when you're working with a leader, are you working with individual leaders or you working with the whole team?
So interestingly, if I do both, I look work with individual leaders, but for the most part my workshops are with high potential emerging leaders throughout organizations.
So you have these folks together, you're working with them, you are listening to them hopefully in an unexpected way, but you're finding out that you've brought whatever you brought to the party that day. Also you're just another human being. There's got to be in a pattern to what happens in cuz there's always patterns to what happens and somewhere in a pattern. I always look for that thing that I call the first unit of change. . It is what actually is something that changes, that's concrete that you can say, okay, that actually changed. I could validate it, I could test it, I could be concerned that it's going to change back. That's one of the ways that I can tell that the unit of change is a real unit of change is when it bothers me a little after it happens that I'm concerned it'll flip back whether it's in myself or somebody else. What is it that you are looking for listening for? Probably listening more than looking in a group. Say you've got seven emerging leaders that together you're at the end of the first whatever it is, hour, two hours or sometime when you're hoping that there will be a change of a kind, what is that unit of change? What's the thing you're looking for listening for that you would be worried or concerned later? I hope that doesn't flip back over to side A.
So I'm always listening for diversity of thought. Do I have seven drummers in there or do I have a full complete band? Do I have two vocalists that are dominating the whole session? and I really listen for what does their band or what does their group consist of? What is their talent? And then how can we cohesively work together to bring out everybody's talent to add loyalty and creativity and innovation, right? Because that's really the meat of emerging leaders are that's where you're going to get your creativity, your innovation, your next level thinking for the company to move forward in five to 10 years. The people who are in the seats now are already thinking five to 10 years out. So now we need the next group to start thinking five to 10 years beyond that.
Which is interesting given the way the world works now, right? Because five to 10 years far exceeds most people's anticipated employment with any given company.
We're running a funny operation here at ConnectAndSell where the average tenure company's 15 years old and the average tenure is 17 years. So we flipped, I dunno how we did,
But think about everything. Think about if you could actually, cuz I've been with four companies throughout my entire 30 years, my career. And if you could retain that type of loyalty, that type of belief, that type of innovation for the long haul, what that would do for a company, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and people, the bands that weren't one hit wonders, they have a legacy and we need to leave a legacy for the people that we serve. And so as we continue to grow that the only way that you're gonna do that is by hoping more people stay loyal and not leave the company and have that type of culture.
Interesting. I wonder if Paula, in your practice to that point, if you have I'm sure you've seen CEOs that were more the drummers or maybe the CFO was more of the lead singer which is counterintuitive to I think how most people think, right? Chris, when you have those roles and what have you learned from those type of dynamics that it doesn't necessarily match up with the archetype of the org chart and they're not right outta central casting as you had thought. Marketing isn't the drummer rather it's a financial person. Maybe it's not a good thing to have the drummer be the CFO, but I dunno, maybe it is
Actually the way that I did this and I worked with a neuroscientist, a psychologist, a musician, and myself. The four of us worked together. So we took the position of the drummer because we've been talking about the drummer and we asked ourselves, what is the primary role of the drummer? The primary role of the drummer in a band is to keep the beat, to keep everything moving forward, to keep the song moving forward. So what would be the side a side A is usually the visionary, the forward thinker, the person that is always ready to move and keep moving . So what their side B would be is curiosity, because they need to understand as a visionary what's happening in the market, what's happening with their people, what's happening with their customers. They're always curious to move forward and innovate. So we did this really so methodically that I think it would be interesting to see if it's not based on title necessarily, but what their skill set is. So the lead guitarist,
The riffs that have the unique sound that is the band. You think about The Edge, you two has a unique sound. Led Zeppelin had a unique sound because of the lead drummer. Right? Exactly. That's the
What is the primary role of a vocalist? I suppose mean if we've all been parts of bands or watching bands at bars where the musicians are incredible, but the lead singer is horrible. And also where the lead singer is incredible and maybe the band isn't up to tune. So I would say it's, it's really the face of the band. It's the identity of the band. Everybody knows Bono up front or Axle Rose up front, right? Or Mick Jagger front I. So I would think it's really more the branding but I don't know. What do you think Chris?
As a singer myself, and this is something I actually even think I react to when I'm here at home. I've got my piano right over there and I play and sing most evenings. And I think as the vocalist, I feel as the vocalist, what I'm doing is I'm telling the story, I'm helping the audiences emotions move with the whole song. Cuz the song includes the lyrics, it includes the tone as the vocalist. I have a bigger range than any of the other instruments in terms of subtlety. I can do more things with my instrument than they can do with theirs.
That is why their side B is advanced business acumen because they do the whole thing when they're on tour, they're providing direction, they're providing clarity, they're getting people set up. They know when the song ends. They analyze the pit balls in the audience. I mean, I've been in a concert recently where the vocalists literally stopped the concert because he saw someone pass out in the mosh pit and get help and get them. So it's that type of brain.
Yeah, that's interesting. It's a funny thing. I mean it's also a big power position. I mean the drummer can drive the thing like an engine, but somebody is gonna decide when they're gonna slam on the brakes, when they're gonna make a hard turn. And there's a lot of power in that. And that always comes from the vocalist. The vocalist also ends up catching and basically gluing things together when it didn't quite work. One of the problems with pure instrumental music is when it doesn't work, when it's a little off. And this is especially true when you're listening to jazz, jazz trios, when it's a little bit off, it's really bad. It falls apart and there's almost no way to catch it. It's like, who's gonna catch it? What are they gonna do? And what you do is you simplify down to something that continues to work. That is you actually lower the qualities so to speak. And jazz, the quality comes not just from the execution but also from the imagination. You reduce the imagination, lower the temperature and let the music come back together. But if you add a vocalist to that trio, when it starts to fall apart, they can actually pull it together with their voice
, and then everybody can get back together with the vocalist without having to abandon their imagination or tone it down. I mean I really like, this is some interesting stuff, so I kinda know Paula, so everybody feels differently about music as a consumer of it, but more similarly to each other than the fact they might like some genres more than others. I didn't know that I loved rap until I went to a play yesterday, I think it was day before yesterday called. It was the Christmas Carol done as the Q Brothers Christmas Carol. And I realized what, that's what I really like about that music. Even though I don't like the music now, I really like it because it was funny and it told a great story and so forth. As consumers of music were all similar in that we all know how to consume the music that we like
As producers of music. Whether it's just your voice when you're speaking or whether it's actually making music by yourself or with others. I think we diverge a lot. I think that there's a lot of issues around performance anxiety when it comes to music, especially . You were raised giving piano recitals at the age of four. There were, it's like, how scary is that? It's not that scary cuz you just don't know anything. But for some people it's okay to perform musically. For some people it's not. And yet when you're bringing out your side B in a sense, you have to be okay. You have to learn to be okay performing, so to speak, from this other side of yourself. How do you help people do that? Cuz that's a wide divergence of capabilities that are built in and then hammered in through childhood. That's just hammered in it's some people are way over there and they'll say, I could never sing or I could never play. I could never do whatever. And some people will walk into a room having a tune the like or break out into Broadway show music, a regular basis, diovan, .
It really is getting people to see really. So I am not a vocalist. I am a lyricist. I've written six songs for my book and produced those with great musicians. But it's really seeing the unseen and once somebody sees that they can be what they are truly within themselves, bringing their whole self to work, it's easier because that's what they're used to. For example, I was a competitive swimmer. I naturally leaned into music because I didn't hear anything or rhythm really. Keeping my strokes in rhythm, keeping my beat going, breathing at the right time. I would make up songs in my own head. So when we're doing that, those songs in your own head are just these voices of chatter. We're just trying to change that language to your side. B
Was absolutely going on My head actually in seventh grade, I'm gonna give you a little tip here. Seventh grade, I wrote a whole play Broadway play for Billy Joel's album. The Stranger. What I did with it, I don't know, but I wrote it about the Italian restaurant, the red wine, the white wine, the Brenda and Eddie. And I had the whole scene mapped out in my head. , I know because I love music
By the way. I played from that play which somebody stole from you and put on Broadway. I was just playing from it the other night. . Yeah, it was very songs. I didn't know you wrote that stuff. That's fast.
I think probably the early, well by the way, the power of rhythm I think is really quite astonishing when it comes to stabilizing performance. So as some unfortunate to among our eight listeners, I do barefoot endurance running for fun. And some people think that's oxymoron. How could that be fun? It's actually kind of a gentle relaxing activity for at least the first few hours. And I recall once because I always have a song in my head and it's always challenging to find a song that will help you, that really will go along and help you. And I did a 50 K once in the almond and Quick Silver Mountains behind my house two weeks after running the big serve marathon. So this was not a good idea. And these mountains are really up and down and up and down. And I did it on a whim and I ate the wrong thing beforehand.
And so I had these sort of stomach cramps for the first two, two and a half hours. And this thing took nine hours to run. And what I found helped me for especially about the last five hours, oddly enough, was the odd rhythm of take five. And the reason was it kept my mind occupied because at the end of ever measure, you were on the other foot. Really? That sounds ridiculously stupid, but it never got boring because when you you're doing a run like that, it's hard to keep your focus. Some things are going on in your body and your mind. But there was just something about going, I wonder which foot it's gonna because I'd forget. Right.
But Well it's got five beats. It's five four, so it's quarter, it's quarter notes, but there's five of them in a measure. And so it's got this extra beat and that extra beat I kept falling into. That's what I felt like is I can always fall into that fifth beat and then the next measure starts. I did that for the last five hours or so and then I finished the run and had a nice piece of peach pie and went home . I'll never forget that. The power of the music and I don't listen to music when I run. I don't let it come in through my ears. It's always inside of me. But I'm a big believer in that I actually think that music runs inside of us in a way to maintain our sanity.
And we remember it differently. I mean otherwise why would there be named that tomb? We talk on the cold calling technique world of market dominance guys, which is all about paving the market with trust by effectively, by singing to somebody in seven seconds, you have seven seconds to get your voice to do something magical inside of that person. And when you're thinking about like, well what's really going on there, , if somebody were to say, well what's really happening there? What's happening is the words, we have a thing, we had a whole episode on this. The words are a surfboard and the voice is the surfer, the artist. And somebody has to shape the words. We probably shouldn't be shaping our own words when we're out in the world of repetitive performance because that's right. The words, unless there's a whole bunch of 'em, we're probably not gonna get it quite right.
But we can incorporate the words as poetry and then sing them. And it's like name that tune. Why could name that tune ever be a show. Think about it. It's crazy, right? Oh, right now that tune in one or two seconds and yet if you walk around in the world and you hear the beginning of a song, it make a mistake. You might think it's one of three, but you'll, you'll not think it's one of a hundred. It's very, very quick. We can't remember our children's name. Well, I have a problem remembering names after 3 27 in the afternoon. I have real issue with that. But the ability to remember that this is that song, even if you can't name it, you can continue it. Sure. That is deep. Deep memory stuff. And when you think about relationships we have with people, what we're essentially doing is we're building memories with them. And it's those memories that are the glue of the relationship. It's like when we are remembering before the show here being on at this conference and then going onto this little podcast that was happening, we were actually reinforcing our relationship by remembering something together. , . And that is the essence of how we build businesses, is we create what we call culture is actually a matrix of shared memories that are interpreted in a common framework
It's funny, Chris, I just had a client of ours came and pay us a visit and she is of Japanese heritage and we were talking about the phone here and the phone that I was keeping the back. And now when we pick up the phone, we always say hello. And we were talking about this very thing about the surfboard and tonality and the musicality that you have to have the right. It's like if a lyricist as Paula, sometimes you just looking for the right word to hit the right beat if it's too short. We all know those songs that it could use another word or syllable here, . And in Italy, when you pick up the phone, you say Poto, right? And she's saying in Japan, cuz I was talking about cold calling in different cultures and the musicality of what we try to do here in the US and would it translate well to Italian when it translate to Japanese.
And she said a beautiful thing. She said, the Japanese, when you answer the phone from a business to business, not mushy, mushy when it's more informal, but that a traditional first encounter and the word actually means, the phrase actually means greetings with a first encounter. It's Hajimemashite! Which means nice to meet you first encounter. It's almost like now I would never do it. So the first time we meet Paula, let's say Hajimemashite!, right? Corey Frank, right? Nice to meet you. First encounter Corey Frank. And it was just something Chris that was, I thought was just very beautiful about our profession. That the person on the other end of the line, instead of saying, listen, this is a cold call, you can hang up if you want Chris Vos stuff. Or it's really a variance of the 27 seconds. I know I'm an interruption. Yes. Labels you as the monster. You as the invisible stranger. When you say that Hajimemashite!, like this is the first time we've spoken and had she was speaking in Japanese, she just had such a musicality of it that I thought was such a beautiful tradition to connote. I'm the stranger. You're being vulnerable here right now by picking up the phone. I want you to know that we've never met before.
Yeah. And talk about that vulnerability that you have to have in business. We talk about it. Paula, here as we wrap up about the vulnerability you have to have to explore your side B, right? The person I have talked for years now about the vulnerability that you have to show, the courage you have to show because of this highly athletic act of cool calling here that we do here, . But I tell you what, Paul, I love to learn a little bit more. I think there is so much to be learned from these things about ourselves and the synergies and the opportunities to talk with you and Helen together. Chris, that would make a wonderful episode to have the love your team and the side B consulting here, experts in action. So Paula, we would go to paula s white.com if we wanna learn a little bit more. And side B consulting, are you on the Twitter verse everywhere else? And
Well Paul, it's been a pleasure. We look forward to hearing from you again on future episodes of the Market Dominance guys. And for Chris, be the sage of sales, the profit of profit, the Hawking of Hawking. This is Corey Frank. Until next time,
No coercion, just maybe the Ohio State Buckeyes. Yeah.
Corey Frank (02:31):
Perfect. And so this breakfast was what a breakfast it was.
Chris Beall (02:35):
And a graduate from the Ohio State University, who has a PhD in clinical psychology, cooked our Thanksgiving turkey. There's a connection right there, Paula.
Paula White (02:48):
There it is, right there. That person cooked your Thanksgiving turkey and, unfortunately, the Buckeyes did not win and lost to Michigan, the state up north.
Chris Beall (03:01):
Well, that's actually fortunate for me because Sean McLaren, our executive chairman, is a Michigan guy, so I have to deal with him on more occasions than Paula. Paula, I'm so sorry-
Paula White (03:16):
Well-
Chris Beall (03:16):
... but out of self-interest. Paula and I met recently at the OutBound Conference, which is a tremendous conference that Jeb Blount and Anthony Iannarino, it used to be Mike Weinberg, anyway, but the Sales Hunter, Mark Hunter is there. And we met and just were having a bunch of conversations about something that's near and dear to my heart, which I'll call it the other side of sales, and she calls it Side B, and Paula's an aspiring DJ or a practicing DJ. I don't know what you are-
Paula White (03:46):
Yeah, yeah, right now, I'm aspiring.
Chris Beall (03:53):
... just as good a DJ as I am a piano player. We were just talking about a whole bunch of stuff, and it also came together in my mind in part with what Helen is doing with her book, Love Your Team: A Survival Guide for Sales Managers in a Hybrid World, Amazon bestseller in multiple categories, and so it was like, "Hey, why not get on Market Dominance Guys?" Because we talk all the time about what I'll call technique, right, but, when we had Helen on, we talked about this other side, which is the human side. We do a lot of the human side on Market Dominance Guys about what's going on in that person's mind and their gut in the first seven seconds of a conversation? Paula is helping folks discover their own human side so they can bring it into the arena, so to speak, and be a whole person and still be a fantastic performer. I think that that just led to this. Here we are. Paula, welcome.
Paula White (04:47):
Well, thank you. What an amazing, amazing introduction there. Although I will say, Chris, that our very, very, very first meeting was seven years ago at the AAISP Leadership Summit.
Chris Beall (05:04):
Was it the leadership summit or the executive retreat?
Paula White (05:07):
Oh, the executive retreat. You're right. Right.
Chris Beall (05:09):
We were sitting at the same table-
Paula White (05:11):
Same table.
Chris Beall (05:12):
... when we were being challenged to solve some problem of the world that I can't remember. Yes, that was exactly right. And we were, from the speaker's vantage point, in the back on the left table, you and I [inaudible 00:05:29].
Paula White (05:28):
Pretty close.
Chris Beall (05:29):
I was to your right and you were two seats over and then we started talking. And, Corey, that is what's wrong with me, right there?
Corey Frank (05:37):
There, there. It all came back in a flourish, right? You just had to unlock the right little [inaudible 00:05:42] cube in there, the brain, and now it all comes forth. When you say become a rockstar leader, and I really like this phrase, I want to learn more about it, called you intentionally connect to people.
Paula White (05:56):
That is correct.
Corey Frank (05:57):
What does that mean versus just a bumbling fool like me who accidentally connects with people, or what do you mean intentionally connected to people?
Paula White (06:06):
First, let me describe, if I may, if you remember these old 45s or old 45 records that had one song on it on Side A and, Side B, they recorded it, but unpublicized it, right? You had a Side A, Side B in these 45 records, and RCA started that about 1942. I decided I would think of your leadership as a Side A, because, as you know, many, many, many great hits came from Side B recordings. Your Side A is your resume building skills, all those things that you do with negotiating and budget planning and sales growth and all the things that you would put on a resume. Side B, I call your hidden hits. That's your humanity, your relationship-based, your people skills, and that's where you really start to intentionally connect with your people. And, when I say intentionally connect, it truly means understanding what your gift is as a leader, because all people are not, and I hate to ruin this or say something out there, but not all people are empathetic or vulnerable.
(07:32):
There are other Side B traits that we could tap into without making people feel that they have to be empathetic and vulnerable. There's curiosity, there's courageous, trustworthy, passionate, and once you understand what you are internally, this comes up from how you were raised, then you can intentionally connect with your people. If you are the drummer and of curious behavior, you're naturally going to be open-minded, experimenting, and communicative. What do you do? You ask a lot of questions. That's what curious people do. They ask a lot of questions of their teams, of their people, of their environment, and that's how you intentionally connect as the drummer. If you are the vocalist, then you are optimistic. You intentionally connect people with sheer optimism. That's what I mean by intentionally connect. It's really finding out what your Side B trait is.
Corey Frank (08:41):
A guy like me, with no discernible talent whatsoever, I just play the tambourine, do I have a [inaudible 00:08:47] on the side?
Paula White (08:48):
You do. It's an assessment that I have that I worked with the Harrison Group on. But we take 175 traits and we narrow them down to what your traits are specifically. You may be a drummer, even though you only play the tambourine.
Corey Frank (09:06):
Yeah. What about Chris? Now that you've spend some time with Chris, what position of the band ... is it the roadie? Is there a roadie or there's a-
Paula White (09:12):
There's a roadie? No, not a roadie this time. But, if I were to really take Chris into everything that he is, I would look at Chris as being very gracious, right, and so being gracious is just one of those skill sets that is so hard to come by. But I want to get my list here, as I'm talking to you about this, because it's so amazing. Being gracious is one of those things that we come by and he is always thinking how he can help other people. Wouldn't you agree?
Chris Beall (09:54):
No, I'm not allowed to agree with this.
Paula White (09:59):
You're not allowed to agree?
Corey Frank (10:01):
I would [inaudible 00:10:02].
Chris Beall (10:04):
It is true that, when I get up in the morning, that is my number one concern actually. I'll never forget my mom saying to me, when I was about four and I was being a little pisser, she said something that really stuck with me, she said, "Chris, there are," and I believe, at the time, it was true, "there are three billion other people in the world. There's only one of you. Do the math."
Corey Frank (10:27):
That's right.
Chris Beall (10:28):
It is true that we have a lot more opportunities to help other people than we do to help ourselves and that's a steadying thing. It's like you don't have to worry, "Gosh, I wonder if there's anybody I could be helpful to." It's like, "Eh, probably run across somebody soon enough."
Paula White (10:47):
You will. And here's the beautiful thing is the graciousness, or as I call the saxophonist because, if you think of a saxophone, it's rich and deep in tone, those essential traits that Chris taps into is open and reflective, warmth, and I'm going to say it and, Corey, I'm ready for you to come back at me, diplomatic, right? He really likes to develop and is open to a lot of different things. There are traits to avoid in these as well, and I don't see him as defensive or self-critical.
Corey Frank (11:30):
No, very, very curious, and, if you're a regular listener, which all eight of our listeners are, I think, over the years, right, you'll understand that that level of curiosity that Chris has has helped him be very successful in multiple professions and avocation as well, from mountain climbing to selling bug spray to selling Fuller Brush door to door and waiting tables. We could go on. We should do a show, as we've always threatened, one of these days, just to do dirty jobs of all the jobs that Chris has had over the years.
(12:00):
With this, Paula, my first instinct, in this hardened world of ours or so, is this, these are really, really soft, small S soft. Does that make me a weaker leader? Do I cry with my people? Because I still have this stigma where I've got to be ... we were talking about somebody, before the recording here, I don't know what role they would play in the band, Chris, it would probably be more like the one-man band. They try to do it all and they don't believe in this stuff at all. What do you say to that? Can I succeed in business or is it I have to have my B Side and my A Side to succeed in business today?
Paula White (12:37):
Well, I'm so glad you asked that question because I would love to answer that. I get that question a lot. And that's why I say you have to be both business savvy and intentionally connected because you really have to be both, taking the both/and approach to business to be successful today. Employees are looking to be valued and respected. That doesn't mean that, if their dog goes missing, that you shut down the office and go help them, but you can add a level of accountability with kindness at the same time.
(13:19):
If you were all Side A and all resume, I'm going to say, most of the time, your employees are going to think of you as very blunt, very rigid, and really not want to work with you. If you're Side B all the time, you may be seen as weak and soft and really not respected because they can get one over on you, right? The balance of both, and having that accountability with kindness or that discipline with graciousness, is really the effect of taking it to the next level where you're going to get loyalty, you're going to get productivity, you're going to get retention, which, in business, all leads to the bottom line, profitability. If we don't have that, people are starting to churn. Employees want to be respected. They want to be connected to their leaders.
Corey Frank (14:26):
Chris, I think it's so interesting. I'd love to have Paula and Miss Fanucci on a podcast too. I remember, from Helen's book, and I think I have a product placement as well, Love Your Team-
Paula White (14:40):
Nicely done.
Corey Frank (14:42):
... [inaudible 00:14:41], but she talks about the categories ... Paula, I don't know if you've had a chance to tackle Helen's book yet, but there's 17 different conversation chapters and they're broken down really succinctly into five categories, and the first category mirrors a lot with what you're talking about. It's called Conversations of Connection. And because the first thing, right, as Helen talks about, is that a manager, a leader, needs to do when they take on a new team, for instance, is make sure that they're connecting with that team, and you can't do that with just A Side type of content, I'm hearing you say
Paula White (15:15):
No, you cannot, and I usually call that, the first 30 days, a new leader needs to listen, learn, and observe, right? They need to listen to their people. They need to observe and learn, right, and get connected with them, learn about what's going to drive them. Because I'll tell you what, money doesn't drive everybody, but if I know one of my employees is looking to buy a new house or is looking to go on a vacation, I am now going to motivate that person with that connection, right, because that's where they want. If you hit your number early, my goodness, what if we gave you an extra day vacation for that vacation.
Corey Frank (16:01):
Yeah. Chris, I think Paula's on to something here too, certainly, I know Helen is too, with this concept of loving your team and focusing on the leadership style of a DJ with A Side and B Side, right? Helen talks about the two ways a new leader should talk to someone, right, when you're talking about what a traditional sales manager would do and then what a love your sales manager would do. You obviously talk ... love your team and had a conversation with Paula about this. You see a lot of the similarities there, that I think maybe this is prime for business today.
Chris Beall (16:35):
Well, I think there's two things that are interestingly similar. One is that, while we have conversations with a lot of people, a lot of the conversations we have are with the people we work with every day. In a leadership position, I think there's a fundamental deep, deep issue with those conversations, and those of us who end up with the no good deed goes unpunished, we get made CEOs or it comes to a head, so to speak, which is what I call the Lonely Minds Club problem. When you're in a leadership position, your conversations are fundamentally asymmetric and you're a little bit stuck with that, right? If somebody wants to ask me, "What's the problem with being a CEO?" and it's like you have nobody to tell you the truth. You just don't, right? And you're not obliged to tell anybody the truth, but how can you be helpful leading people if nobody's going to tell you the truth?
(17:25):
And I don't mean they never do. I just mean that, at the margin, folks are obliged to protect themselves and their careers and you hold an excess of power as a leader, which is inevitable. It's just built into the position. You can't pretend the power is not there, but you have to figure out what do I do with this asymmetry? And there's a lot of how-to in that. We'll teach you how to read P&L, right, a profit and loss statement, in business school, or we'll teach you how to even something like go to market, right? There might be step, step, step.
(17:59):
But what's the how-to that allows you to bring out the side of yourself that allows folks at the margin to tell you the truth and to allow you to help them without them being suspicious of your motives, because that's actually how you take teams to the next level. That's where the magic is is you can't abandon the position. The position is fundamentally corrupt. The position of leader is fundamentally corrupt because you have access to power that other people don't have and, therefore, at the margin, you're always tempted to use it. Now you can't deny that position, but what do you do with it?
(18:38):
And something that Paula is suggesting, I think, in a strong way, and something Helen talks about, is counter that problem that you have of being the leader with a solution that includes who you really are, and that's a different approach. Helen's approach is very much ... it's a cookbook, "Here is the step-by-step," remember, she's a mechanical engineer, Here's the step-by-step to handle this kind of conversation, this kind, this kind. This is when you do it and this is how you do it and this is how you know if they happen," right? She doesn't talk much about what's inside of you, other than to say, "If it's not there, don't do the job, right? If it's not there, self-select and do something else for a living," right?
(19:20):
Paula is actually going about it from the other side and saying, "Well, know what's inside of you so you can consciously and intentionally bring it out in connecting with other people," knowing that the connecting with other people, the building of relationships, the ability to work together honestly, which is the hardest part of business. How do you work together honestly, when you have too much power with somebody that has less power than you? It's always a runaway train. It's the boulder that wants to go down the hill. You know where it's going to go, right? How do you do that? And she's suggesting, "Well, flip the record over and play the other side, not your greatest hits, how you got here, but who you are, which is still in there somewhere."
Chris Beall (20:45):
I think. Right, Paula? Is it something along those lines?
Paula White (20:50):
Exactly. You are speaking my language, exactly. I say Side B as a metaphor, but also as a tool, because I think sometimes we need to understand who we are on the inside, and not just by words, but by feelings. And what's the best way to feel, it's to listen to music, and music because it is the universal language. Now some people like to paint, some people like to do other things, but music is around us every day.
(21:23):
When you're grocery shopping, intentionally listen to the music that they put on their sound system, when you're in a restaurant. Those are specifically there to set a mood, right? When you're getting ready to go into a big meeting, let's say, with your boss, with your people, I talk about taking that one song of yours that's going to get you in that mood so that you can enter that room from a place that's authentically you, bringing your whole self in, and not ready to defend your position, but to listen, right?
Corey Frank (22:03):
It takes a little bit of courage though, doesn't it? If I'm not around necessarily, somebody's got to go first. From a cultural perspective, there could be a lot of risk inherent to that. How do I bypass that? How do I find that cheat code to just ... it's okay to be my authentic self on the Side B?
Paula White (22:20):
First thing to do is put together your leadership playlist, right? Write down the moods that you select or that you're fully aware of while you're at work. Would it be that you're disrupted, that you get angry, that you're joyful? What are those specific moods that you have? You're stressed, you're overwhelmed. And find one song that's going to get you out of that for each one of those moods and create a leadership playlist. It should not be longer than 10 songs because the last thing we want to do is go down a rabbit hole, right? Start that way. Another way is to play your favorite playlist on your way to work to get yourself prepped for that. Then, on the way home, play a playlist that's going to get you prepped for home. Those are the ways that we can use music as a tool.
(23:15):
But, as a metaphor, I'm not sure we're going to be able to change the culture as it is right this minute, but we can start with our emerging leaders, the ones who want that respect, who want that value, who want to be seen, and we start coaching them on their Side B skills and their Side B traits and how to understand that those can be used and, actually, when they are used, they're very powerful. If I'm talking to a CEO today, the first thing I'm talking about is bottom line, profitability, productivity, retention. They're having trouble keeping people. Why is that? Well, people don't like to work. People want to be flexible. People don't want to come back to the office. That's not necessarily true. People want to be seen and valued.
(24:16):
Again, it's not that you're going to go out and hunt for the dog, but you're going to care about that dog when that person comes in, right? And, yes, some people will strike the iron saying, "You're weak. You're motherly," I don't know how many times I've been told I was motherly, "You're nurturing." That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying you've got to use both. You've got to use both your business savvy skills and your intentionally connected skills, and you're going to get the retention, you're going to get the profitability, and your P&L is going to look a lot better.
Corey Frank (24:57):
Well, Chris, you come from the venture world, private equity world, entrepreneur-in-residence, hired gun as a CEO. You probably had to turn around many cultures that you've been a part of, or asked to participate in, either as a board observer or member or an investor. What do you say to that? How do you get that sense where a culture is just missing the Side B and that usually is maybe one of the largest constraints that they have in that system?
Chris Beall (25:27):
Here's a test that I tended to do. It's like let's look at the problem that we're solving. And somebody just told me, "Draw the circle on the whiteboard and have no name in it. This is us, right? This is what we do. A little arrow comes out of it and there's a little stick figure. Who is that person that we help? What is that thing that we provide? How much money do they make or lose when that little arrow ships something to them, so to speak?" I'm not really asking the question. Usually, it's a pretty obvious answer. What I want to know is, can we talk about it together? It's like making music together. Can we talk about it harmoniously? Can we enjoy the conversation? Can we agree and disagree? Can we be confused? Can we do all the things that it takes in order to start to work together within a conversation?
(26:20):
I'm much more focused on the mood. Are we being honest with each other? Is it fun? Can we poke fun at each other? Do people know each other's little foibles and, without being mean, can they point them out in the way that people who are really on a team can do? Everybody thinks somebody else is funny in a particular way, right? I just think that that's the essence of making teams work. Teams work when teams can work together. And, most of the time, when things aren't going well, folks retreat into their own corners and then they can't work together on the hard stuff. They can only work on their own job. But, until you can work together, you can't really work on the hard stuff, and the hard stuff is always out there. It's always there. It's either something competitive, or you've run into the limits of your ability to make the system that you've built build, or you've got a scale issue, or you've got a quality issue or whatever it happens to be. How do you work together on it?
(27:18):
You got to learn to sing together. And I actually think the song that I listen for, in a group like that, is honest laughter. When you come right down to it, if you're not having fun, you're not taking it seriously enough. And getting to the point where you can have fun together is the essence of making teams actually work. There's no such thing as a grim team working effectively together, right, "I hate you, you hate me, but we're going to get this done," kind of thing, right, or big boss is hitting us with the whip and making us go in the same direction. Well, at some point, we're going to cut the traces and we're going to go somewhere else.
(28:02):
But I love this idea of Paula's about the music, by the way. As you know, Corey, I'm an occasional musician, right? As I asked Helen on the podcast the other day, I said, "You got married this summer, didn't you?" And she said, "Yes, and it was so nice of you to show up and play the piano." [inaudible 00:28:19]. I'm not a very good musician, but I'm a big believer in the power of music to get inside of us without us having to invite it in.
(28:32):
And it's something we talk about on Market Dominance Guys with regard to the nature of the cold call and information. When we speak with somebody, the music of our voice goes directly into their mid-brain at 20,000 bits a second. That's four emails a second that are going into that person. It's mostly in the song and very little of it's in the lyrics. That is the words we put in the script are a very small part of what we communicate to somebody with a purpose, and the purpose is to help them trust us enough that we can explore helping them with their business problem. Step one is trust. Act zero is ambush. We go from between ambush and trust. Well, we sing to them.
(29:20):
I remember being in a board meeting once at a company that I was asked to come in and help, and this is a company that I wasn't allowed to know who it was. I was given an address to go to. And so I went to this address and the person who opened the door expected me and they put me in a room and I sat in the room for half an hour and then some people came in and I listened to what they had to say. And, when it came time to ask me and a couple other people what they thought, they got to me and I said, "Well, your problem is your product is a fake, right? It's completely fake. It's just a bunch of fancy slides and there's a fake."
(29:59):
They hired me and stuff like that, and I went to the first board meeting and came out and this brilliant guy I worked with said, "What did you just do to those people?" I said, "What do you mean?", a venture board, he says, "You changed your voice and you sang a song to them that caused them to decide not to shut us down." And I think that, to me ... music done by professional musicians is especially compelling, that's why they're professional musicians, but when it comes to actually interacting with people and helping them along the way of working with us, it's actually the music of our voice that is going to carry the burden. We can't actually go to the professional musician, say, "In the meeting today, what we're going to do is we're going to listen to Stairway to Heaven and the P&L is going to go crazy." But we do sing to each other all the time and we feel different and can act differently and can actually be a little bit different when somebody helps us out with the way they use their voice with us.
Paula White (31:15):
I agree with that 100% because it's like being in the recording studio. Everyone that comes in needs to check their ego at the door and whatever comes out is the best idea and that is really where it comes to. If you were to go into a boardroom and ask them, "Name a song that describes your company right now," they would be all over the place, but, by the end of the meeting, you want them all singing that same song and that song being the same.
Announcer (00:05):
Welcome to another session with the Market Dominance Guys. A program exploring all the high stake speed bumps and off-ramps of driving to the top of your market with our host Chris Beall from ConnectAndSell and Corey Frank from Branch49.
(00:21):
When you're nearing the end of the quarter, especially the fourth quarter, you tend to panic and offer a discount in order to close any deals hanging fire or in clap. New York Times bestselling author of Pitch Anything and Flip the Script discusses the downside of this neediness on today's Market Dominance Guys Podcast. Our two hosts, Chris Beal and Corey Frank, explore with Oren what happens to the status you have so carefully built with your prospective customer if you blatantly display just how needy and desperate you are to close the deal.
(00:51):
Does showing your soft underbelly increase your chance of closing the deal? Or does your neediness kill the deal altogether? Oren's advice is to stick to the sales process and hold no matter what. Join these three sales analysts as they caution the sales reps of the world about the pitfalls of a needy mindset when the sales deadline is looming, on today's Market Dominance Guys episode Hold Everything.
Corey Frank (01:20):
And here we are. Welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with Corey Frank and the sage of sales, the prophet of profits, the hawking of Hawking, does that make sense? And we have, Oren, I'm sorry I don't have any nicknames I've rehearsed in my shower for the last few weeks for you, we have Oren Klaff, best-selling author of Pitch Anything, Flip the Script, and Sales Connoisseur. I don't know, that's all I got. So welcome, Chris, we got to a great special guest in the hotseat today and what brings the three of us together? What could possibly top the last podcast we did? Oh I don't know, a short six, eight months ago or so. We probably have something to announce, do we not, Oren, Chris, that we could talk to a little later in the podcast?
Chris Beall (02:07):
I think we do. For one thing, let me just point out, I recommend some sales books but I don't force any of them down anybody's throat except for Flip the Script. And the reason I do is Flip the Script says, "Don't force this book down somebody's throat," and I just love the delicious irony of utterly failing to apply every single principle in this book while pushing this book on people. I don't know, the dynamic tension in that just works for me.
Corey Frank (02:36):
It's like don't push this button [inaudible 00:02:39].
Chris Beall (02:39):
Yeah, it's like peeps, look, if you have only two books you can read in this coming year and for some of you that is a stretch, read Flip the Script and learn how to do simple things like get a little status alignment going and learn how to flash roll. I'm still trying to teach our people how to flash roll. They tend to want to drift into teaching at that point. Learn how to flash roll. And then when you're done with all that and you realize that you're not going to do all this, that you're a manager and your people are going to do it, pick up Helen Fanucci's Love Your Team and go and read that, and you put those two together, and I don't know, I'm not going to be responsible for you failing, I'm just not going to be responsible.
Oren Klaff (03:18):
In the military, those super sauced up guys, so calm guys, they have these banana clips they put in the clip, and then they shoot the 28 bullets or where the 30 bullets are that clip, and then they flip it right around, and then they shove the next clip in because it's already attached. I feel like Flip the Script and then Love Your Team, you shove that in, you shoot all those 30 bullets, you're out, then flip it over, and then Love Your Team flips in.
Corey Frank (03:42):
I love it. That's right. Well, hey, I thought getting you two fine gentlemen together, here we are coming up on the end of another quarter and the end of another year coming up in Q4, and Oren, we always talk about no neediness, right? I think what you've hit me over the head for the years we've known each other. Chris, certainly that's what you talk about on this podcast many, many times.
(04:04):
But here we are coming up at the end of the year and so I wanted to grab you two gentlemen and talk, certainly maybe about a pending event that we have coming up, but also what do you do so we don't just drop the price and create all these insulting kind of promotions to finish the year strong but still have a little pipeline left going into Q1. So, from a neediness perspective or what are you going to think to that?
Oren Klaff (04:28):
I like to think in visuals. There was this movie, The Perfect Storm, towards the end they're like going up this wave and however, they shot this wave is like a thousand times bigger than the boat, and they're going straight up it. The captain's telling the kid at the wheel to hold because he wants to turn it, and he's going, "Hold!" And they're climbing up this wave and it's just terrifying. He wants to turn, "Hold, hold, hold." That's what I think is like [inaudible 00:04:52], is you want to turn the boat, you want to turn around, you want to run to safety, and you need Corey, or me, or Chris get saying, "Hold, don't turn the wheel, just hold." Right? And you get yourself in this impossible situation in which there's no possible way to get out. But you have somebody who's been in that situation saying, "Hold, don't be needy, don't turn the wheel." And then it becomes, "Now! Turn the wheel."
(05:23):
But you have to be able to hold through that period where most other people would cave, collapse, run away scared, start discounting. So, if you could remember, hold your position. If you built the position but then you're afraid of the position you built and back away from it, you haven't done any good. You cannot be needy. I don't care if this is the last account on earth for you, because the other side of being needy is it definitely will not close. You have to hold strong, hold. Get a tattoo on your forearm. I mean, I'm not advocating that you get a tattoo, but go ahead and get a tattoo that says hold, based on this podcast and Corey will sign it for you. I don't want my name on it because I don't know who you're married to, but you know.
Corey Frank (06:15):
All right. Chris, from your perspective, you have obviously ConnectAndSell. You have a weapon that brings more prospects to your doorstep, more than they can even handle. So, what do you tell your clients, your fellow CEOs, your fellow CROs, CEOs, VPs of sales, when they come to this time of the year that, "Hey, I can bring you the prospects, I can bring the conversations to you, but be careful you don't do x."
Chris Beall (06:42):
Well, one of the things is there's a mathematical thing, right? It's like driving on a one-lane road. You have a problem. And that is if anybody's slow in front of you, then you got to decide to either be as slow as they are or go off-road. And sometimes you got to go off-road, and sometimes you got to go up the wave, and sometimes you got to hold and hold and hold. A really good idea, and it's getting a little late, but a good idea is to just, if you widen a little, you widen a lot. That is, if your portfolio is a little bit bigger, it's a lot bigger. And that's just the way it is. With risk management, we all think, "Oh, if I add one more opportunity to my one opportunity, I've reduced the risk by something." You don't know what it is.
(07:29):
You've cut it in half, my friend. But you add a third one and you actually cut it two less than a third. Now, you've cut it to one over three to the third. Ooh, you've cut it to by 26, 27th. Life gets a lot better because you only need one lane to go down. Now, do you need it or not need it? Well, you might need it but you better not act like you need it because it's like Oren drives the best cars. And when Oren shooting a gap between two cars or he's making a decision to pass in someplace that's a little tiny bit marginal or whatever, once he makes that decision, he's got to actually hold that line. He can't kind of half unmake the decision part way into whatever it is that that maneuver is, right?
(08:19):
There's just a rule in all, I'll call them ballistic acts. A ballistic act is where the performance outcome, the thing you want, depends on what came before, therefore what came before, therefore what came before. It starts somewhere and once you commit to it you're really screwed unless you go through with it. I used to be, Corey, and Oren keeps trying to forget, I used to be a very serious rock climber mountaineer, and there's a word used in climbing and there's a word that's used as an adjective and it's used as a noun. As an adjective, the word committed. That's a really committed route means once you start you better finish it or you're toast. You start that move, you got to finish the move. That's like the same thing. It's like look, once you're here and you're in a committed situation, you have to ignore all outcomes and you simply have to go; that's just a truth of the world.
Oren Klaff (09:16):
And so I think what happens is ultimately we tell people run the process. And so if they go, "I forgot the process," or, "What process?" Then there's a problem. But if you have a process and you just go, yeah, outcome independent, don't be needy, run the process, trust the process, and then if you don't like still the nervousness that brings with it, then have Chris bring you lots of other pipelines. So, we run that process in a very high stakes, high tension situation where there's a couple of leads, we got to close two out of four. And it's very challenging.
(09:54):
That's where we learned this never be needy, but if we know Chris is going to bring us another 18, then we're flipping. We come to meetings in T-shirts, we say things we wouldn't, we take risks we otherwise wouldn't take. We come late, we come early, we do what we want because we're like, "Yeah, that didn't work out. Let's not do that again. But still, Hey Chris, bring that wheel barrel over here. Jumps some more leads off." We just figured out a couple of things that are not going to work, so the great thing is if you have a process you can run it, that allows you to hold and stay the course. But if you can run a process and you've got pipeline, there's a name for that.
(10:29):
I'm not sure how it's pronounced in German, or Swiss, or whatever you speak, Chris, but in English we call it a business. Where you have prospects, you have a process, you've got a technique in which you can close them, and then you also have new leads coming in case something goes wrong, you don't close the lead that you wanted to. That's called a business.
Corey Frank (10:51):
Oren, talk a little bit about with neediness, we've had a number of conversations about this, you need some status with that neediness. And I think that if you built up a good status in your previous conversations with this prospect, with this company, with this executive team, you're expecting that status is going to hold, right? But as you've always talked and you've written about, it's temporary, and so you need to establish it throughout. And it seems like a lot of sales reps will abandon all that status they've worked to hold and maintain at the last month of the year, the last few weeks of the year to try to get a deal.
Oren Klaff (11:29):
Yeah, I think there's one way to address this. Okay, yes, we're having an event... Sorry, what was your question?
(11:42):
Let me try to run this down. So, Chris, Corey, and I said let's have an event and it was in June and it became July and then it became August. Back then in August, August we could've had any event, like Chris and Corey debate politics and crypto, and that would've been a good event. Then it became September, end of the year, busy. We didn't do the event. So finally we got serious. We said it's now.
(12:06):
All right, December and we're still having an event. And then Corey pointed out, it better be really good if we're going to have an event in December. So yes, we're having a really good event in December. Actually, it's too good because when you hear about it. The event's too good when I don't want to speak at it, I just want to go to it and benefit from the event. Because like hey, my business can use the event, but I'm actually in the event and part of it, but I'm too busy to do what I'm doing at the event for our own business. So, this thing is amazing and I really want to be there. So status.
Oren Klaff (13:32):
I think what happens is salespeople very carefully and intuitively curate their status going in. And so they appoint themselves well, they give a good presentation, but now you're sort of a move out of your domain into their domain and people come out of nowhere that know more than you. It's like a video game. You're going up higher levels and bigger bosses come out. My favorite analogy, as you know, is you think you're fighting the boss to win the level and this giant foot comes out of nowhere and crushes the boss you're fighting, right? The big boss cares so little about... He just crushes his own team, and what's going on here? And that's where salespeople lose their status is where somebody who has much stronger frame, much more expertise, much more knowledge, and actually controls the contract comes out of nowhere. And that's where status goes to die.
(14:29):
And I think it's not a status event, but we're definitely covering how to hold your status not at the beginning, because there's like no teaching about status that you need at the beginning, right? Yeah, I dress good. I talk politely. I have a presentation. Everybody can hold it together at the beginning until the stress comes on. And then the things we're talking about, never be needy, hold your status together, make sure you've got pipeline, widen your lane, stuff that Chris and Corey know how to do really come together once you're later in the deal and there's real stressors.
(15:05):
And if you think about it, last thing then I'll turn back over to you, you're at the beginning of a deal all the time, right? There's a lot more first downs than there are fourth downs, I think. I'm not sure. We'll have to check that. But anyway, you're at the beginning of deals all the time and so you're good at the beginning. Chris and I had a call with Andreson, one of the big venture firms today, which is great, but how often are you on a call with Andreson Horowitz versus on a call with somebody about something? So, you're good at beginnings, but how good are you at controlling those later stages when status falls apart, you fall apart?
Chris Beall (15:41):
[inaudible 00:15:41]. That remind me of a story by the way.
Corey Frank (15:42):
Go ahead, Chris.
Chris Beall (15:43):
There's a story [foreign language 00:15:44].
Oren Klaff (15:44):
A story about our event?
Chris Beall (15:46):
Yeah, this is a story [inaudible 00:15:49]. This is the kind of thing you learn at this event is to do what's in the story. So, first of all, this event is so important, I might actually show up. I might not because I have a very dear family member who's having surgery the day before and might need my care, and I'll be approximately 1400 miles away, but I could be there. The story is sometimes you have to be somewhere else in New York. You find yourself at the end, you don't even know it's going to be the end. So this particular story, I was called by the general counsel of the General Electric Company who told me, "I need to talk to you and I need to talk to you tomorrow."
(16:23):
And so it was a Sunday. I went and did my usual thing. I was living in Denver, went down to the airport, asked them at the red carpet club where I was going. They told me. I got on an airplane, I got off, I went into a building up there in Connecticut. And the general counsel of General Electric put me in a room, a big boardroom, the one right under the CEO's office, right under Jack Law's office. And he sat down and he dressed like Mr. Rogers, which I think was one of his best tricks. And he literally pounded the table, which I thought was hilarious.
(16:54):
I almost laughed out loud, but I held it. "You are destroying the General Electric Company." Now, that's a case where you're kind of at the end because this had to do with a huge renewal opportunity for 11 out of the 12 general electric companies. Now, what are you going to do there? You must have something wired into you that allows you to hold your status. And I have a fondness for humor. I just said, "Well, there must be some amount of money you'd like to pay me to get me to stop destroying the General Electric Company." It's an example.
Oren Klaff (17:29):
That's where he pressed the button underneath this desk, and security came in, escorted you out the building.
Chris Beall (17:34):
No, no. He started laughing. And you know what? We ended up doing the deal I wanted to do.
Oren Klaff (17:39):
Oh, I have a great story about the other call that I have to be on right now [inaudible 00:17:48]. The good news, well, so the bad news is it's not a good story. The good news, it's a very short one. Corey, can you run down the dates of the event and a little bit of information for people and then I will call both of you in a while.
Corey Frank (18:00):
Yes. We are going to do this on December 7th and December 8th coming up here in a very short period of time. And what we're going to do is we're going to put you and your existing sales process through the ringer. We're going to take and rip up your sales script, turn it into a screenplay, and start from scratch building up a brand new December Q4 sales machine for you with a screenplay that's tailored to your business. And Chris's team, Oren's team, our team, the Branch 49 team, we're going to walk you through step by step through this Pitch Anything formula, through the best practices and how we create a screenplay, and apply it to the industry and business. So the best part, Chris, right, Oren, as you know, is we're going to perfect your pitch and you're going to practice it.
(18:45):
If this is your first time at Fight Club, you will fight. If it's your first time dialing with ConnectAndSell, you will dial and we're going to jump right on the phones right alongside you. And by the end of the event, you're going to have a brand new pitch process. You're going to have a brand new screenplay that drives qualified leads back to you that are ready to buy. And we are going to guarantee that you're going to close enough meetings to at least equal the cost of the event, or Chris's team, orange team, our team, we're going to work with you until you do. That's a pretty good guarantee, would you say, Chris?
Chris Beall (19:20):
That's crazy. Corey, has anybody ever in the history of, I don't know, life on Earth, have they ever actually done this particular kind of event? This exact thing.
Corey Frank (19:32):
I recall when you visited our sales team at my previous company, you swooped in with the jump boots and one or two of your cohorts, and you walked us through a mini version of this. I think this was one of the origins, I know you've had others, of the flight school because as soon as we started utilizing the weapon of ConnectAndSell, and I think it was the first monosyllabic construction we put together, you said, "Stop. What are you saying? Stop. Don't ever say that again."
(20:00):
And you completely deconstructed and then built up our screenplay to an effective breakthrough screenplay that changed the trajectory of our business. And hence, since many thousands of folks in flight school later, many thousands of folks at our Pitch Anything events later, many thousands of events or phone calls that we've made here at Branch 49, I think we're pretty dialed in on how to do cold outreach.
Chris Beall (20:27):
And it's fascinating to me because some people don't like that word, cold outreach. They think it implies, well, I don't know, it's December and it's cold or something like that. Or maybe you don't like people, you're so cold when you're reaching out. Of course, it's technical. It's a term of art. It means outreach to people you haven't spoken with before. And if you have half a brain in your head, these are people that you would like to speak with. You have a hypothesis and that is a conversation with anybody on that list of people, anybody in that target set has a reasonable shot of moving forward to something better than where you are than talking to a random person. That's not a big hypothesis. That's an important one. What's so interesting to me, and this is what this event is going to be about, is it doesn't have anything specifically to do with what you're selling.
(21:15):
It has to do with one universal truth, which is you're speaking to a human being and that is bedrock. That's the thing I always come back to and somebody goes, "Well, does it work in this industry? That industry?" We don't want to come to this thing like that because what we do is we sell something so high value, customized, so bespoke, so thought through, that nothing that you guys could teach us or that we could practice in an event like this could possibly fit us.
(21:46):
But you know what? It's kind of like a pair of gloves. As long as I know you have fingers, even if you're missing one or say, you have an extra one because well, maybe you do. Maybe somebody killed your father and they should prepare to die, but you still have got something that pretty much looks like a hand, it's going to fit pretty much in a glove and you're about to go pretty much out into 20 below and you're better off with gloves than with no gloves. You're going into a world where it's better to have something on your hands. And that's really where we're taking it, that's what's cold, is that world you're going into. I think it's going to be quite a fascinating experience for folks. I dearly do hope I can physically show up. It's extremely inconvenient.
Corey Frank (22:32):
Well, it's your weapon. It is your weapon and probably a member or two of your team. So, ConnectAndSell will be represented fully in spirit and in practice. And you're mentioning cold outreach, Chris, I think maybe we could finish with this concept because we've talked about it a lot. I know the esteemed Jerry Hale posted something on LinkedIn several months ago about this concept of survivorship bias and particularly how germane that is probably to Q4. Listen, we've always done a discount at the end of Q4. We've always extended our contracts for another month to allow our folks to make it easier to jump on board. So, maybe just talk a little bit about not just cold outreach in the approach, but how survivorship bias really kind of diminishes your opportunity to grow as a sales organization because of that's how we've always done it this way.
Chris Beall (23:25):
Survivorship bias is funny because everybody I think, I hope they know the story. It was invented as a concept looking at the damage done to bombers that were flying over Germany in World War II. And the ones that came back that where they had the holes in them, what they were doing is basically saying, "Well, this is where they got hit. We should put armor there." And that's incorrect. This is where they got hit and they made it back. So, those places don't need armor. Put more armor in the places where they got hit and didn't make it back.
(24:00):
Now, it's a little actually more challenging to figure out what that really means, but anything's better than putting armor in a place that you didn't need it, because we know it always adds weight. So, when we come to the end of a quarter or a year and we're looking at last year and we're going, "Well this worked last year." What worked is like a plane coming back, it "worked."
(24:26):
Do we really know which part of the plane went down? Or the ones that didn't work and are maybe it was one of those that would've made it? Did we even select correctly which deals to focus on and where to put our armor, so to speak? Survivorship bias is the most insidious, I think, of the intellectual failings that we embrace in groups. So, groupthink is bad, but groupthink is amplified by survivorship bias because we can all see the same thing and seeing as believing. We reason in very simple ways about these situations and the simplest way is let's do what we did last year.
Corey Frank (25:06):
Yeah, absolutely. Well, we've talked about false positive versus false negatives and how most organizations... I think we talked about this with Jeb when we were on the phone, is that how most organizations look at false positives and they should be, similar to survivorship bias, looking at the false negatives, correct?
Chris Beall (25:22):
Yeah, false negatives kill businesses. False positive, they cost you a little something, you have to do some work that you throw away. Dying is not as attractive, frankly, as doing some work you throw away. Now, the fact of the matter is management of ignorance is what it's all about. And it's really interesting. If you want to hold, you want to do it what Oren said, which is hold, one of the things you oddly have to do to be so committed is you have to embrace your ignorance. You have to admit you don't actually know based on the information you're getting right now, what your reaction should be.
(25:58):
And since you don't know, your best course action is probably to be proactive, to run your process. P-R-O, as the beginning of both of those words because your lack of knowledge is actually your savior, in this case. It's like, "I don't know, so I may as well do what we decided to do, whatever that happens to be." And it is that change of course. It's like, "well, what if we offer them a discount right now?" I have a couple of them right now. I've got a couple of deals that are... One of them, one of my very best customers will expire at the end of the day. I'm sitting here talking to you.
Corey Frank (26:38):
That's right. That's right. Well, I'm sure the rep on the deal is...
Chris Beall (26:42):
I am the rep.
Corey Frank (26:43):
Oh, you're the rep, too. Even better.
Chris Beall (26:44):
Well, we have another principle here, and I think a lot of people practice it, but we're pretty hard over here at ConnectAndSell. We all sell from the front lines and we don't sell the special deals. We just sell deals. And in fact, I sell the most experimental deals. The ones that are the weirdest. People turn their nose up at and go, "Why'd you do that?" Because I can endure the most reputational damage without being damaged. Being the CEO, as long as you hold and people make fun of you like, "Oh, that's a stupid deal. That was idiotic." It's like, yeah, well, it's part of my job is to explore the possible on behalf of all of us. Som I get to go to the top of some mountain that turns out there was nothing over on the other side that was worthwhile, but I'm kind of a sunk cost, right? As the CEO, you kind of a sunk cost.
(27:30):
So, we sell from the front lines, but one of the reasons we do it is that there's a hidden set of signals that go on in a company that cause reps to waiver. And it's this thing that says, "Hey, do the right thing in the deal. Go do the right thing." We all know what that is. Oh, and by the way, make the number no matter what. It's like those are a little bit at odds with you there and that's fine. I mean, dynamic tension is the essence of good stories, but at some point you have to decide what are we going to do as a company? What's our real goal? Was it to make this number?
(28:07):
It's very rare, by the way, that making a specific number on a specific date makes all the difference. I'll never forget my eldest, and I think I told this story once in a previous episode, we were in a meeting and everybody's talking about it, making this number on this date and all these numbers, numbers, numbers, numbers. And we came out and my eldest kid, Serenity, at the time said, "So, dad, I have a question." I said, "what's the question?" She said, "Well, do they think by talking about the numbers, they're going to change them?"
(28:43):
And I said, "Yes, they do." And she thought for a while said, "That's really sad," and walked off and led me over to Starbucks for hot chocolate. Talking about the stuff is actually a bad habit. Talking about what's going to close, talking about when it's going to close, talk, talk, talk, talks a bad habit. Go run the process and take your spare time and fill up with other opportunities because they'll make you stronger.
Corey Frank (29:09):
One of my good friends, our good friends, Robert Vera always talks about you can't out exercise your fork. So, as much as you want to do a lot of activity, you got to make sure that the biggest constraint in your system is tackled and it takes... You're a mathematician and a physician. It takes 3,500 calories to burn every pound of fat. These are the laws of thermodynamics. The same for celestial mathematics and the laws of physics. And those exist in client acquisition and revenue. And you have to eliminate that biggest constraint in your system, as we've said time and again. And for most folks, it's establishing that trust-based conversation game at scale and no conversations, no product-market fit, no conversations, no core Q4 achievement, no ticket, no laundry, right? And so if you're not doing five to six pitches in your tam, as you said many times, guess what? Somebody else is.
Chris Beall (30:05):
And those are the good ones.
Corey Frank (30:05):
[inaudible 00:30:07].
Chris Beall (30:07):
Most are the good ones. It's prima facie evidence that they're good. They're actually happening. [inaudible 00:30:16]. And it's so fascinating when folks talk about the quality versus quantity thing, and there's all these sort of notions that people have like, "Oh, if I just think harder about the quality, then there'll be better meetings." Embrace your ignorance. Your ignorance is your friend. Freedom is your friend. Just go in knowing nothing and have a conversation.
(30:38):
I mean, you know one thing. You have a range of capabilities, you have a range of things that you could bring to bear. You're representing your company, that's why you're called a rep. You're representing what your company's capable of doing. Now, you know what that range of capabilities are, but you really don't know where the problems for the other person or the challenges, the gaps where they are. Okay, your ignorance is your friend. That's what enables you to be curious and ask those curiosity-based questions. And when you're needy, you want to see where neediness shows up first. Neediness kills more deals in discovery, then it kills at the end of a year by a lot. Not a little.
Corey Frank (31:23):
There you go. Absolutely. Well, I think we also need to mention the event one more time since Oren's not on here, right?
Chris Beall (31:31):
Yeah, when is it?
Corey Frank (31:33):
December 7th and December 8th at the Top Gun Studios in Carlsbad, California.
Chris Beall (31:37):
Wow.
Corey Frank (31:38):
Yes. Sunny, sunny California, right on the beach. You've had many events over the years there, Chris, you've been there many times. We'll try to maybe take a few of the cars out for a spin, maybe a couple of Ducati's since Oren's not on here, we can guarantee that. We'll have a blast. We're limiting it. If you would like some more information, please reach out to me at corey@branch49.com. Go to orenklaff.com, go to chris.beal@connectandsell.com. christ.beall, correct?
Chris Beall (32:06):
Yeah, chris.beall.
Corey Frank (32:09):
[inaudible 00:32:09]. Okay, great. And with that, Chris, I think we're going to put together another episode in the can here, since we do have our own Q4. Of course, you're not sitting around, you're waiting for the prospects to come to you. So, if he buys, he buys. It's only your number one client. We'll wait to hear how that story ends in the next episode. So for Chris Beall, this is Corey Frank with the Market Dominance Guys. Until next time.
Chris Beall (32:34):
All right, thanks, Corey.
Chris Beall (01:20):
Pretty fascinating. Here's a modern problem. So we have this massive work from home thing that showed up in 2020. We actually got to watch it, the day everybody went home in our customer base. We knew what day it was. It was like everything still worked, which was pretty cool. We thought that was amazing. Our people who navigate these phone calls all went home too. That shocked me that that worked. We dodged more than a bullet that particular day, because at 200,000 plus dials navigated a day by human beings. You got to have people who can navigate those styles and suddenly there are centers they were working at. We didn't know that had happened. But now I'm kind of looking at it going, okay, everybody's going to work from home. My wife's book, Love Your Team, A Survival Guide for sales managers in a hybrid world, in a hybrid world means a bunch of people are working from home.
(02:06):
How do you solve that problem of knowing how to get to them working from home? People send stuff to me in my office in Los Gatos and I will go there, something on the order of twice this year maybe. Partially because when you set foot in California, they tax you for that day of work, but for some other reasons too. What do you do there? How do I get my customers or even my team? So my innocent team right, there they are, I got 10 SDRs and I got 10 AEs and they're talking to say 85,000 people a year. How do they get that physical note to the right person?
Rick Elmore (02:43):
Yeah.
Chris Beall (02:43):
How do they get the address part to happen?
Rick Elmore (02:45):
So most of our clients have addresses already. Work with tons of nonprofits, political affiliation, political action committees, real estate, mortgage, insurance. All these people usually have those addresses, but there are a lot of creative ways you can find people's address. What we've seen people do, we don't do it, is they'll find a list of people they want to contact, at least the city they live in, and then they'll hire VAs to scrape list off of Reference USA match names and addresses or Data Axle or PropertyRate. I mean there's tons of ways to find someone's address, but I would say majority of our clients already have this information. But if there is a need to find it, you can get creative and find it. It's just a little extra work but [inaudible 00:03:30] off of Upwork or Fiverr, give them a list, tell them here's the three web addresses to use to scrape and match names in cities, and they do it. They do a good job.
Chris Beall (03:39):
Interesting, interesting. So in the B2B world, we live in B2B right. We have a couple of customers use ConnectAndSell for B2C. We're not hugely enthusiastic about it, even though it works great because the regulatory surround on phone is non-trivial, right? And on business call somebody. So B2B is kind of funny because getting their work address is probably easy, getting it to their desk is probably easy. Are they ever at their desk is probably an unknown. Now I suppose we could ask them, but what do you see in B2B? I want to get it to their home probably, I think. Who's doing B2B and how are they doing it?
Rick Elmore (04:15):
B2B is a lot of medical software, corporate gifting. A lot of those types of companies, they usually have addresses and they're sending straight to the buildings. But if they want to get addresses, we just point them in the direction of how to do that. I'm trying to think of a good case study of somebody going B2B. Yeah, we had this CRM company for veterinarians and what they did is they just sent a handwritten note to every veterinarian office and just said, dear office manager, dear doctor, whoever was registered at that address. But if you have a more specific question on B2B, what type of industry, I can probably pull up an example of some client we've worked with over the last four or five years.
Chris Beall (04:53):
Sure. We can always be pioneers.
Rick Elmore (04:54):
Yeah.
Chris Beall (04:55):
I mean in this space we may as well try yours, right? No reason not to. I think it's fascinating actually. I mean we're all about this human touch element and breaking through the noise with the human touch. So this what you're doing, we're doing it with the human voice, which goes straight into somebody's mid brain.
Rick Elmore (05:10):
Yeah.
Chris Beall (05:11):
I mean you can't turn off a voice once it's coming in your ear and now it's down to your skill. It's down to your tone of voice. It's down to you. Do you have a message that works? Do you know the psychology of the first seven seconds of the cold call? All that kind of stuff.
Rick Elmore (05:24):
Yes. The psychology behind a handwritten note is a hundred times more impactful than you believe. People appreciate it. You stop them in their tracks for seven to 10 seconds, right? You're engaging them on a level that they're not being engaged by anyone else. You're competing somewhere, no one else is competing. But it's super impactful when you put something down that's tangible that they can hold in their hands and that's shelf life too.
(05:46):
So we're going into the holidays right now. We're sending out tens of thousands. I think we're going to do somewhere near half a million holiday cards in the next six weeks. These have six to eight week shelf lives. What piece of material can you get in front of your customer's hands that's going to sit on their fridge, their counter, their mantle for eight weeks. Where they walk by and they're going to constantly see that and be reminded of you. Like that's real estate you can't buy in any other type of marketing form. And it's personal, it's impactful, and it can be measurable if you get creative with the QR codes and call tracking and driving traffic to landing pages and stuff like that.
Chris Beall (06:20):
That's fascinating. It's fascinating. I really like it. Gosh, you got my little tiny wheels and my little tiny brain turning here. As you look into the future, you're doing pretty big numbers already. How big is this? You're attempting to bootstrap your way into what looks like a billion dollar TAM. Is that, am I getting that right?
Rick Elmore (06:40):
So we've been completely bootstrapped so far. We should make that aim 5,000 this year pending a couple orders. But the purpose of never getting funding was for a few reasons is one, how big can this be? I didn't want to give up too much too early. I knew that this was something that could be special if it was built right. And we've laid the platform for getting the engagement, the footprint. We have the largest web traffic of anybody in our niche going to our website every single month, plus the technology. But my goal is to get it to somewhere close to eight figures in yearly revenue before we go get funding. But in order to go from eight to nine figures in revenue, we're going to have to have a much more advanced platform and have more product offerings outside of just handwritten notes. A little bit maybe more gifts or something more digital. Something that's more built out as an engagement platform where the handwritten notes is one of the tools that we offer.
(07:33):
But yeah, I mean we're 11 full-time employees. We're small but mighty and I think we've only had one employee leave our company in the last three years. So everybody's really committed. It's a really strong family atmosphere here. Everybody looks out for each other. We use tons of VAs. I have this method, trying to remember who it was, but they taught me basically like you mind dump all your information you need done about a job, you wait 30 minutes, you come back, you reorganize it, you build systems and processes and just scale your work that way versus trying to come on and try to hand teach everybody. So Michael E. Gerber Built To Sell really impacted me work on your business versus working in your business.
(08:09):
So yeah, we're just excited. We're way too early to think about funding because we're just getting done with a huge project of building our machines into manufacturing now 30, 40, $50,000 checks I was cutting for engineering. Now we can put that into operating expenses, growth capital, PPC. My PPC budget's been only $800 a month for the first four years. Literally nothing. We have people who spend $50,000 a month. So we're excited. We're just scratching the surface of our potential for sure.
Chris Beall (08:40):
Well fantastic. By the way, our PPC budget is zero, so.
Rick Elmore (08:43):
Oh really?
Chris Beall (08:46):
Yeah. I remember we met with Google once, we were once called over to Google and they wanted to talk to us about something we'd done for them and something we'd done for them actually helped them shut a business down. So they prevented themselves from going too far down the road. Because when you talk to people, you get quick intelligence as to whether a business makes sense. And they finally decided not to compete in that particular space as a money loser. So they wanted to tell us, this is Google's idea of an award. They wanted just have us come over and say, "Hey, you're our vendor of the year." What do we get for that? Well, nothing we just wanted to tell you.
Rick Elmore (09:21):
That's what you get yeah. [inaudible 00:09:23]
Chris Beall (09:25):
Yeah. It was funny because during that conversation their very, very, very, very senior guy who was there said, "Do you realize you're the only Silicon Valley company that we're aware of that doesn't pay Google one penny?"
Rick Elmore (09:37):
Wow.
Chris Beall (09:37):
And I said, "Yes and we intend to keep it-"
Rick Elmore (09:39):
I had a mentor once, tell me Google is God. There's a lot of power there, but a lot of scary power. They have the power to take away a lot of traffic. I remember two years ago we signed up an SEO company, just organic stuff and they were doing some shady backlinking and we actually got dinged and they literally tank you. And it's just overnight we are getting all this traffic and it goes down to 90% less. It scares you.
Chris Beall (09:39):
Oh yeah.
Rick Elmore (10:01):
And Google did it. They just stop indexing your stuff. They take it off, they push you down rankings and it's just like, oh my gosh so yeah.
Chris Beall (10:08):
Yeah, it's tricky and then there's an element of independence that you want to keep from that but you need it anyway. We've avoided it because the nature of our, we just call people.
Rick Elmore (10:17):
Yeah, relationships. Yeah, that's the thing. You got to get people to believe in you. Buy into you.
Chris Beall (10:22):
Yeah.
Rick Elmore (10:22):
And that's the thing, we're really lucky... we don't have a... you do have people that are price shoppers, but my background was building relationships. I obsess when we bring on business accounts, I call them, I onboard them personally and it's probably not the right thing to do, but I have to make sure everything goes good and call them after the order. What did you like? What didn't you like? Obsessed to make sure everybody's happy.
Chris Beall (10:43):
Well to me, you're doing it right. It's obvious I've been doing this stuff for three quarters of a million years and I still am involved at that level in the business. Somebody the other day was saying, "We kind of like CEOs that put their feet up and look out the window and think big thoughts." I'm going, well when I put my feet up and look out the window, I have a blank mind. But when I engage with something like why is this person getting hung up on? I had one yesterday. Guys getting hung up on. Mind you 200 and something thousand dollars a day, there was a lot going on. But there was something about this one that I just thought, this is not a tech problem. There's a subtle problem hiding in there and I won't learn it unless I jump in and have a look.
(11:23):
So I went in and had a look, listened to his conversations. It turned out, on his follow up calls he was getting hung up on the easy calls. Why? Because he was so confident on the easy calls. He was talking for eight to nine seconds before he let the other person say anything and he was getting hung up on. Is he aware of it? Of course not. So I made a little coaching email for him, showed him the wave forms. This is where you're talking. By the way, when you're on a cold call, you let him talk in three quarters of a second, actually it's about a second half. But on these follow up calls, the easy ones, you're going too far. I learned something, which is now I've got one of my data engineers looking through all the data for a particular pattern of short call, long call, but nothing in between. And we'll go find those and then we'll be able to proactively help those customers. I don't think you learn anything in business by having somebody else do something and tell you how it went.
Rick Elmore (12:15):
You got to get your hands dirty right. You got to have that experience. So when you talk about it, you can talk confidently about it. So you talk from an understanding, not from just memorization or somebody else telling you what to say.
Chris Beall (12:26):
Yeah. When people put together presentations for you, you know the purpose of the presentation right? And it's not to move the business forward. So that's all there is to it. I mean you'd love if it were true, but what's in it for them? Well, you're the boss. As I say, we belong to the lonely minds club here in the CEO biz. At the lonely minds club means people think we have no hearts. We do, but we don't dare to let them simply rule. Bring them out, but you can't let them rule. And second is, it's lonely because everybody who works for you, regardless how close they are to you personally or professionally, is obliged to lie to you at the margins in ways that do not feel like lying. They're obliged to because you have this concentration of power that's fundamentally corrupt and there's nothing they can do about it except adapt for their own safety.
Rick Elmore (13:14):
Yeah.
Chris Beall (13:15):
It's a problem. It's a problem.
Rick Elmore (13:16):
It is. I like that lonely mind club. I like that analogy.
Chris Beall (13:21):
That's what we're in.
Rick Elmore (13:22):
From being on the other side to not being on this side. I totally understand what you're saying.
Chris Beall (13:26):
Yeah, well some of us can't kind of handle that thing where we're reporting to somebody, whatever that means. I always thought that was a funny term anyway. What am I reporting to?
Rick Elmore (13:35):
Yeah.
Chris Beall (13:35):
What am I supposed to not know it myself? As you look at the next stage of this, you mentioned adding products, that's one kind of thing. Do you operate truly globally now? Do you feel like people are writing notes in French and everything else under the sun? Is all that happening?
Rick Elmore (13:51):
Yeah, we can. I would say 99% of our business is here in North America. But yeah, we definitely would have to expand globally to reach the ambitions that I have for this company. But to do that we would need to expand globally as well. So we would need a production facility in the UK, Australia, China, just so these are not having national stamps on them. So if you ship from the US to Australia, it has a ginormous international stamp right and that's a problem because it's be like, why did this handwritten note from John who lives a mile from me be shipped from the states and it took three weeks to get there, but then it takes three weeks and it has a big international stamp on. It doesn't make sense. So in order to expand globally, revenue's going to have to be a lot higher. We're going to have to have some channel partners spread out throughout the globe to make sure that happens. But yeah, that's definitely a vision.
Chris Beall (14:41):
Yeah, it's always so tricky to get to that unit of expansion. When you're expanding globally, it's suddenly you're carving out part of the overhead of the core business. You're adding a lump of pure overhead because it's always going to take a while to get going. And then you're also adding the risk of unfamiliarity. The things you don't know that you will find out. How you'll know if you don't know them.
Rick Elmore (15:02):
And that's the thing, I think we would expand through acquisition because there are some smaller little mom and pop companies trying to do this across the globe, but they're using really outdated technology. And what we would do is basically come in and basically give them a business in a box and say, "Hey, here's our technology, here's our systems, here's our software. This is how we have built an eight figure business." More like a franchise and say, "Hey, we'll start feeding you business, but we're going to acquire you in your business but we're going to make your business a lot better with our technology and our platform." So yeah, I mean that's definitely the pie in the sky where we want to go. But there's just so much business just here in the US. I mean there's like 60 or 70 billion with a B, pieces of first class mail sent here in the US and that's not including marketing mail. So if we get to 50 million pieces a year, it's a fraction of a fraction of possibilities.
Chris Beall (15:02):
Yeah.
Rick Elmore (15:53):
Yeah and we're excited about it and plus it's a new tool. That's why I always tell our clients, your clients put food on your table. We always try to tell them to work on the relationship, right? Because it costs five times more to acquire a new client. If you have good customer appreciation, you make them feel appreciated. They're going to make repeat purchases, they're going to tell their friends, they're easy to upsell. It's easy to sell a new offering to a current client who feels appreciated. And then if they don't, they just... They'll go price shopping and go somewhere else. So yeah, we think we have a cool tool to build relationships and build loyalty and trust for sure.
Chris Beall (16:25):
Yeah. Yeah. Might not even be a tool, might be a weapon. Never know.
Rick Elmore (16:28):
Yeah.
Chris Beall (16:28):
That's what we're into.
Rick Elmore (16:33):
Yeah.
Chris Beall (16:33):
Tools, that's for gardening. We use weapons to dominate markets, right?
Rick Elmore (16:36):
Yeah.
Chris Beall (16:37):
That's where it's at.
Chris Beall (17:18):
So I have a question about the thing that came up last night. So I was talking to somebody who was here having dinner and for her own privacy, I won't say who it is, and she said that's such a cool idea. I once got a job based on one and only one thing, which is I wrote a handwritten note and nobody else did back to the person I interviewed with, but I wanted it delivered that day. So I couldn't get that to happen easily. So what I did is I hand wrote the note and then I took a picture of it in my hand and I sent it to the person and said, Hey, I would send you this but it's going to take too long to get there. And I just wanted express my appreciation for the interview that we did today and for the thoughtful questions you have and blah blah blah. It was something intelligently handwritten.
(18:01):
So it struck me as the most unusual hybrid. It's in a way it's guaranteed to have been personal because she's holding it in her hand and taking a picture of it and yet the delivery was instantaneous and it was a B2B thing even though she was... She's a business so to speak. Does anybody do that kind of crazy stuff?
Rick Elmore (18:22):
So that's what I'm talking about expanding our platform is having a digital aspect, engaging them through text or email or socially. I mean there's a lot of cool tools out there now that we can leverage APIs to scrape information and pull it into our platform to engage them with a personalized email somehow with some type of creative copy or message or picture, send a text message, hit them up on LinkedIn or their social account. So I think that's a really creative thing to do. Write the note, take a picture, send it, right? It's kind of witty and personal at the same time. But that's what I'm talking about expanding our platform is doing something like that where you can have type in your message, our system would create the note, impose it on a mock up image for you where it looks like it was just handwritten and then you can send a text message. So yeah, that platform idea is definitely the future of expanding and growing this to a much bigger business. But yeah, that's just a really cool way that that person stood out for sure.
Chris Beall (19:12):
I can think of some twists and turns around this. For instance, a book in Kindle, like when my wife Helen's book comes out on the first right, I'll buy a Kindle edition for 99 cents because that's what you can do for up to the end of the week. And they have the ability to make a little poster. So the Kindle app, I use mine on my iPhone and I can highlight a sentence or whatever and then go share it and they'll make a little poster and post it on LinkedIn and it comes with the citation of the book and a link to the book so you can buy the book. So it's kind of a full viral loop. The posters cool, but the poster is just whatever font they have and whatever. If the poster were handwritten, if it were actually handwritten and it were a picture and it went up on LinkedIn, that would be cooler, I think. Obviously you're doing runs of a few, I mean literally can you do a run of one where it's completely unique?
Rick Elmore (20:05):
Yeah, so we help you send one, send hundreds, thousands or automated. So our website's more like an eCommerce platform. Go on there, pick card, type your message, check out. That's really not a big part of our business. We make some money on that, but it's not really the money makers. Really why we do that is to allow people to try us out, send one or two, see how you like it before you really kind of dive in with two feet. It just gives them the ability to get a good feel. Yeah, I would say the majority of the people we work with are businesses. I would say it's like the high 80% of our clients are businesses. We're working on projects with them, they're automating it, seasonal like things, holidays, anniversaries. Yeah, we definitely allow anybody to use our platform as of right now.
Chris Beall (20:45):
Got it. Do you follow or know Stu Heinecke? Okay, so Stu has written a couple books. He wrote a book called How to Get a Meeting With Anyone. He wrote another book, just wrote it called How to Grow Your Business Like a Weed. I think you'll really like this book and I think you'll like Stu. Stu is the guy who will send you a foam board with a cartoon that he's drawn on it. That's funny and it's about you and he'll send that to a senior executive to get a meeting, that kind of stuff. He's a genius about this. He's a Wall Street Journal cartoonist. He's one of the nicest human beings on earth, by the way. Highly recommend. Just reach out to Stu and tell him that-
Rick Elmore (21:20):
I have to write his name down. I can we get them with this. Yeah, I'll get that from you.
Chris Beall (21:25):
Stu Heinecke. And just seems like a lot of what you're doing fits in with the Stu Heinecke way of looking at the world. Plus you've done your business his way. His point is look, weeds figure out how to grow in the middle of cracks and freeways. Get over it.
Rick Elmore (21:39):
You know what, I always look at that when I'm on runs, you'll see those and it's actually to me really inspiring. There's a will, there's a way. We've fought through a lot of challenges over the last four years, but I've always felt that way and when I see that, that is a nature's example of exactly what I'm going through right now, there's a will, there's a way and that hits home for sure.
Chris Beall (21:58):
Yeah. Checked out his business, his book and check him out. He lives up on Whitby Island up in part of the Olympic Peninsula off the Olympics and the San Juan's. Brilliant, brilliant guy, nice person, and you're doing it, which is what's so interesting but you're also enabling him. I mean it's an example of kind of a seed pod strategy. Stu is a guy who would talk about your business and that's an awesome thing and he would talk about it in the right way too, because he's got a huge audience. So I highly recommend reaching out to him and kind of seed podding up so Simply Noted become something that he use an example. Because when Stu uses an example of how to grow your business like a weed and it's you, people are going to go after it and he's kind of speaking to your audience. Those businesses that have a lot of outreach to do in order to get things to happen. So highly recommend.
Rick Elmore (22:49):
Nice. Awesome.
Chris Beall (22:51):
But I want to come by some time and watch the robots do their thing just down the road in Tucson so we'll do that.
Rick Elmore (22:57):
Great. They're a little pen wielding army. It's a little army of robots you'll love it. It's really fascinating for sure.
Chris Beall (23:03):
That'll be cool. And then someday we should do a little test drive. You said you'd do a little cold calling before we got on?
Rick Elmore (23:09):
Yeah that's one of the major ways that we started this business was just getting on the phone. I mean I went through the BNI, the Chamber of Commerce, some of the EO stuff for networking, but really it's... we've used our product, a lot of social, email and cold calling. If we have nothing to do, we're on the phone smiling and dialing. I need to talk to you about what you guys are doing because it's definitely something that is a major cornerstone in our business for growing.
Chris Beall (23:34):
Yeah, I mean what we do is so simple. We can talk about it, but it literally is you push a button, talk to somebody in your list in a couple minutes and while that's going on, you don't have to do anything. You can do something else.
Rick Elmore (23:44):
Yeah, I mean we have a dialer. I mean you can make a hundred calls an hour, but there's a way to make it even more efficient.
Chris Beall (23:49):
Oh yeah. A hundred calls an hour. That's crawling. We don't talk about little numbers like that. That's too weak. Plus you got to pay attention when it goes to a voicemail or whatever. You got to be paying attention.
Rick Elmore (23:49):
Yeah.
Chris Beall (24:01):
You pay it no attention. You just hit the button. I was on with small business up in Canada today. We do this thing called an intensive test drive and it's basically you get it for a full day of production and it's live. We don't do demos, we don't do any of that stuff. It's live, it's your list, it's your people or you or whatever. And one of the principles I asked him, "Did you hate it?" And he said, "I didn't hate it but it scared me pretty bad and I'm still sweating." Yeah.
Rick Elmore (24:30):
Sounds intense.
Chris Beall (24:31):
Yeah. We call it the intensive test drive for a reason. Now you'd really like it with your approach to things. You'll have a blast with it and the fact is, that sincerity you talked about, being on their side, it comes through in the voice and it is the one thing when you kind of look at it, people don't make buying decisions based on the facts. They make buying decisions based on one thing, which is they grow to trust you more than they trust themselves with this decision. Anthony Iannarino opened his latest book, it's called Elite Sales Strategies and he actually quoted me without telling me which shocked me. So the opener of the book is a quote from me that says, "People buy from people they trust to make a decision they don't trust themselves to make."
Rick Elmore (25:13):
Yeah.
Chris Beall (25:13):
That's why they buy. And we know that trust is a subtle psychological thing. It's not, it's such a big deal. It's so dangerous to trust somebody that we're wired to not do it, but we're also wired to do it when it's done right. And just listening to you and thinking about how you truly are on their side and they'll hear it in your voice. I mean your successful career in sales, a lot of it's got to be predicated on that. That first conversation. When they're done, they're gone. Hey Rick Elmore knows what he's talking about and he's on my side, he's an expert and he's on my side. I trust him more than I trust myself right so that's what our whole thing is about.
Rick Elmore (25:55):
Yeah, I just focused on over-delivering. I'm going to make it right no matter what. Make sure you have a good experience. I remember when I first got into sales, my first manager at Striker, he sent me to a Dale Carnegie sales training thing and I learned a lot there. Like you were just saying, people will listen to people they like, but they'll buy from people they trust. I remember that's something they taught me. But yeah, that's definitely a 100% true in sales. Anything in business people are going to buy from people they trust for sure.
Chris Beall (26:19):
Right and how much they trust them. This is something I'm convinced that we've kind of figured out. Everybody always said, you got to be trusted more than your competitor. Your competitor is always do nothing. So how do you be trusted more than do nothing? That's really interesting.
Rick Elmore (26:33):
For me. I invest a lot in social proof. So it's getting good reviews, getting out there and having people seeing us. People talk about us that aren't us. So even if I'm telling you something, go out and search it and see what else somebody else is saying about us. That's another good thing. When I was a rep it wasn't really as that important, but when you own a business, you got to make sure other people are doing nice things about you outside of your own walls, inside your building.
Chris Beall (26:58):
Inside the echo chamber.
Rick Elmore (26:59):
Yeah.
Chris Beall (27:01):
Well Rick, thanks so much for coming on to Market Dominance Guys. Corey didn't join us. He must have business he's doing, he's always off there hustling too. Us old guys continue to hustle. There's no age limit to it. When you come right down to it, you don't build these things to sell them, you build it because frankly we don't know what else to do ourselves. So we just do it. And I'm super excited about your business and gosh, you don't need my good wishes, but I'll wish you all the best anyway because I think you're just going to blow it all away.
Rick Elmore (27:29):
I appreciate it, Chris. It was an honor to be on your show and share this with you guys, so thank you so much.
Chris Beall (27:35):
All right, well until next time, and we have no idea what episode this is. Might be two, might be three of them. This is Chris Beall for Rick Elmore. Thanks for being on and the absent but brilliant, Corey Frank, and I'm sure we'll see him again someday.
Chris Beall (02:16):
Cool. We run a pretty informal show here, so here's the informal show part. I know you have a very, very interesting background. We both went to school at the same place. You for real, and me, did it for three years and then went off and became a professional blackjack player for a while. Your background is unusual, I think for anybody, much less in business. It's something people want to hear about, but then, I also am dying of curiosity, as a guy who bought probably the second or third HP 7470A sweet lips pen plotter in the world, back in 1981 or two, I believe. I am fascinated with the use you have found for using a pen plotter to create artifacts efficiently that generate trust and more, so tell me the story.
Rick Elmore (03:07):
Yeah, well thanks for the intro. I appreciate it. My background's actually in athletics. I went to the University of Arizona and played football for Mike Stoops back in the early 2000s. Lucky enough to have a good career, went to the NFL and played three years in the NFL, had the typical journeymen struggle to survive. Just super competitive there, but was fortunate enough to stay and thrive and play for three years, but then when I got done, like most competitive athletes, they're looking for that competitive environment still, so reached out to some people who made that transition. Got into medical device sales, was rookie of the year my first year. Then I was top 1% or number one rep for the next five years. And then, just felt like there was something more. Saw that chip in my shoulder. I wanted to do something big.
(03:54):
So in 2017, went back to Eller, that's University of Arizona's Business School, got my MBA, and I was in a marketing class and a marketing professor was going over just all the success rates in marketing. Everything was super nominal or marginal, super low from cold calling, knocking doors, print mail, email. Everything was either single digits or low double digits, and being in sales myself at the time, I was trying to figure out what the competitive edge is and waiting for him to kind of drop the truth bomb and hallelujah moment, but at the end of the lecture, he said half jokingly, "Hey guys, you know what still works nowadays, even more now than ever, is a nice handwritten note. It has a 99% open rate," and I was just like, that is a no brainer. Why aren't we doing that now? It's obvious, because nobody has the time, but I was like, why isn't there a business out there doing this?
(04:46):
I got to researching. There was a company at the time named Bond, but they were focusing on the worst segment. They were funded with a million dollars and they were focusing on the wedding industry. I was just like, you're dealing with Bridezillas. Why would you focus only on weddings? I've been married, tons of people have been married. Everything changes all the time, last second, delayed. This needs to be a business tool. Again, my background's in sales and marketing. It's not in software. It's not in robotics. We actually tried using a plotter at first. Nice little AxiDraw plotter, holds a pen, does what you want it to do. Our technology's much more advanced than that, but we worked with the mail house here locally, talked to them just about what we can do, our ideas, how can we get it done.
(05:28):
We sourced product from all over the world, south America, China. Worked with some Autopen companies, but over the last four and a half years, we've grown our platform to over 300,000 users a month. Going to make the Inc. 5,000 this year. We've developed our own technology, our own robotic technology from the ground up. We're going to have six patents on it. We're really excited about it. I'm really proud of it as well because we've done this with no funding, no investors. The product has always paid for the company, been cash flow positive since month one, leveraged my sales and marketing background. And then, I've really launched a pretty cool little business here in the last four years.
Chris Beall (06:05):
Well, it sounds like it might not be so little. 300,000 monthly users is actually a pretty big number. When you say monthly user, what is a monthly user?
Rick Elmore (06:12):
Just somebody who comes to our site and uses our site for whatever they needed to do. We've invested a lot in SEO over the last 18 months and we just drive a lot of organic traffic. Our conversion rate is anywhere from a half a percent to one and a half percent. It really just depends on the month and where the traffic is coming from, but we're driving a lot of interest. People who are searching for products that we are selling, they're coming to our page. We're not closing every one of them. They're not all making purchases, but they're coming to our platform, signing up, requesting samples, sending one card. They're just actively engaging with our website every month.
Chris Beall (06:46):
Got it, got it. Well, I've been to the site and it's a thousand times better than ours, so I admire it.
Rick Elmore (06:51):
I appreciate it. Actually, the bane of my existence is building websites. It's just so frustrating. Little things get tweaked all the time that cause problems.
Chris Beall (07:00):
It doesn't take much. Well, you know what we say about networking, which is bad enough. It's two bits away from not working. I think there's a corollary over there on websites.
Rick Elmore (07:09):
Absolutely.
Chris Beall (07:09):
I don't have a good little poem for it or something, but we need an aphorism for website development and it's like Murphy's Law on steroids.
Rick Elmore (07:17):
Oh my gosh. Anything in software, Murphy's Law for sure. What can go wrong will definitely go wrong.
Chris Beall (07:24):
Well, software is funny in that sense. It's fundamentally brittle and I've been building it since 1968, so to give you a sense of how the first time I ever put my fingers on a keyboard and wrote a line of code was in '68.
Rick Elmore (07:37):
Wow. That's cool.
Chris Beall (07:38):
That goes back a little ways. Some people probably think-
Rick Elmore (07:41):
That's fine. I'm fine.
Chris Beall (07:42):
You aren't dead yet?
Rick Elmore (07:44):
I'm actually going through a Harvard CS50s class right now, a little computer science introductory course and a Python course, just so I can get really well versed in this type of stuff, just so I can communicate and work with my developers better. There's just so many opportunities within software and what you can get it to do in automation and APIs and machine learning, and all this stuff applies to our business, which fascinates me even more.
Chris Beall (08:08):
Well, it's funny. You're doing the right thing. In my opinion, most people who are founder CEOs don't bother to learn what's under the covers and it's what's really-
Rick Elmore (08:08):
Ignorance costs a lot of money.
Chris Beall (08:19):
Well, what's funny about it is, you nailed it. The communication with developers is communication with anybody, which is that once you have a common language, now you're down to how many iterations are you going to have to do in order to get to a finished product? Until you get to a common language, it doesn't matter how many iterations you do, you never get to a finished product. Most founder CEOs, I believe, end up in what I call the world of the flying car. That is, they don't know how the stuff is made, so they keep asking for flying cars and then after they get told over and over and over, "Sorry boss, you can't have a flying car." Then they stop asking for anything and the engineers take over and then you get an engineering run company, which is-
Rick Elmore (09:00):
That's a good thing, that's not the case for us because I literally understand... I've done everything with this company from building our websites, being engaged with the software team, the handwriting engine team, the robotics team, the sales and marketing, building out all of our case studies, all of our marketing materials, working... I guess that it is a bad thing if you don't understand the depths of your business for sure.
Chris Beall (09:21):
When folks talk about software eating the world, they don't actually consider the possibility that the senior executives who are running things are further divorced from how things run than they've ever been in history, and it's a problem because I don't know, you can give orders, you can tell people what to do, but if you don't know what underlies it, you're just [inaudible 00:09:41]. That's all there is to it. You just got to fucking do it. By the way, I'm a huge Python fan. I taught myself Python on a Saturday morning in 2006, I believe it was. Yeah, 2006, when I just got off at my own developers at a company that I joined in Silicon Valley because I wanted a visualization of this graph network thing that I thought of, and none of them would write the damn thing. So I said, "Ah man, I don't write much code anymore, but I'm going to do this," and I went and found a package to help that was done in Python and I thought, I'm going to hate Python because it likes white spaces and it's white space sensitive, which I used to teach programming languages to people, and here I am taking something I hate, which is why [inaudible 00:10:26], but why does it care about white space? I fell in love and about 10 minutes. I think it's one of the best languages ever.
Rick Elmore (10:31):
No, we can have a whole podcast talking about just the challenges of working with developers and why it's important to understand this and Python so far... I'm taking a course through Michigan right now in Python, so I'm only three weeks in, but I'm excited. I'm like the worst person to compete with because when there's a challenge, I just run through walls until I figure it out, so I feel bad for my competitors because there's no give up in me. If I need to know something, I'm going to figure out a way to understand it, even if it's at the expense of my time.
Chris Beall (10:57):
Well, I don't care about your competitors. I want to be crushed by you.
Rick Elmore (11:01):
I appreciate that.
Chris Beall (11:03):
That's what this whole podcast is about is dominating markets. Our [inaudible 00:11:06] is really simple, which is either you dominate or you're in peril. That's it. And then, you trump the markets you dominate and the more markets you dominate by count, the less peril you're in. It's just because after that, it's portfolio theory. It's like each one, if I have five markets, I dominate, all five have got to go away before I lose the ability to adapt the simplest way, which is to reduce overhead to match gross profit flow, which is the key to everything in businesses. You got to make your overhead just barely below, or well below, your gross profit flow and then grow. That's kind of it. There's not much more to it.
(11:44):
If they have all those business courses, it's like, guys, you get money from folks. There's your cost of goods, there's your gross profit, it flows into business. You have to reduce your overhead to being below that. Your final unit of overhead is your own salary. Figure that out. It's not that hard. Figure it out. It sounds like you've done that. Month one, month two, month three, there you were putting this thing together. You say, "Let's go." What did you do in month one in order to become cash flow positive? That's hard. That means you have to collect money from human beings for something they didn't pay for before, and human beings hate to buy stuff they didn't pay for before. They like doing today what they did yesterday.
Rick Elmore (12:27):
My background's in sales and marketing. I'm extremely competitive, extremely driven, but we started researching this in 2017 when I was going to school, and in 2018, we really started messing around with product, different machines, Autopens, the axidraw plotters, and getting samples. I was talking to my current clients, current business executives that I respected. My wife works in fundraising development, so she works with a lot of businesses, so we're really well connected here in the Phoenix market with people who run their own businesses, but prior to ever getting started, I probably had over 50 conversations with people that I respected, friends, family and business leaders, and when we finally got kicked off, I was just really excited about the product and people can see how excited I was about the product. I believed it down to my core, and I believe if your clients can see that in you, they get excited about it with you.
(13:16):
And then I was just obsessed with making sure those first clients that we had were successful. Even if it was at our expense, I wanted to make sure that they had a good experience because those first few clients that you have can make and break your business. You got to make sure they're fans about your business. They're lighthouse customers. They'll refer their friends. They'll keep buying from you if they know that you have their best interest in mind. So those first few months, looking back now compared to what we have now, it was a crappier product, but people just believed in it, and I talked to them about the problem that we were solving, connecting them with their clients in a personal way, in an automated way, in a more efficient way because if you think about it, everybody now is competing digitally for everybody's attention. It's all social, it's all SMS or MMS or LinkedIn or Slack or Twitter.
(14:05):
Nobody's competing in the mailbox, and with that high of an open rate and with how rare it is to receive a handwritten note and how expensive it is to require a new client versus just keeping a current client happy, it was actually a pretty easy sell to somebody who would listen, but now we have a much more complete platform. We have tools that automate it. We have better robots, we have higher capacity, we run our own printing press in house. That means faster, same day order deliveries. We have capital equipment that allows us to push out 10, 15,000 notes a day. We're just a lot more mature, but early on it's getting peoples excited about your journey, your product, your passion, your vision, get them to buy into you because they're not going to buy into a product they know nothing about. You really got to hard sell them on why they need to do it.
Chris Beall (14:52):
Yeah, you do. What was the point, before you actually launched somewhere in there, you went from, hm, interesting to, I'm going to go do this.
Chris Beall (15:48):
My experience is, that's what I call a mousetrap. It snaps. You don't grade into it and go, Oh, I think I'll do it. Maybe it's like, at some point you go, okay, I'm doing this. What drove you to that point? What was that like?
Rick Elmore (16:00):
I call it the entrepreneurial seizure. When you had that aha moment where you're literally, your whole body gets rushed with hormones where you just feel so good at, you had that moment, but when we were still testing this out in 2018, we were using plotters back in the day, and it took me forever. It took me weeks, I think it was four or five weeks to write 500 handwritten notes, but I was in medical sales at the time. I had a large territory across Arizona and Nevada. Again, I was in my class, my professor said a 99% open rate, and I was like, man, if I can get in front of my client 99% of the time, that is going to make me more successful. I wrote out 500 handwritten notes, basically pitching a product to doctors who never bought anything from me and really was really clear and concise who I was, how I can help them, can I buy them lunch and tell them more about it?
(16:48):
From those 500, I had over 30 people respond, which to me was new. I was just like, holy crap. People are calling me about a product and are about wanting to learn more. I always had to knock on doors and get people to sit down. And then from those 30 people, I sold $280,000 in equipment and it was $20,000 in commission from literally, from 500 handwritten notes. Literally, for that four or five, six weeks, my quota of monthly was $39,000, so when they saw $280,000 come across in six weeks, my whole company went crazy. My VP of sales were like, "Rick, what are you doing? It's working. We got to get everybody doing this," and I shared with them what I was doing, and really from that moment on, my business went on autopilot until January 2019 where I jumped in two feet with this.
(17:35):
But I saw it work firsthand and it was an idea that was kind of incubated during an MBA where we put a lot of work into just finding stuff that make it work, a lot of tinkering, and then weeks of getting this product together, and then I saw results and I was like, man, if we're seeing results now, let's solve a problem, build a platform, build the best technology, and we're going to have a really good company down the line that we can sell. That's really been my vision for this company, is to solve a problem, make it easy to use, build a robot, which we just did, and then scale it and sell it. We're really excited. We're only four years into this, but the next four years are going to be amazing.
Chris Beall (18:11):
Is it fun to watch the robots do their thing?
Rick Elmore (18:13):
I am obsessed with it. I was on a different call earlier today. I'm in here sometimes 11 o'clock at night, and I'm just still amazed seeing these little pen wielding robots. We build our own pens. There's a lot of technology in this company. We build our own pen inserts, we design the pen insert. It has 300% more ink so it writes longer. Also, you can control the quality of the ink. This is how geeky we got into this.
Chris Beall (18:13):
Love it.
Rick Elmore (18:38):
We've really thought of everything. The viscosity, viscosity's like how wet it is and how much it'll smear, so we have full control of it.
Chris Beall (18:47):
Remember, I have a physics degree from the University of Arizona.
Rick Elmore (18:51):
We've gone everywhere from the pen to the robots to the software, to the handwriting engine, to the website. Everything's been built from the ground up, which I'm extremely proud of.
Chris Beall (19:00):
That's so cool. Do you show videos of the robots doing their thing?
Rick Elmore (19:03):
Yeah, there's tons of them on my LinkedIn. I have them pinned up on the top. If you go to our LinkedIn, you'll see them. The website that we have now is actually being rebuilt. It's a two year old website. We're actually rebuilding the web app and then just the front facing design. We'll have a lot more of our technology highlighted on our website soon.
Chris Beall (19:21):
How personalized is the handwriting to me? I have a use case in mind right now. My team talks to 85,000 VPs of sales a year. I want them to follow up on every single one of those conversations with something-
Rick Elmore (19:34):
Automated.
Chris Beall (19:35):
Because once you talk to somebody, you may as well do something. We can actually get people even to open email, which we don't like very much, but when you talk to somebody, you send them an email, 10 minutes later, five minutes later, three minutes later, it's an email from somebody you just talked with, so we have the ability to scale the conversation side, but our follow up is, in my opinion, relatively weak. It's email and then we have a follow up conversation mechanism for people we want to talk to more than once, blah, blah. All that's built out. We put like, $55 million into this thing over time, so it does a lot of tricks, but it doesn't do your trick, so if I want to do your trick, how do I do it so that it feels like it's me writing that note, so I'm comfortable with it having come from me?
Rick Elmore (20:21):
Everything we do is custom to you guys. From your campaign, we'll completely set up custom, but the magic is automating it. Depending on what software you use, what CRM you use, we actually think our automation's a perfect follow up sequence. Say you had a call today and you book it and you want to set up an automation so once that trigger happens within your CRM, you would be notified same day either through an API integration or a Zapier integration, and we ship most orders same day, but it takes three to five days for them to be delivered. We actually think from that call to that landing in their mailbox within a week, five, six days, is actually a perfect follow up sequence for sales. Again, my background's in sales, so I'm always thinking about ways to engage prospects to get them on board. Even though we try to sell this as a tool for appreciation and thank you because again, cost of acquisition is five times more than just keeping your current clients happy. We just automate it through a Zapier integration. Super simple to set up. Just create an account on our website, we give you an API token, you log into the Zapier app, set up the automation, you never think about it again. It's pretty awesome.
Chris Beall (21:26):
Cool. We use Salesforce, so we know what's going on and then we pull it out of there. I'm sure you have that pre-wired, right?
Rick Elmore (21:31):
Yeah, Salesforce is one of the most flexible integrations we have.
Chris Beall (21:35):
Absolutely. Well, that's really interesting. How about on the handwriting side? It's me. How much is it me or is it a choice? It's like choosing a voice narrator for an audio book.
Rick Elmore (21:46):
This is a geeking out again, but the reason we had to build our own handwriting machines is these Axidraws or Autopens, they just have patterns when they write. It's impossible. They don't have super strong handwriting engines. They were built in the 80s and 90s, but can use your handwriting if you want. We can give you a handwriting conversion form, but what's powerful about ours is, not only do we have the ability to build you an unlimited sized handwriting style, so if you want to give us 100 As, 100 Bs, 100 Cs, we can create a very custom handwriting style to you, but we go well beyond that. We go into ligature style, so how your T connects to an H, what two T's look like together. What's an E at the end of a word versus an E at the beginning of a word look like.
(22:28):
It takes about five days for one of our graphic designers to convert your handwriting style and create your handwriting style, but there's a lot that goes into it, but everything about your campaign is completely custom, especially on our enterprise level accounts, stationary design, custom inserts, shift cards, business cards, bags of seeds, lumpy mill. You get really creative of what goes in an envelope, but we set up your custom campaigns. Really, when people come to us, they tell us about the project they have in mind and we show them the path of least resistance to get it done.
Chris Beall (22:58):
Got it. Well, it's very interesting. Our customers pay, they'll say an extraordinary amount of money to talk to people and follow up is everything, as you and I both know. I'm new to sales. I've only been at it for maybe 60 years, but as far as I can tell, I've learned very little and one of the main [inaudible 00:23:16] I've learned is follow-up is everything.
Rick Elmore (22:58):
Oh it is.
Chris Beall (23:18):
If you don't follow up, nothing ever happens in this world, and there's another thing which is courses for courses. We're calling people on the phone, not that you use a phone when you use ConnectAndSell. You push a button, you talk to somebody on your list, but to them it's a phone call. Then the question is, well, did you get everybody? You can get, roughly speaking, initially, you can get about 35% of the market on the phone right away. They're phone answering people, and it's not all about their mobile. It's actually all about what they actually answer on, and we do 60 million dials a year, so we know what everybody answers on, so we've got all of that information, but on the other side, what about the people, not just following up with the ones you talk to, but what about the people you can't reach? What about that note? That's still 60% of the market, roughly. You're saying to my customers right, and I have a fair amount of them that pay attention to this podcast, that if they want to reach the other 60%, that I don't know what the open rate will be. At a 99% open rate, is that still the case or whatever it happens to be?
Rick Elmore (24:27):
Yeah, there's tons of studies published online. We actually verified this. We took six different types of envelopes. One of them was handwritten, the other ones were print, different colors, different sizes. What we did is, we put a $10 check inside and told them what we're doing. "Hey, just scan this QR code. We're testing an open rate case study, but here's a $10 check," so we confirmed it by checks being cashed and then QR codes being scanned, and over 99%. We verified it, but there's tons of case studies out there as well showing the open rate is 99% as well.
Jeb Blount (02:10):
Well, let's start with the reason why we don't do them. Discovery is the weakest link in most sales processes because it's not sexy, it's boring, Sexy is closed the deal. Sexy is do the presentation. Walk into any room of salespeople and ask them what would you like to know? And they'll what to say. They want to know what words should come out of their mouth that are going to suddenly woo everybody and wow everybody into saying yes to them or complying with a request. But the truth is that in sales a question you ask is more important than anything that you will ever say. But that's boring. It doesn't make us feel good to ask questions and listen. So discovery has a tendency to get put on the back burner even though 80% of your time that you spend in sales conversations and inside the sales process should be on discovery because what you said, Corey is true. Deals are won and lost based on the questions you ask and the information that you get.
(03:12):
It's really no different than if you think about attorneys, lawyers going to court. If you've ever been in a case, you know that you went into depositions and there was a ton of discovery that was done up front. Pretty much cases are won and lost during that period of time, not in some spark of inspiration in the middle of a courtroom. That happens on TV, it just doesn't happen in real life. In sales there's typically not this magical plays where like in a movie scene, you push the pen over to the buyer and say, "Sign here", and you've delivered some amazing message to them and they just comply, sign it and you go out and you celebrate. It doesn't really work like that.
(03:53):
Typically, the deal is closed somewhere in discovery because you ask a question that provokes their awareness that they need to change and then as you're listening to them, you're making them feel important. You're learning their story. And so as you build your business case, you begin to build these value bridges. You're connecting the dots between what you learn in discovery about their aspirations, about their pain, about the problems that they have to solve and you're connecting it to what you can do for them, but you're using their language. That's the point where they begin to feel like you get them and they begin to trust you and you begin to close more deals. Now as we move into recessionary period, discovery becomes even more important and it becomes more important because, as we're in an economic downturn, buyers begin to change their buying behaviors. The most important change that they're going to make is it going to be much more risk averse.
(04:48):
They're always risk averse, but in an economic downturn, in a crisis, in a time where they've got to be very careful about the decisions that they make because it could impact their job or impact their company, you've got to build a much better business case in order to mitigate that risk, in order to lower their fears and show them the value of doing business with you. The only way that you can build that business case, a business case by the way that is laced with math to show them the outcomes that they're going to get from your business proposition, the only way you do that is through discovery.
(05:24):
So it's always important, far more important in an economic downturn than in any other time because that business case truly matters. They are not going to give you their money unless they feel like the risk of giving you their money is low relative to the gains that they'll get from giving you their money and the return on the investment for doing business with you. But otherwise you're dead in the water and you're not going to be able to talk your way out of that. There's not a close or an objection turnaround that's going to talk a buyer off the cliff if you haven't demonstrated that the value or the outcomes that they're going to gain from doing business with you, they're going to derive from doing business with you, are a lower risk than spending their money with you in an economic downturn. Six months ago, they're throwing money at you. Today, not going to happen.
Corey Frank (06:18):
Yeah. Chris, we've spoken about that several times where a half wounded Jeb, what do you think about this theory, that a half wounded prospect, when they have a poor discovery interview thrust upon them and maybe that sales rep trips over one or two compelling questions that makes that prospect think or two, but then there's no follow up, there's no elegance. That prospect is at risk of being taken off that chess board for three years, average life cycle of a SAS deal, 36 months. And so to do poor discovery, does it mean there is a zero sum game there? You lost that opportunity to convert that prospect. Chances are that pain still exists, that prospect is going to get zapped up by somebody who's much more confident. Did I say that correctly, Chris, from some of the things we've been talking about?
Chris Beall (07:10):
Yeah, I mean there's a reason that some years ago I gently suggested that you put together an agency that would go all the way through discovery because it's clear to me, has been for quite a while, that discovery actually doesn't have a lot to do with your product and therefore it can be done generically. Somebody who is great at discovery, could do discovery for anything that any of us sell and do it with very, very little preparation around what that thing is, how it works and blah blah blah. Except they need to know basically what are the classes of problems that it solves, what are the knobs that get turned and what are the outcomes that might happen as a result? And then they should stay away from all of that except to ask the questions that might clue them in as to how this works.
And I think, I love what Jeb said and what language they use in order to talk about their world so that you can talk about your potential to be helpful to them in the language that they know how to reason it. Something that there's been a lot of research done on how language changes, how we think. I was just talking to somebody the other day who spent some time in part of Africa where in that particular place, people didn't talk about left or right. They didn't have words for left or right but they had very, very good words for north, southeast, west, northeast and so forth and so on. So you wouldn't say, you would get a snake that's right off your right foot. You'd say you'd have a snake that's right off your north foot. It changes how your brain works when you use language in a certain way and you have the big problem in sales. If you want to succeed, you have to be able to adapt to somebody else's language so that your brain works like their brain works.
(09:00):
And the way to do that is to ask questions and get into not just what they say but how they say it, what's behind it, where they get confused by the question. All that stuff is of huge value to you and is the differentiator between them being willing to part with their risk. I mean, Jeb says their money, but actually I think unless you're talking to a business owner, you're never talking about their money, you're talking about somebody else's money, but you're always talking about their risk and their risk is so much higher than the owners. It's easy to sell value to owners. You cannot sell value to agents, to functionaries. You must sell risk reduction to them.
Jeb Blount (09:40):
And that's a good point because when people are asking a simple question, "Do you get me"? So there's five questions that people are asking of you in discovery, "Do I like you? Do you listen to me? Do you make me feel important? Do you get me and my problems when trust and believe you"? And Chris is right, in most cases when you're in sales, you're selling to someone who is using someone else's money to solve their problems. So when we are giving a business case, there's really three outcomes that we want to be able to demonstrate. There are personal outcomes. So for that individual stakeholder, what do they get from that? What is important to them that's going to help them and their life be better, their job be better? There are emotional outcomes. That's things like peace of mind or less stress. What does that look like?
(10:22):
We talk about pain a lot. I'm not a really big fan of pain in sales. I know it's a Sandler thing and I know that everybody likes to get ahold of it because it's an emotional thing. But pain is not the only reason why people buy. It's sometimes a reason people buy. And then there are measurable business outcomes. That's the math. We have to talk about all three of those things. So what discovery does is it helps me understand, it helps me get that person. This is very, very important. And let's just take the context that Chris said. When you're dealing with a business owner, it's one thing. When you're dealing with people who are typically buying, which is most of the time you're not dealing with a business owner, you're dealing with someone else who is using the business owner's money to solve problems.
(11:06):
This idea of get matters greatly. Think about it like this. The most important, the most valuable relationships you have in your life, you describe like this. This person gets me. Those mean more than anything else. So what Chris was saying about language, which is just brilliant, is that language is a way to demonstrate get. You'll never have that level, like the level of get that I have with my wife, you're I'm not going to have that with someone I'm doing business with. But the same psychological blueprint is in play. Does the person feel like I get them or at least that I'm trying to get them? So Corey, let me back you up real quickly. You are a salesperson and you ask a good question, but you're so focused on the next question that you ask, using your words, Corey, I'm not being eloquent about it.
(11:55):
So rather than ask a follow up probing question that demonstrates that what I just noticed was important to that person and allow them to talk more, which makes them feel important and significant because I'm trying to get them, I just move onto the next question that's on my list. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt and the tattoo. I was 24 years old, I was just reading questions off of a list. So I don't demonstrate that. But if I do the follow up question, if I probe, if I listen deeply to what's being said behind the words and I'm get all that together and I start repeating it back to them, it's amazing sometimes when I say something back to someone in their words, they just look at me and they go, "Wow, you're the only person that's really listening to me".
(12:37):
And I'm like, I just literally took the words out of your mouth and gave it back to you. And you feel that I get you. Yeah. What you're doing with language is you're saying, and when I say outcomes, pain is one of the outcomes, aspiration is an outcome. The chance to capture an opportunity is an outcome. An opportunity to, if you're a business owner, I want be at the same level as my competitors.
(13:02):
That's not a pain, that's an aspiration. It's something that I want to accomplish. So if I start repeating back to you, we can help you do these things. You told me, Corey, that when you were in this situation, it made you feel this way and that was awful. I can't even imagine what that was like. What I can do for you in this particular situation is if we deploy these three solutions, it'll solve that problem for you and it'll reduce the chance that you're going to feel that way again. How do you feel about that?
(13:35):
How people respond to that is extraordinary because all I did was use their language. Language matters. It connects us as groups and it taps into the human similarity bias that is always in play. No matter how hard we want it not to be in play, it is in play. We trust in people who are more like us, but because we sell in a diverse economy to people who are not like us, the easiest, fastest way to tap into that is by speaking their language. And their language is their language of their company, their language of their jargon, their language of their team, their language of their aspirations and their pain.
(14:15):
The only way you get there is through great questions in discovery that compel them to tell you things that get them to the point where they stop thinking about hiding stuff from you because you're the salesperson and they begin opening up and allowing you to get below the surface where they teach you their language and then you bring that back. You don't get that if you're doing shallow discovery or you're so caught up in what you're going to say next, you only get that organically when you're in the moment and when they begin to lean into you. And that takes, I love the word eloquence, it takes eloquence, it takes nuance. But the real key to doing it is essentially just being a good human being and stop selling and start just really listening to them and allowing them to express themselves and then coming back with how you're going to help them achieve their desired outcomes.
Corey Frank (15:09):
Love that. I mean that's a book right there. What you say, Chris? That's number 16 right there, we get it. Forget 60 days, you just did it in six minutes.
Corey Frank (16:01):
But Chris, a lot of things that Jeb's talking about, we're in a different world than maybe five, 10 years ago where I jump on a plane and I go see a client. Right now a lot of clients don't even turn their Zoom on because they're afraid that the Zoom gods will steer their soul or something like that. But they don't turn their camera on or we have the cold call. Chris, how do we, and Jeb, how do we deal with that extrasensory perception that we have to have on the pauses or listening for the typing in the background. What do we do to awaken that empathy, that great amount of empathy that you talk about? And Chris you've talked about for years.
Chris Beall (16:35):
I do discovery in a funny way. That's all I got to say, because to me everything in sales is always about the other person's emotional journey. And my favorite book of Jeb is Sales EQ. And Sales EQ has to do with, it's not so much our emotions, it's their emotions. And it's the same. Jeb works with animals, he works with horses. I grew up in a world of all animals. It was, I didn't have any people, I just had animals. And when you're working with animals, especially animals bigger than you are, you realize the only thing that counts as their emotions, that's it. They have their capabilities which tend to be substantial and multidimensional in ways we don't understand and every once in a while they surprise you. I didn't know that one could bite so hard, for instance is a good one.
(17:24):
But when you come right down to it, it's the emotions. The emotions move fast when they move. They tend to be stable islands. And then when they move, they move fast. To me, what Jeff just said is you want somebody in discovery. Your only goal, in my opinion, is you get to the point where they start opening up to you. That's it. If there were another goal in discovery, I think I would've found it by now. The goal is, and we have a whole episode on this somewhere in the archives called The Confessional is now open. You want to get into the confessional, you want them to tell you their truth. And what I've found is oddly easy. It's just like cold calling. Cold calling's very easy in one way because you know where they start emotionally. They're afraid of you. You've got to build trust. You got seven seconds to do it. Great. There's a lot of ways to do it, but you better do it otherwise the emotional journey towards curiosity and commitment just ain't going to happen right, until they trust you that little bit.
(18:20):
I think the emotional journey and discovery starts with apprehension. They're apprehensive. They're pretty sure you're going to try to sell them something. They're pretty sure you're an expert, may aren't. And they're pretty sure that they don't want to have you have the better of them. So they're apprehensive. They don't want to go into the room, they don't want to go into the confessional. How do you get them out of apprehension? You have to replace it with another emotion. I mean emotions are always there. So the question is, well what's the replacement emotion? The one I choose is pride. Because everybody, if you think about it, it's impossible to be apprehensive and proud at the same time.
(18:54):
It's actually like they're incompatible emotions. You can't have both. So it's very easy to provoke pride in somebody in a very innocent question. Mine sounds funny. People think like Anthony and Arena would laugh at me for this and think I'm a total idiot. But when you see the results, you might think otherwise. I just ask a simple question. So Corey, it always helps me to know where somebody is in the physical world. Where are you right now on the face of our blue whirling planet? And I ask it exactly like that. And then I wait and I can go 25 minutes listening to your answer and I'm happy because you're in a place of pride of place. And pride of place is a universal for human beings. Every human being has pride of place. I don't care where you live, you're proud of it. And then I want to go from pride of place to pride of mission.
(19:48):
Because until I know why they're doing their job, why they get up every day and go and do that job, I really am going to have a hard time getting underneath all of that to the confessional. Why are they even doing this? It can't be for the money. Nobody does anything for money very long. They give it up. I don't want to deal with them anyway, so then I ask this other question which is, "Hey, when everything goes great and it goes great, it's fantastic, product is right, timing is right, the budget is there, everything's great. Your people do what they have to do, other guy does what they have to do. How does your product change that person's life"? And then I sit back and wait.
(20:24):
A lot of people think that's two stupid discovery questions, right? Oh Chris, you're trying to get empathy, blah blah blah blah blah. The fact is, most of the time after that second question, somebody after they've confessed their mission, pride of mission is there, they will start to talk about what's in the way of them accomplishing that mission. And that's where you want to be because that's where you want to be. You don't know is it economic, is it emotional, is it strategic? It's something, because everybody is frustrated that they can't do their job as well as they hold themselves accountable for.
Corey Frank (20:58):
That's beautiful. Can you teach that curiosity, Jeb? Can you teach that or is it what you had said earlier about prospecting that the way to do it is just to do it and to say the questions and eventually you'll start meaning the questions. Or is there another bio life hack that you'd suggest to engender that level of curiosity and empathy?
Jeb Blount (21:22):
Yeah, you can teach it. I mean there are people who shouldn't be in sales. Let me get clear about that. There are people who should not be in sales, but people who have a core set of talent, you can teach that. The problem for younger salespeople is they haven't developed the emotional intelligence yet to have the patience that Chris does to allow the answer to begin to build. They step on it. You can teach people how to control their emotions. A lot of cases what'll happen is the person's in the middle of telling you where they live, are telling you what's important to them. And you blurt out what's important to you too. Because when you're talking, it makes you feel important. And when you're not talking, it makes you feel unimportant. So with salespeople, you can teach that. You can teach the patients. I learned it. I learned it from masters like Chris who taught me these things and sometimes through a kick in the rear end. But I learned it.
(22:11):
You learn it through trial and error, but you mostly learn it by just learning human skills. One of the ways I teach people this is just through science. So Chris did two things there in those questions. One is he recognized something called the negativity bias, which is when people start telling you about something that's good, they'll almost always tell you what something is bad. So if I say, "Tell me what you love about your competitor", they'll go blah, blah, blah blah blah, but they don't do these things. I know it's going to happen every single time. I don't got to worry about it. It's always a pattern. He also stumbled into the self-disclosure loop. And this is pure science. When a person is talking, they are getting a dopamine hit to the pleasure centers of the brain. It makes them feel good. Some people, it's harder to get them into that state than others, but you can get every single person to that state because it's science.
(23:02):
They talk about themselves and they get the dopamine hit. They talk about themselves, they get a dopamine hit. So what I teach young salespeople is if you will learn to have the patience to pause, to allow them the space to talk, in most cases they'll continue talking, continue talking, continue talking until they cross over what I call the TMI zone. But they move into this place and Chris describe this, where they begin pouring out their soul. And even when their brain consciously says, you shouldn't be saying all these things, they can't help themselves, but because they're so hopped up on brain crack that it's like they're almost uninhibited. And so when you get them doing that, they start telling you all these things. And then Chris left out one little part of this, which is pre-framing or framing. When he initiated the conversation, where on this great blue planet world are you?
(23:58):
They knew why he was there. They made the meeting with them. They know he is from ConnectAndSell. They know it's a conversation about their salespeople. They know it's a conversation about software. So Chris is right, I don't have to talk about any of that stuff. They'll do the work for me. All I got to do is ask them an open-ended easy question that they have pride in, like they enjoy answering. And I get out of the way because they are pre-frame to talk about ConnectAndSell, talk about more meetings, talk about prospecting, talk about their sales results. If he just waits long enough, they'll bring it full circle and start telling him all the reasons why they need him and their business. So it's almost a game. And Chris, I don't know if you play this game, but the game that I play is how few questions can I ask to get the most information from a prospect?
(24:48):
And it's like a symphony plan. When I see it happening, I see them starting to roll downhill, sometimes on a virtual call where in situations where I can do it, I just look at my salesperson and go. "It's coming, you can see it's happening". And so the art of doing this, and this is really is an art. There's science in it, but it is an art to be organic in the moment. You can absolutely, totally teach salespeople that. And by the way, you asked about virtual selling. I did write an entire book on this on how do you leverage empathy in a virtual call. It's the same thing. Once everybody gets over, "I'm on a camera", look at us, we're all having a conversation. I'm not even thinking, gosh, I'm on a camera. Once we get over that process and we start paying attention to those emotional cues and all the probing questions we ask around those cues, it gets brutally simple because science does all the work for us.
Chris Beall (25:45):
Yeah, it's like a boulder rolling down a hill. All you have to do is get it started. You don't have to figure out which ones it's going to hit if something's going to happen and you're going to get to the bottom of the hill.
Jeb Blount (25:56):
And that's what we call a self-disclosure loop. Because then that boulder's rolling down the hill, the only thing is going to stop it is you throw yourself in front of it.
Chris Beall (26:02):
Right.
Corey Frank (26:04):
Well yeah. Was it Uncle Zieg? I think Ziegler said, "Feed your family or feed your ego. You can't do both in sales". And I think as your point, Jeb, as a lot of us as young pops coming up, we want to, "Hey, my managers gave me all this stuff. I got to say my marketing people gave me all these decks and I want to showcase how much I know about the industry even though I'm a 23 and a half year old person and I step in the way of the prospect way too much and I can't build that trust or that empathy", it sounds like. So man, great tips galore. Got to ask, of the 55, I think we only went over one right? One tip so far. But of the 55, two, there's got to be one that has a greater atomic weight than the others. I mean, we love all our children as parents certainly and certainly all 15 of your books. But of the 55 ways to stay motivated and increase sales in a time of crisis, what's the favorite?
Jeb Blount (26:59):
Let's ask Chris that first because he's read the book twice.
Chris Beall (27:05):
Here's my favorite. It's the opening chapter of part two. "The pipe is life. Talk with people". And here's why it's my favorite. In a crisis, we tend to clam up, we tend to clam up, we tend to go internal, we tend to, companies, to have internal conversations in a crisis instead of external conversations. You only have so many hours in the day. You only have so much emotional juice you. You've got to actually deal with a lot more stuff in a crisis. One thing we didn't really talk about is everybody goes home to something that wasn't as good as before the crisis. And so they gave it the office, but they got to give it a home too. It's going to be challenging. So I love that the simplicity of chapter 14, the opening, I think it's 14 if I remember correctly, the opening of this entire section, and by the way, "The Pipe is Life" is a mathematical statement actually.
(27:58):
It basically is a statement that everybody who's an investor understands. You have two things you can do as an investor and all you're doing when in sales or businesses you're investing. You're investing time in order to hope to get some sort of a return. As an investor, everybody knows when risk is high, portfolios must be broad. That's just a truth of every market back until the beginning of life. I mean, way before there are humans investing, if you are in a high risk situation, high fundamental risk, high external objective risk, you must have a broad portfolio because you don't control outcomes and you don't control timing. But you need outcomes within the amount of time you have available to cover your overhead so you don't starve to death.
(28:50):
That equation's running at all times. And so in really great times, you can sometimes narrow your portfolio and go for some big thing, whatever it happens to be that you really believe in. But in tough times you got to talk to people because that's step 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 million to broadening your portfolio and otherwise you are living in fantasy land. You're going to walk into that risk buzz saw and observe your parts all over the place and look at the blood on the floor and then realize, maybe I should have been talking to more people.
Corey Frank (29:25):
If there was only a weapon out there on the market that allowed you to talk to more people, Chris maybe should-
Chris Beall (29:32):
If only. I wouldn't use it. Sounds like shocking to me. Sounds like [inaudible 00:29:39]-
Corey Frank (29:38):
Like grouch marks, you would never belong to a club that would accept yourself as a member. [inaudible 00:29:42]
Jeb Blount (29:42):
But what Chris does at ConnectAndSell is he facilitates conversations. The more people you have conversations with, the more you were going to sell. It is just that simple. It truly is a mathematical equation. My favorite chapter, by the way, following up from that is "Be the squirrel". I think that in a downturn in a crisis, I'd look in my own pecan trees in my backyard and look at the squirrels in the trees. They're relentless, they're unstoppable, nothing holds them back. They fall on the ground, they hit their back, they get back up, they do it again. They 24/7, 24/7, all they think about is prospecting for nuts and seeds and stacking them up for winter. And the great sales people during a crisis are going to be focused 24/7, dialed in. They're going to broaden their pipe, they're going to fill it up and they're going to be relentless, unstoppable prospectors because when all is said and done, no matter what we say, all of the noise around sales, in sales, persistence always, always finds a way to win.
Chris Beall (30:46):
Yes. And creativity. When I read that chapter at Jeb, I was beyond smiling. So here's a blog that I wrote in on May 16th, 2017. Here it is.
Jeb Blount (30:57):
Oh really? Look, there's [inaudible 00:30:59]-
Chris Beall (31:00):
Go nuts. Think like a squirrel. And it came about from watching squirrels get to our bird feeders in the backyard. And I would devise extremely diabolical means to keep them from doing it. Now, I have unfair advantages. I have a degree in physics. I know some stuff other people don't know, but guess what? I don't know anything a squirrel doesn't know. They can get by everything,
Jeb Blount (31:24):
Anything. And that's wonderful, wonderful videos on YouTube of like you said, diabolical ways of keeping them out. The problem is that you would think about the way and then you would go to work, and you were thinking about something else. The squirrels, the only thing they thought of all day long, all night long is how am I going to get past this thing that Chris erected to keep me out of the bird seed? And that's how they beat you because they just figured out a way around it and they would work at it until they would. And that's the problem for a lot of salespeople right now is that they have been living large, they've been doing so well. We always talk about how hard sales is. I mean, every time somebody says to me that selling now was harder than it's ever been before. I just laugh at them. I'm like, "You got to be kidding me".
(32:14):
For the last 18 months, if you showed up at work and you could fog a mirror, you were probably going to make your quota. You were probably going to be able to survive. Right now, that is not going to happen because folks, nobody is going to call you and the sales people who have been living in that fantasy land of everything is good, suddenly they're going to start hitting those obstacles. If they pack up and go home, if they complain about it, if they whine about it, they're going to fail.
(:
But if they become the squirrel and they say, "Okay, I hit that obstacle, I got to figure out a way around it, under it, through it over it, or I'm going to tear it up. Well I'm getting to the other side of this obstacle". Those are the folks that are going to make it rain during this terrible time that we are moving into and we're going to go through. They're going to win. And by the way, if you're a salesperson and you're listening to this, look around you on your sales floor. Half of the people that are there with you right now aren't going to make it because they're not squirrels.
Corey Frank (33:13):
So instead of Sales Gravy, I think it should be Squirrel Gravy for the next 1824 years. Squirrel. Gravy, I think [inaudible 00:33:21]-
Jeb Blount (33:20):
Well, I'm from the south Corey, so let's just be careful. I've actually had Squirrel and Gravy. It's one of my favorite things, like with some homemade biscuits in the middle of it. Down here where I'm from, we call them tree chickens.
Corey Frank (33:34):
I love it. Well, beautiful. Listen Jeb-
Chris Beall (33:37):
We got a... You got a title now for this episode?
Corey Frank (33:41):
Yeah, I do. [inaudible 00:33:42]
Chris Beall (33:42):
Be a Tree Chicken.
Jeb Blount (33:42):
That's right. Be a tree chicken.
Corey Frank (33:44):
Be a tree chicken. Right. We'll give that to Austin when you hear it. We'll give it, Be a tree chicken. I love it. Jeb, it's an absolute pleasure to finally get you on the podcast here with Market Dominance Crew here. I think we got to have you back and talk about the other 51, 52 we didn't talk about yet.
Jeb Blount (34:03):
That's right.
Corey Frank (34:04):
But by then you'll probably be ready for your book number 16. So for all that want to get ahold of Jeb, obviously best selling author, Fanatical Prospecting, in Sales EQ, Objection Selling in a Crisis, and 10 others. So go to salesgravy.com, jebblount.com. For the esteemed Chris Beall, this is Corey Frank from Branch 49. Until next time.
Corey Frank (01:38):
Great. Good afternoon, good morning, good evening everybody. This is Corey Frank on behalf of Chris Beall and the Market Dominance Guys. We are once again with you for another exciting episode of what it takes to succeed in your market. And not just succeed, but to dominate your market.
(01:55):
And as always with me in the virtual studio is the sage of sales, the prophet of profit, the Stephen Hawking of hawking, Chris Beall. So Chris, good to see you once again. So I don't know if he owed you money in a poker game or what, but we were able to wrangle Jeb Blount, CEO of Sales Gravy, founder, author of 72 sales books... No, 13 sales books. Best selling-
Jeb Blount (02:22):
13? 15. 15.
Corey Frank (02:22):
15.
Jeb Blount (02:24):
I worked hard to get that number.
Corey Frank (02:26):
I'm misinformed.
Chris Beall (02:26):
[inaudible 00:02:29]
Corey Frank (02:28):
I'm misinformed. Yes, I will tell our producer that the data that I have is old, including the new one. So welcome, Jeb. Chris, how did we were able to lasso the esteemed Jeb Blount and his Sales Gravy team to our little podcast?
Chris Beall (02:45):
Well, so Jeb, it's so exciting to have you here. I haven't seen you for a couple of weeks. And it's like, I miss you, man.
(02:56):
So I was sitting down by the fire with Helen over here, we're down here in the desert, and I had been fortunate enough to go online at Amazon and buy a copy... Oops, a copy of Selling in a Crisis. And I love the title.
(03:09):
I was reading it, and it's a very easy read. It's 55 chunks that you can do something with each individual one, which I really like. My only complaint about it is, I prefer the number 108, as you know Corey. But Jeb got a little tired after 55, and figured that's enough and cut it off.
(03:27):
So I went out to review Selling in a Crisis, and just say how fabulous I thought it was, and Amazon wouldn't let me review it. So I sent Jeb a text. And it was fairly late at night, Jeb, right? It was like, I don't know, 11:00 something your time or whatever.
Jeb Blount (03:42):
Yeah, I was in bed.
Chris Beall (03:43):
You were in bed. [inaudible 00:03:45]
Corey Frank (03:44):
He's working on the 16th book, that's what he's doing. Number 16.
Chris Beall (03:48):
And he gives me this answer immediately, and basically says, "Well, there's kind of an issue with Amazon." And he explained it, and I didn't understand it. But I realized I just have to settle down and try again every day until I can finally review it.
(04:00):
But he said something interesting to me too, which is that, "I'm glad you liked the book. I wasn't 100% sure if people were going to like it." I think that's what you said, Jeb. Something like that, right?
Jeb Blount (04:09):
Yeah. Yes.
Corey Frank (04:12):
Well, I know it's tough enough, Jeb, and we can probably start with this as we turn the attention over to you, and as we have pen in hand as you spew all this wonderful wisdom for these 15 books, and all the wonderful seminars. Including the number one sales podcast in the world, I believe right now, right?
Jeb Blount (04:28):
Yeah.
Corey Frank (04:28):
With the Sales Gravy? But selling is tough enough. Now you're going to tell us, I got to learn a whole bunch of new things to sell in a crisis? So maybe we can talk about what was kind of the impetus and the rationale.
(04:40):
Because you have the pulse, you and your team have a pulse on what's happening in the sales world, the outreach world, et cetera. What were some of the little reverberation, seismic things that are happening beneath the surface saying, "Okay, we've got to gird our loins, and we've got to adjust for this Winter is Coming type of moment."
Jeb Blount (05:01):
Well, all you got to do is be a good observer of the world. I read the Wall Street Journal every single day, and you start seeing patterns. So if you read every day, and you look at legitimate business news sources every day, you begin to see the patterns stack up.
(05:14):
It's no different than when, it was right before Christmas, and I was seeing all of these clients coming in asking us to teach them how to go out and get price increases, that I was like, "This is tipping. We know that the inflation is there, but to get this many people coming in..." And I wrote Selling the Price Increase.
(05:32):
And then, as soon as that book was coming out, you began to see that you've got some recessionary issues that are coming into play. Maybe not in every single economy. And by the way, not even in every single state in the United States. It's just a pattern that you see emerging.
(05:46):
And when you start seeing a pattern emerging, the question is, are you going to be behind the curve or ahead of the curve? So by paying attention to what's happening, you start thinking, "Well, there's something there."
(05:57):
This wasn't a aha moment, I need to do this book. It was much more of a, I'm seeing things happening. I had just finished Selling the Price Increase, which was an intense book. It's a detailed textbook on how to go get price increases. Really, really, really detailed. Probably one of the most detailed, wonky books I've ever written.
(06:20):
I'm not thinking I want to write another book. I'm thinking I want to go sleep for about a year. Because I pulled that book off in about 60 days, and it's the longest book I've written in terms of pages.
(06:31):
So I'm sitting down, this third week in June in New York City. I was up there doing a gig, and met with my publisher, Wiley. And we're just having a conversation batting around ideas, and they're like, "What have you been thinking about?"
(06:43):
I said, "Well, I've got this content I've been working on for a while, and I don't know if this is the right time, but it's called Selling in a Crisis. And as soon as I said it, the antennas went up, and they're like, "Oh, that. How soon?"
(07:00):
I had the summer blocked to write the follow-up to Fanatical Prospecting, called the Fanatical Prospecting Playbook, which is out on Amazon, but there isn't a book yet. And they said, "Send me this stuff." So I left there, send them my ideas, and had a contract the next day, and said, "This is what we're going to do."
(07:18):
So that was really the impetus. And I had the time set aside, so I was able to get the book done. The way the book turned out though was kind of weird. I didn't start at this point with the book being the way it is. I'm really happy the way it is, but it wasn't my point.
(07:33):
But that's how it came about. But Corey, I think that the way that I've written books over the last few years, when you look at Virtual Selling, Virtual Training, Selling the Price Increase, and now Selling in a Crisis. It's really the way that good sales professionals should be looking at their marketplace and looking at their world, is you got to be paying attention to patterns.
(07:54):
Because if you can get ahead of the curve on the activity, on the messaging, on how you're changing. Even changing markets. Part of this book is, you've got to go where the money is. So if you're shifting into a different market because you know that that market's going to go there, there's Chris with the book.
(08:10):
So most people in the world are reacting. You don't have to be. You can be proactive. You have to pay attention to what's happening around you.
Corey Frank (08:18):
So with that, Chris and I talk in our Market Dominance podcast certainly, a lot about the signals we get from prospects. The pauses, the not-pauses. The signals they give you by not responding to emails, ghosting, et cetera.
(08:33):
When you look at particularly selling in a crisis, what are some of these... We talk about 55 ways, but what are some of these ways? You said to pay attention to the patterns. What are some of those patterns that you're talking about?
Jeb Blount (08:45):
Well, when you think about prospects teaching you. That's the way I look at it. A prospect teaches you what's happening in their world. Those lessons come in a couple of ways.
(08:53):
If you're brand new... So for example, if you're running ConnectAndSell, and you're having lots of conversations, probably the easiest way to learn how to have a conversation with a prospect is to have lots of conversations with prospects. Pretty soon you kind of figure out, this is the things they're interested in. These are the things they're not interested in. Especially if you're going down a market vertical.
(09:11):
That's everyday work. If you're in a crisis, or in a disruptive period, economic downturn. It could be energy crisis. It could be any of the things that are impacting companies today. You've got to pay attention to what questions your prospects are asking you. You've got to pay attention to how slow they're moving, or how fast they're moving.
(09:32):
So for example, in selling in a crisis, one of the things that we know to be true is that, when you're in a situation where people feel stressed or overwhelmed, or they feel like making a decision to do business with you is super risky, time is not on your side. You don't have six months to work a deal. You've got to advance that deal micro-step by micro-step by micro-step.
(09:56):
And if they're not willing to match your effort and move along with you, it's a pretty clear signal that you may not have a deal there. The most expensive thing that you can do during a crisis period, during a recession, is to invest a lot of time in the wrong prospect.
(10:11):
So the signals that you get from prospects along the way are, "Hey, am I really in this with you? Am I really interested in working with you?" Along the way, you've got to pay attention to the people that you are dealing with. Because, as we start moving into an economic downturn, as winter starts coming on, decision-making authority begins to shift and move inside organizations.
(10:33):
Right now, it's typically at a middle level to a low level. As the crisis heats up, as the recession comes on, it'll begin moving up higher in the organization, and you're not going to know when that's going to happen. So you have to start paying attention to when you ask those prospects to do something, what do they do? How do they do it? How do they respond to you?
(10:55):
You have to pay attention to cognitive dissonance. You have to pay attention to their body language. All of those things matter. And a good salesperson, a good sales professional, lives in the land of awareness. Because they understand that you cannot be delusional and successful at the same time. And if we ignore those patterns, we begin to live inside of delusion.
Corey Frank (11:16):
So Chris, you, as the CEO of ConnectAndSell, you see several million phone calls a year. If you look at, we're talking about flight school, IFR and VFR type of ratings, right?You not only have the visual flight, by being on the ground with your clients, Chris, and seeing kind of the residue and the body language over the last few months. But you have the IFR, the instrument ratings as well, to see what's that residue that shows up in all the ConnectAndSell reports from the data. So with what Jeb is talking about, are you seeing many of the same things?
Chris Beall (11:51):
Well, one of the ones we have seen... Yeah, we do see some things. One of the ones we've seen is, we get a signal back that says people have left their job, and it's called person left remove in our world. And that signal has gone from a 2018 level of about 3.3% per month, and it went up during this whole great reshuffle, et cetera, et cetera, up to about 5.2% per month.
(12:15):
And we can look at it by how senior the people are. As Jeb said, the decision-making authority is likely to move up in organizations, and it moves up very, very fast. The reason it moves up is somebody has a meeting and says, "Okay, CFO's got a lot of power."
(12:31):
During a crisis, CFOs have a huge amount of power in organizations. In fact, you can generally say that the power shifts from the CEO to the CFO in a crisis. That's what really happens. And the CEO's left trying to figure out what to do with the resources they're allowed to have.
(12:47):
I know a lot of people think CEOs are like big powerful beasts that do everything. Actually, kind of they're both reporting to the board, the CFO and the CEO effectively. Unless the organization's put together kind of funny. And you get these power shifts that are going on.
(13:02):
And they tend to be represented in reality by, suddenly somebody who could spend $50,000 has got to go get approval for $10,000. Or for anything. That's a fairly common one.
(13:15):
What we don't normally see in sales, and we have to learn to adapt to in a crisis, is not just continuous change and staying on top of stuff, it's discontinuous change. So there's continuous change going on like, "Hey, now if my deal takes three months, I have a 15% chance the person I'm working with is gone before the end of the deal."
(13:36):
Think about that. So you're better off doing a deal that can be done earlier, and then cementing it as best you can to somebody who's likely to still be there and start delivering value, than to see if you can do a better deal in three months, which you might have been [inaudible 00:13:51]
Corey Frank (13:52):
So are you saying [inaudible 00:13:53] take a smaller price deal? Is that what I hear you saying? Potentially [inaudible 00:13:56]
Chris Beall (13:56):
I always make the distinction between price and chunk size. So price is price. Your unit price is your unit price. Whatever it is, you're probably not going to move off of that. Chunk size has a lot to do with what you can get done in a amount of time you have with the people that you're working with.
(14:12):
And chunk size, in a crisis, it's often wise... It feels funny, but it's often wise to actually come down in chunk size, spread your portfolio, and take market share. The best thing you can do in a crisis is while everybody else is trying to keep the lights on, you take the market.
(14:29):
And they wake up when it's all [inaudible 00:14:33] "What happened?" And it's like, "Well, I took the market." Then that's what our show's all about, is market dominance. "I took the market while you were worried about the deal."
Jeb Blount (15:33):
Yup. By the way, that's exactly what we did at Sales Gravy during the last downturn. It wasn't a very long downturn, but we put pedal to the metal, and we sucked up market share and quadrupled the size of our company by not being afraid to lean into it.
(15:48):
And a lot of it was exactly what Chris is saying. Really wise words. We just broke the chunks up into smaller pieces. And it turned out that when we were delivering value, they said we want more of those chunks.
(15:59):
So one way of looking at this, and Chris, I don't want to put words in your mouth, is, when things start hitting the fan, you've got to make it really easy for people to do business with you with a lower risk to them, so that they don't feel like they need to hold off on something. Because time is not on your side.
(16:19):
If you think time's on your side, you are dead wrong. It is not. It will slay you. I love the stat, 15% of the people are leaving within three months. And that's real.
Chris Beall (16:30):
Yeah, and a buying committee, it's even worse. Because say you've got a buying committee of four folks, right? You're almost at a 100% chance that one of the four will leave. And as soon as they leave, that committee goes into paralysis.
(16:42):
It's instantaneous paralysis, because their buying mechanism was the vote among those people. And there is power games being played inside of there. You can never see them perfectly. You're an outsider, they're insiders. All that power is flowing around inside. But something broke down power-wise, because that person left.
(17:00):
And it's not always that they're fired. Sometimes they're the smart ones. The powerful person who says, "I'm getting out of here, I'm going to where the grass is going to be greener, or at least the sprinklers are still going to be turned on tomorrow."
(17:11):
So I think speed becomes a huge, huge issue. Getting cycle times down, and friction out. Those are hard things to do, because we cling to the big deals, the one that's going to make everything happen. And we cling to our friction elements, because we think they provide us with proof of progress. And yet, we have to let go of that stuff if we really want to dominate in a crisis
Corey Frank (17:34):
Yeah, for sure. You know, one of the things, Jeb, you talk about certainly in a lot of your books, is activity is everything. Especially in a crisis, Chris, certainly you have a powerful weapon like ConnectAndSell that helps you amplify, and certainly modulate, upscale your activities is everything.
(17:52):
But Jeb, with that in mind, in these 55 ways, is there such a thing as, do I have to prospect smarter? Or is it, do I have to prospect more? Or do I have to prospect differently? When you talk about, again that broad axiom of activity is everything, how can we frame that in towards the crisis mentality here?
Jeb Blount (18:13):
All of the above. You have to get more prospecting done, in less time, with greater outcomes. And so you have to prospect faster, and you have to get more done. Which is why ConnectAndSell's such a great product.
(18:27):
You have to have more conversations with people. And you have to do it, and you have to compress the time. Because you've got to get much more prospecting done during a crisis period, because there are going to be fewer buyers. It's just necessary to sift through all of the soil to find the gold.
(18:46):
But you also have to do some things different. I mean, you have to maybe change your message a little bit. That's going to be important. You're going to face a little bit different prospecting objections. Most of it's going to be deferment objections. "We're not buying right now, we're not doing anything right now."
(19:02):
You're going to have to get through those. And you're going to have to pay attention to Willie Sutton. Willie Sutton is the namesake of Sutton's Law. Sutton's Law simply describes, you have to go where the money is.
(19:13):
So you're going to have to begin shifting what you consider your ideal qualified prospect as we move into a down market. And that just simply means the money's going to be moving someplace. It may not be moving in the market you've been calling in, so go find another market.
(19:28):
And then you've got to be prepared multiple times to shift. Because sometimes that money will move into one segment, and then move to another segment. It might move into a certain size company, away from other size companies.
(19:40):
This goes back to knowing your market, knowing your business, knowing your customer base. Knowing what's happening at the macro level and at the micro level. It means studying, being an expert.
(19:52):
But you have to do all of those things. You have to prospect more, you have to be more efficient. And sometimes you have to be different. Different messaging, different ways of dealing with objections, and into different markets.
Corey Frank (20:06):
And Chris, in your world, when you look at, again, the weapon of ConnectAndSell. Dial-to-connect rates, conversation / conversion rates. Dial-to-meeting rates. What kind of residue and signals are you seeing?
(20:19):
Much like what you talked about earlier with the folks who are no longer employed. You saw a little bit of blip a few months ago, that was a leading indicator. What are you seeing from dial-to-connect, dial-to-meeting rates that kind of buttresses what Jeb's talking about?
Chris Beall (20:34):
Well, I always look at the most calibrated reps, right? So you look at, over time, who produces certain number of meetings per prospecting hour. Because that's really what the number is. Time is not your friend. Time goes tick, tick, tick. You've got a prospecting hour, what do you produce?
(20:48):
A fabulous number is, well, we know some folks who can go two and a half, three meetings per hour that they can produce like clockwork. Most really good, top-of-funnel folks who other people would say are good, they're going to be at about 0.6.
(21:05):
But if you take that top person, and you see that meetings per rep hour go down, all things being equal, you have got to move. And if you don't have a calibrated person, you're kind of screwed. Because now the question is, "Well what's really going on?" And what's probably going on is actually what Jeb talks about in chapter 44.
(21:23):
Chapter 44 is Control Your Emotions. "Selling in a crisis can push you to the edges of emotional extremes. These emotional extremes become your Achilles heel. Unmanaged, they betray you, make you weak, cause you to lose self-control, and make it impossible for you to effectively influence buyers who are likely being impacted by similar emotions."
(21:44):
The death spiral in sales is when your emotions start to be affected by their responses. When they're affected negatively, you become less effective. And the place you become less effective is at the opener of your cold call.
(21:59):
That's where you go to crap. That's where you go to hell in a hand basket. Your voice tightens up, you're a little bit off, and everybody wants to hang up on you. So that's what I always look for, is that first hint.
(22:12):
It's a very athletic business. Think of how you do it with athletes, right? If it's a wide receiver, you're looking for the guy who's breaking a little bit late and gets hit in the side of the helmet by the ball. It's like, "Why weren't you looking back for that?" Because he's tight. That's why. Because he's tight. And as soon as you're tight you can't execute.
(22:33):
So I look for that tightness in that number. Which is a discontinuous, or rather quick change in meetings per rep hour from a highly calibrated top performer. And then you kind of go, "That's the market." Go down in the organization, you're going to see it from their own emotions. Now you've got a coaching thing that you've got to work on.
Corey Frank (22:54):
You bring up a great point. We have to do a plug to our friend Brad Ferguson and then Dave Kurlan from OMG. Because the OMG sales assessment tool, they have a metric in there, a measurable aspect, that says your ability to stay in the moment. And can you take a punch or not, right, Jeb?
(23:12):
I'm sure that you see this in... It's tough enough in cold calling, when you're doing prospecting. You talk a lot about it, I know, in the discovery, which we're going to talk about a little bit later here. But how do you coach that, from your perspective?
(23:26):
From your team at Sales Gravy, they go out, and I'm somebody that, I'm going to get turned off my focus here. Because the prospect is maybe a little bit more antsy, a little bit more animated, a little bit more agitated. How can you coach me to stay in the moment, om, Spock-like, keep the game going?
Jeb Blount (23:45):
It's more of a pattern of things. It's not going to be one call. So it's going to be multiple calls that are going to start pushing salespeople to change their pattern, and the way that they approach prospects on a cold call, because they become emotional.
(23:59):
In other words, they begin anticipating that they're going to get hit in the head, essentially is what happens. They get tight. They're like, "I'm going to get punched in the face." So they come off more insecure, they lose their confidence.
(24:10):
And in a cold-call situation, because you're moving so fast. I mean, essentially it's verbal judo at 100 miles an hour. If you're tight, you're going to get nailed. So the downward spiral becomes, they get hit in the head, it hurts, then they flinch again, and then they get hit in the head again. Then it hurts. And then it just gets worse and worse and worse in the way that they're approaching them.
(24:31):
So if you're a sales leader, first of all, what Chris said is exactly right. Go watch your salespeople. Calibrate. Look at your top salespeople, look at the people in the middle. Pay attention to what's happening to them. Listen to their calls. Be present. Pay attention to them.
(24:46):
You can't lead this from sitting behind a desk looking at your email. You need to be there and listen to calls. In my case, I'll go get on calls with them. So I'll go make calls with the salesperson, have the same conversations, see what they're experiencing, and then sit back and say, "Okay, we're getting this objection from a customer or from our prospects. How are we going to handle that?"
(25:10):
And then we're going to coach the messaging, build the messaging, replay the messaging, role-play the messaging, and then we're going to go get back on the telephones again. Because all they really need is just to know how they're going to handle that moment. And how are they going to handle their emotions when they get punched in the face.
(25:26):
But sometimes you forget. If you get hit enough times, you just forget. A really good way of looking at this. And Chris, this is kind of a connection to what you're saying.
(25:36):
Most people know I'm just big into horses. It's my thing. And I had a horse last spring that refused a jump on me really dirty, real bad, and it broke my foot. Then I get on another horse, and I get on another horse, and suddenly I feel fear because I think those horses are going to do the same thing.
(25:57):
Now this is all happening at the subconscious level, and I'm tight. Well, if I'm tight, what I do is I change the horse's behavior because of my behavior.
(26:07):
What my coach did for me was say, "Hey Jeb, guess what? Let me show you a picture of what's happening. Here's a video. This is you on that horse going over the jump. See how far forward you are? See what you're doing?"
(26:20):
So if you're a coach, you have to sit with your salespeople, and then you have to help them become aware of the way they've changed their behavior. Because usually when they start changing those behaviors, they don't know it. It's just one little thing at a time.
(26:33):
And then you have to sometimes get on the calls with them and show them it's going to be okay. But more than anything, you want to help them with their messaging. You want to listen to what they're doing, and you want to get them back in track.
(26:45):
It's no different than the coach with the wide receiver that's cutting just a little bit early. You're going to show them some game film. You're going to say, "Here's what you're doing, now let's go out and practice it."And that's how you get them better. It's not like the person's talent took a hit, it's their emotions that took a hit. As the coach, that's what your job is, is to fill and close that gap.
Corey Frank (27:03):
I think an example that you talked about, I believe it was on your blog recently or one of your podcasts, you talked about your son conducting one of the seminars. And a gentleman in the audience raised his hand and says, "Hey, this whole fanatical prospecting thing, is it even relevant today? Does that stuff even work?"
(27:21):
Now talk about getting a signal that there's some fear there, right Chris? And I'll let you tell the rest of the story if you recall. How did your speaker, how did your son, handle that particular question?
Jeb Blount (27:30):
He just pulls out his list and picks up the phone. He just rips off 20 outbound prospecting calls, he sets a few appointments. And he just looks at him and says, "Is it relevant?" That was it. That's the truth.
(27:43):
So he covered that gap by showing them that what they were fearing was all the wrong thing. I mean, all they really wanted him to do was to let them off the hook. And Chris, you'll love this, that the phone didn't work anymore.
(27:56):
I mean, it wasn't about whether fanatical prospecting was good or not. It was whether or not they should be talking with people in real time, in synchronous conversations, on the telephone. Or should they just sit around in their sales enablement platform and spam people with a bunch of crappy emails. And he just shut the whole thing down, just in that moment.
(28:16):
And my kid, by the way, looking at patterns. When he was in high school, I used to make him come in, and I would give him a list of people to call and we would practice messaging. I'd have it on speaker phone and all I wanted him to do was get objections.
(28:31):
So I wanted to hear all the objections that he got. Then we would change the messaging, and he would come in and we would do it again the next day. And we would change the messaging until we would hone it, and we would start getting fewer objections than we were getting conversations.
(28:47):
You're always going to get objections. But if I can improve the probability that I get a conversation and reduce the probability I get an objection, I'm going to get more meetings. If I get more meetings, I'm going to sell more.
(28:55):
So it's the same thing that Chris was talking about. As a leader, you've got to listen. Pay attention to what's happening around you, what your patterns are. You cannot hide in the sand.
(29:05):
And Chris, I'd love to get your opinion on this, but I've got to tell you, I think a lot of leaders are frightened to death of coaching prospecting activity. I think it scares them. I don't think that they like it. I think that they will do anything to stay away from it. I think it makes them feel uncomfortable.
(29:22):
And I can tell you that, if you're a leader and you will go sit down next to your rep, and you'll make dials with them, you'll be the greatest hero in the world. They'll tell everybody what you did. Because most leaders are afraid to do that, because they're afraid that they'll get rejected. They're afraid that they'll fail. They're afraid that their reps will see them fail.
(29:41):
I do it all the time, Corey. I make egregious mistakes. Every once in a while I'll sell something. I mean crazy as it sounds, I'll get a deal. I'll get somebody on the hook. But usually I'm crashing and burning right next to it.
(29:52):
They don't even notice. I'm the guy that wrote Fanatical Prospecting, and I'm messing everything up. All they see is that I'm sitting there on the phone on a list.
Corey Frank (30:01):
Yup, yup.
Chris Beall (30:02):
Yeah, I've got an example of this that's quite illuminating. So Scott Webb over at HUB International, chief sales officer of the Central Region there. He's figured out two things I think that everybody should think about a little bit when it comes to this question of the emotions and prospecting.
(30:18):
One is, he doesn't let anybody prospect using our weapon unless it's in a group setting. And the group setting is all Zoom, but it's a group setting. And it's like, you come to this, you come, we start on the second. It's at 9:00:00 it starts. And it ends at 9:59:59, and whatever's left, and it's over.
(30:44):
And you've got to earn your way in. You've got to earn your way in by converting it greater than 10% conversation to meetings. And you have four sessions in which to do it, after which, "Sorry, you're out."
(30:55):
But he does another thing, which is he leads from the front. And he leads from the front, he's on every one of those. He's calling with them. He has somebody else who's paying attention and coaching. We provide that person.
(31:06):
And as a result, it's sort of like a no excuses world. You really don't expect the head coach to go out there and run that pattern better than the wide receiver, better than that first round draft pick. But he does it.
(31:18):
He converts, by the way, at 100%. And he does it using techniques I've never seen before [inaudible 00:31:24]
Corey Frank (31:24):
100%. Come on.
Chris Beall (31:27):
It's what Cherryl Turner has adopted called the insistence close. It's quite fascinating, and it takes care of a lot of emotions. But the big emotional thing is, look, we don't like to talk about it, but we're kind of herd animals.
(31:40):
A lot of salespeople think they're not. They think, "Oh, I'm [inaudible 00:31:44] I'm this independent, I'm lone wolf, blah, blah blah." Fact of matter is, people are braver in groups than they are individually. And once you get that sort of herd thing going, now you can coach to first failure very easily.
(31:57):
And we're big advocates of coach to first failure. Never coach the second thing, because it's the first thing that screwed up the second thing. Just coach the first thing. Push the damn button, have another conversation. See how you do.
(32:09):
But I mean, I've coached a lot of stuff. You know, Corey, I used to teach people rock climbing. The second failure tends to be really bad when you're climbing. It's the one that starts with the word falling ends with the fall. It's the failure before that, that causes the fall. It's not the one on the move, it's the one that was going to set up the move.
(32:28):
And that's true in sales too. It's the previous thing that you didn't quite get that left you in an awkward position, left you out of balance, left you too far forward on the horse. Whatever it happens to be. It's that first failure you've got to coach to. But you've got to do it under pressure. Because when they're not under pressure, they all perform.
Corey Frank (32:46):
Mm-hmm.
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