Building Trust

Last time, we peeled back the layers on spotting sales superstars with the Glider.ai crew. Now, in Episode 248, we're rolling our sleeves up and getting our hands dirty with the nuts and bolts of their process. Chris, Corey, Aron, and Anand aren't pulling any punches as they dissect Glider.ai's assessment approach. They're asking the hard-hitting questions: Can we really stamp out hiring bias? Where's the sweet spot between tech and human intuition in sales? And what's next in the evolution of building sales dream teams? Get ready for a no-nonsense deep dive that might just flip your hiring playbook on its head and supercharge your path to market dominance. Listen to this episode EP248: "Crafting Unbeatable Sales Teams: The Competitive Edge in B2B."
Catch the first part of this conversation here.

In this final segment with Brian Perks, Corey Frank, and Chris Beall, the conversation takes a fascinating turn into the human side of data-driven sales. They explore the delicate balance between leveraging advanced AI and maintaining genuine human connections. Brian shares insights on the power of sincerity in sales, while Chris delves into the psychology of risk in business relationships. The trio discusses the evolution of sales from mere territory management to building trust in a world where vendors can make or break careers. They touch on the importance of emotional intelligence in data interpretation and the art of restraint in using information. This episode is a must-listen for sales leaders looking to navigate the complex interplay of technology, data, and human psychology in modern sales. Join them for "The Human Element in Data-Driven Sales: Sincerity, Risk, and Trust."
Listen to the full series with Brian Perks here.
 
Links from this episode:
5x5Brian Perks on LinkedIn
Corey Frank on LinkedInBranch49Chris Beall on LinkedInConnectAndSell

In this episode, Chris Beall poses a provocative question that challenges the very structure of sales departments. What if companies didn't need traditional in-house sales teams at all?
Sounds radical, right? But Chris takes us on a thoughtful journey through the potential of outsourced sales. From list building to discovery calls, he explores how specialist expertise could revolutionize each step of the process.
Using his experience at ConnectAndSell and citing innovative approaches from companies like Branch 49, Chris makes a case for keeping only subject matter experts in-house. He backs his ideas with real-world examples and data, showing how modern technology enables this shift.
This episode might just transform how you think about sales team structure and efficiency in the modern business landscape. Join us for this episode, "Goodbye, Sales Department? Chris Beall's Provocative Proposal."

In this episode of Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall challenges conventional wisdom about pre-call research in cold calling. Drawing from a recent real-world experience, Chris dives deep into the mathematics and psychology behind sales conversations.
Is extensive research before each call truly beneficial, or could it hinder your team's effectiveness? Chris presents a compelling case that might surprise even seasoned sales professionals. He explores the delicate balance between being informed and being presumptuous and how this impacts your prospects' crucial emotional journey.
Whether you're a sales trainer, leader, or CSO, this episode offers fresh insights that could revolutionize your approach to cold calling and discovery meetings. Chris breaks down the true goals of these interactions and provides a framework for achieving them more efficiently.
Prepare to challenge your assumptions and discover a potentially game-changing perspective on pre-call research and sales strategy.
Here is the math from this episode:
Conversation Statistics for Chris' Team That Day:
Total conversations: 438
Total meetings set: 30
Total dials: 12,522
Dial-to-connect ratio: 28.59 dials per conversation (12,522 / 438)
Average conversation length: 78 seconds
Research Time vs Conversation Time: Let R = research time per dial attempt Let C = average conversation time Let D = dials per conversation
Research time per conversation = R * D Conversation time = C
Equation: R * D : C
Using the numbers provided: 3 minutes * 28.59 : 78 seconds 180 seconds * 28.59 : 78 seconds 5,146.2 seconds:  78 seconds
This simplifies to approximately 66 seconds of research to achieve 1 second of conversation
Chris rounds this to 90 minutes (5,400 seconds) of research to achieve 78 seconds of conversation
Research to Conversation Ratio: Research time : Conversation time = 5,400 : 78 Simplified ratio ≈ 69 : 1
This means for every 69 seconds spent on research, only 1 second is spent in actual conversation.
Efficiency Calculation: If a rep makes 60 dials per day: 60 dials / 28.59 dials per conversation ≈ 2.1 conversations per day
Actual performance: 438 conversations / 22 reps ≈ 19.91 conversations per rep per day

In this next episode of our Mental Models series, Chris tackles two critical aspects of modern sales strategy. He begins by examining the 'do nothing' competitor - often your most formidable adversary. Chris uses vivid analogies to illustrate why prospects cling to the status quo, invoking the familiar and ominous warning that 'Winter is Coming.' He then explains how to position your solution as a complementary, hybrid approach rather than a disruptive replacement.
Chris then explores how AI tools, particularly ChatGPT, revolutionize sales operations. He shares practical, step-by-step techniques for using AI to expand your target lists, refine your sales scripts, and challenge your existing mental models. Drawing from his daily use of ChatGPT, Chris offers insights on staying ahead of the curve and avoiding mental ruts.
Throughout the episode, Chris examines the balance between embracing new technologies and respecting established business practices, all while focusing on improving your sales effectiveness in an ever-evolving market landscape. Join him for this episode, "Breaking the Spell of 'Do Nothing': AI Tools for the Modern Sales Warrior."
Links from this episode:
RightBound
5 Sentences That Will Change Your Life
Corey Frank on LinkedInBranch49Chris Beall on LinkedInConnectAndSell
 

In this episode of our Mental Models series, Chris dives into the crucial topic of strategic positioning and the competitive landscape. Chris dissects how to effectively align team mental models, using ConnectAndSell as a real-world example. He explores the concept of positioning against alternatives, emphasizing the importance of complementary strategies and differentiating based on customer mission achievement. This episode offers valuable insights for businesses looking to refine their market approach in an increasingly competitive landscape.

In this episode, Corey Frank and Chris Beall explore the power of conversations as the key to thriving in a future sales market increasingly clogged by AI. As digital channels become oversaturated and ineffective, the skilled rep emerges as the crucial resource, capable of navigating the uncrowded paths to success. Chris emphasizes that the robustness of results always sticks to where there is a constraint of nature, and in sales, that constraint is the skilled rep. While AI continues to congest the digital highways, there remains a parallel freeway that no one is driving on – one that can only be accessed through genuine, trust-building conversations. Corey and Chris discuss how to manufacture and curate these conversations over time, ultimately leading to market dominance by owning the digital freeway. Join them for this episode, “Navigating the AI-Clogged Digital Highway in Sales.”
Links from this episode:
Corey Frank on LinkedInBranch49Chris Beall on LinkedInConnectAndSell

In this episode of Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall and Corey Frank dive into how sales reps can inadvertently end up working for their competitors by blowing the trust built in the discovery call. When a prospect agrees to a meeting, they're extending trust. But if the rep rushes into a transactional mode, focusing more on their own agenda, they risk shattering that trust. Chris emphasizes that once trust is broken, it's nearly impossible to regain, and the rep may have just handed a well-educated prospect to the competition. Tune in as Chris and Corey explore how to navigate discovery calls and build lasting trust with your prospects in this episode, “Blowing the Trust: Are you working for your competitor?”
Key takeaways from this episode:
Blowing the trust built in a discovery call is like working for your competitor. If you rush into a transactional mode, you risk shattering the trust and handing a well-educated prospect to your competition.
Trust can be built in as little as seven seconds by demonstrating tactical empathy and competence in solving the prospect's problem. However, trust can be easily lost by trying to sell too quickly.
Many sales reps come from "intensity professions" where the default response to a challenge is to push harder. This can lead to reps pouncing on prospects and blowing trust.
Senior management should listen to actual sales calls, not just digest boiled-down reports. Hearing the conversations can reveal issues like reps being too hurried or dismissive of prospects.
Compensation plans that focus on short-term results can inadvertently encourage reps to work for the competition by blowing trust for quick wins.
Modeling behavior is crucial. Managers should treat their team members in the same way they expect reps to treat prospects – not as a competition, but as collaborators.
Skilled reps who can navigate the challenges of a conversation are a critical constraint. Coaching and upskilling reps to have better conversations is key.
AI and automation can provide short-term gains, but without the constraint of skilled reps, these approaches can quickly saturate and become ineffective, like a clogged freeway.
Conversations are the universal currency of sales. Upskilling reps to have high-value conversations is like creating a valuable commodity that can be applied across many situations.
Links from this episode:
Corey Frank on LinkedInBranch49Chris Beall on LinkedInConnectAndSell

You know what they say about humor in sales? It's like playing with fire. You might warm up the room or burn the whole deal down. In this episode of Market Dominance Guys, Richard Rabins, Chris Beall, and Corey Frank get into the weeds about using humor across different cultures.
Can you just translate your best one-liners and expect them to land in Japan or Germany? Think again. Richard has some stories about navigating the global sales landscape and is not afraid to admit where he's crashed and burned. But he also has some serious wisdom about how to build trust with prospects, no matter where they're from.
Tune in to hear about the importance of noticing the little things, playing the long game, and always, always doing your homework. If you're in B2B or SaaS sales, this episode is no joke - you'll come away with some practical tips and insights that just might help you dominate your market. So what are you waiting for? Let's get into this episode, “Laughter Lost in Translation - Navigating Humor in Global Sales.”
 
About our Guest:
Richard Rabins focuses on strategy, accelerating global growth and scaling the organization. Richard also served as CEO of SoftQuad International from 1997 to 2001, when it owned Alpha. In addition to his 30 years with the company, Richard played a key role as co-founder, and served as president and chairman of the Massachusetts Software Council (now the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council), the largest technology trade organization in Massachusetts. Prior to founding Alpha, Richard was a project leader and consultant with Information Resources, Inc. (IRI), and a management consultant with Management Decision Systems, Inc. Richard holds a master's degree in system dynamics from the Sloan School at MIT, and a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and master's degree in control engineering from University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He has served on the boards of Silent Systems, Legacy Technology and O3B Networks, and is co-founder of Tubifi www.tubifi.com.
Links from this episode:
The full series with Richard Rabins here.
Richard Rabins on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richard-rabins/
Company website: https://www.alphasoftware.com/
Corey Frank on LinkedInBranch49Chris Beall on LinkedInConnectAndSell
 
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Below:
 
[00:43:33] Corey Frank: Well, you had said many, many times that outbound is about playing the [00:43:40] long game. To be good at outbound, it's about the long game. And I think part and parcel of that, Richard, is what you're talking about is, if I'm going to be immersed in this craft, in this profession, I've got to be an expert noticer of the residue.
[00:43:58] Corey Frank: We always talk about the false [00:44:00] negatives that happen. And the sales that I didn't get. Not necessarily the sales I did get. What are the nuances of why I didn't get that sale? All of us, if we had a DeLorean, especially if you're in our profession. We would immediately make hundreds of stops at all the sales calls [00:44:20] we blew early in our career to right the wrongs, to tweak the pitch that we know now, and Chris, especially you and Richard, that you guys do so effortlessly, I think.
[00:44:33] Corey Frank: And that concept of playing the long game , where your [00:44:40] confidence is. is accelerated by knowing that there's nobody that's going to take the hook and take me out of my profession if I don't want to. I know I'm going to be in chemistry, , the gal, the situation that you had mentioned, Richard.
[00:44:57] Corey Frank: So whether it's Caltech or [00:45:00] MIT or Scottsdale Community College. I'm going to play the long game and I'm going to do an end around or a flanking. It doesn't have to be a full frontal fast track to the top. 
[00:45:11] Richard Rabins: Yeah. Another thing that Chris said is, it's kind of off topic, but you can't tell somebody that you're smart [00:45:20] and on their side.
[00:45:22] Richard Rabins: That's not credible. And you've got to earn it through your actions. And what I've found in life. The minute somebody's telling me about something and they use the word, trust me, that's the last person you should trust. Anybody who has to [00:45:40] enunciate that, it's, it's, it's something you've got to earn.
[00:45:46] Richard Rabins: You can't tell somebody to trust you. And I speak from experience. I've been, I'm basically, I like people and I like to assume that people are good and [00:46:00] most people are, but not everybody. And just so I think with a lot of prospects for good reason initially, or there's the barrier and it's a defensive barrier.
[00:46:14] Richard Rabins: And it's totally legitimate on their part. The, the art [00:46:20] of penetrating that barrier, it's not trivial. And the other thing humorous grade and whatever, whatever you're selling, you've got to do your homework, you've got to know what you're talking about, because you've got to assume that most people are pretty smart.[00:46:40] 
[00:46:40] Richard Rabins: I mean, I found that from the days when I, we did market research in my first company and we were sending consumer products typically to young girls like shampoo. But the minute one of the consumer product companies try to pull a fast one [00:47:00] and start making claims that were not accurate or, or the advertising, didn't treat people with a sense of intelligence.
[00:47:12] Richard Rabins: People are actually smart and people are instinctive. They pick up on BS and, [00:47:20] I mean, that's got nothing to do with humor. That's just a general observation, but I guess the lesson is you don't want to game the system. You've got to do the homework. You've got to, you've got to know about your product, especially if it's a somewhat technical product.
[00:47:35] Richard Rabins: If you can't answer some core questions, it's [00:47:40] you're not respectful of the other person's time because they're not, you're not able to impart any useful information. And, and so each, if you expect somebody to talk to you again, if they got nothing out of the first call, why on earth would they want to talk to you [00:48:00] again?
[00:48:00] Chris Beall: We just had one of those actually, Helen and I took a meeting. I took a meeting from a cold call on a topic that would have been of interest to both of us, given her business, Pipeline Power and the one that I run, ConnectAndSell. And so we sat next to each other kind of like this. Richard and I are going to [00:48:20] limit how far that goes, but, and and we, we were on with this very, very pleasant young guy who had been a seller for another company that I know.
[00:48:31] Chris Beall: And now, he's selling for this particular company, telling us some stuff. He knew the answer to exactly zero of the questions that we [00:48:40] asked. He was very pleasant. He was personable. And he said, he'd go find out, but after the fourth, I'll go find out. It's I don't even want to hear from his boss.
[00:48:48] Chris Beall: Because what it's like, why did you put somebody in the front lines who literally doesn't know anything except the simplest script about what it is that your product supposedly [00:49:00] does a little less than I could have read on the website in 11 seconds. You have it's it's a delicate dance. I mean, getting trust.
[00:49:09] Chris Beall: This whole podcast is about one thing. I'll just remind everybody, gentle listeners, well, those of you who aren't so gentle, you can go over there. [00:49:20] Gentle listeners, I'll remind you, Market Dominance, this podcast is about two things. One, paving your market with trust. Two, harvesting that trust over the 12 quarters that it's going to take.
[00:49:37] Chris Beall: For everybody in that market to make a [00:49:40] decision about replacing what they do now that you could help them with, with what you could help them with. That is the replacement cycle for everything in B2B is about three years. Some things longer, if you're selling commercial real estate, or you're buying office buildings medical office buildings like, Henry does.[00:50:00] 
[00:50:00] Chris Beall: Anybody who wants to catch those episodes, those are good ones. Then you might have five years, six years, seven years, but it doesn't get much better than three years. You've got to play the long game, not because of some moral reason, it's because it's the only game. In the perfect scenario, only one twelfth of your [00:50:20] market is in the market this quarter.
[00:50:21] Chris Beall: In the perfect scenario. That's with no false negatives. That's with no blown chances. That's the perfect scenario. So what are you going to do in the other 11 quarters? Well, you better do something this quarter, which is get somebody to trust you. And then [00:50:40] as Chris Voss said, when I asked him, how long will they trust you?
[00:50:43] Chris Beall: He said forever until you blow it. So don't blow it. It's actually, this is pretty simple stuff. So the humor part of it is. It's somewhere between a technique and bedrock. [00:51:00] That is, if you're confident enough because you're studied up enough, and you're honest enough to tell somebody what's wrong with your product, which is actually the key to being seen as an expert, is to tell them what circumstance it won't work for them, honestly.
[00:51:15] Chris Beall: Experts do that. Charlatans don't. You might notice [00:51:20] charlatans very rarely tell you what's gonna go bad okay, if you're studied up enough to do that, and you're humble enough to recognize that you don't know all the things even about the application of your own product, you can afford to be funny when it makes sense to be funny.
[00:51:38] Chris Beall: And I [00:51:40] know that's what? I'm going to study to be funny by learning my product deeply and then getting the confidence to actually be an expert who even tells people what might not go great? Yes, that's the groundwork of being able to use humor. If you use humor from a surface perspective, as a trick, [00:52:00] as a magic trick, you will be strung up by serious people in your audience.
[00:52:07] Chris Beall: They're the ones they really care about. They aren't going to go with it. And so it's, it's a delicate thing. I was at General Electric once, when I was called by a very senior person there, who just called me out of the blue and said, it was [00:52:20] Friday. Said, Chris, I'm so and so from General Electric Company.
[00:52:25] Chris Beall: We've heard about your product. It was an electronic catalog for parts, like engineering parts. Heard about your product. We want to see it. Please come here Monday and present to us at 11 o'clock. This was at their headquarters [00:52:40] in Connecticut. And send somebody who can speak for your company. That's a pretty interesting thing to hear, right?
[00:52:47] Chris Beall: We're a very young company, we don't have a lot of cash, we have something we've just built, how did this guy hear about it? A dumb thing to do would be to say, how did you hear about our product? Smart thing to do, it turned out, was say, yeah, [00:53:00] I'll be there, right? So now the question is, well, how does a meeting go?
[00:53:04] Chris Beall: And would you dare be funny in a meeting like that? So I walk into the meeting, got my VP of sales with me, I've got my, my boss with me. And they go around the table, and these people are deadly serious. It's boom, boom, [00:53:20] boom. This is the General Electric Company, right? Mouse traps are snappin mice are dyin it's a, it's a thing that's going on, right?
[00:53:28] Chris Beall: And I play right along with a very quick introduction, and then get up to do the presentation on the product. Now, what would have been [00:53:40] normal? What would they have expected that's not funny? That's a PowerPoint presentation. So I stood up and I said, Well, I have to confess something that I think is rather sad, and I'm hoping you'll forgive me.
[00:53:53] Chris Beall: Now, they're not expecting that, and I said, I'm so incompetent at PowerPoint that it made no [00:54:00] sense for me to come to you with a slide presentation at all, but I did take one of your division's products, all the parts that I could find, which is about 137, 222 of them, and put them into our parts catalog so we could have a look.
[00:54:17] Chris Beall: Are you interested in seeing that instead of PowerPoint? [00:54:20] Now, that is unexpected, and some of them were uncomfortable, and some of them, but a couple of them it was a little laugh, right? And then we did it. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, went through it. It was a 55 minute presentation. It was done in 37 minutes.
[00:54:36] Chris Beall: And I said, well, I have to apologize to you. I don't have any more material. [00:54:40] That's it. 
[00:54:42] Corey Frank: And 
[00:54:42] Chris Beall: then they were like, and we did a deal on the spot, literally did a deal on the spot. It went like this. It was like, okay, which one of your divisions wants to actually take this pilot? Boom. It's you. Do it. You talk to you.
[00:54:57] Chris Beall: We're done. Oh, look, we saved 9 minutes. [00:55:00] Meeting's over. They're out. Was it humor for the sake of humor? Or was it a trick? No, I was really confident that I'd change the entire world of finding parts. By the way, every time you find one of these parts, it's worth 50, 000 to the company that finds it, just for finding it, not making a new part number.
[00:55:19] Chris Beall: So I knew what [00:55:20] the value was. But then later, another funny situation, years, two years later, the Corporate Counsel of the General Electric Company calls me and says, Get out here! I'm in Colorado, they're still in Connecticut. We gotta talk. Now, I wasn't going to say, Gary, what are we going to talk about? I could tell by his tone of voice, we're going to talk about something [00:55:40] serious.
[00:55:41] Chris Beall: Hello again, jump in a plane. I go on the inside of the plane, so I don't really jump on the outside. It's uncomfortably cold at altitude, and, and, and, and, and, and Windy, Richard pointed out, I take you up to 7, 000 feet inside the plane, more than if you're 39, 000 like I was yesterday.
[00:55:57] Chris Beall: So go out there. Now, they're, [00:56:00] it's the conference room of the General Electric Company. It's the one right under Jack Welch's office. It's huge. It's imposing. for listening. The table itself made me a little bit uncomfortable. I sat there by myself for 45 minutes. Why? Because they teach that kind of stuff, right?
[00:56:16] Chris Beall: Cool your heels. Fortunately, I can entertain myself in my mind [00:56:20] easily because I do have a condition that needs to be treated. Guy walks in, sits down, starts literally pounding the table. Boom! Boom! Boom! I'm thinking, this table sounds great. I wonder where I can get a table like this. This is really, this is probably worth more than my house.
[00:56:38] Chris Beall: Boom! You [00:56:40] are destroying the General Electric Company. And I said, Well, Gary, certainly there has to be some amount of, and the General Electric Company is worth a lot, right? He just looks at me, billions. There has to be some amount of money you would like to pay me so I would stop [00:57:00] destroying the General Electric Company.
[00:57:02] Chris Beall: And he just sits there for a moment, and finally he cracks up laughing, and it's Okay, now we can have a real conversation. Now we're peers. Yeah. So that kind of, I don't know how you teach that, but sometimes just knowing, and the purpose isn't to do this and [00:57:20] you'll win deals. I think 
[00:57:22] Corey Frank: it's those little, you've iterated those benign violations.
[00:57:29] Corey Frank: that in this case provokes laughter because it was wrong, right? It could be, it clearly, it would have been unsettling, it was borderline threatening, [00:57:40] right? But it's also acceptable. I mean, it, this is like tickling or teasing or that, that little mix up or that, that, that funny thing that happens after a joke, right?
[00:57:53] Corey Frank: But it's also a thin line, right? Cause I think it's, we all agree that it's easier to, right? to fail with honor than succeed, [00:58:00] right? And it's a delicate operation, which you described, both of you, where it's built on layers of shared knowledge and, and a lot of innuendo. And but you know your crowd, you know your audience, but if you do that, that benign violation, I [00:58:20] think, think, thing works.
[00:58:22] Corey Frank: There is a, there's a quote I'm trying to dig up here, and I think this is it, it's from an anthropologist, Edward Hall, who I think came up in one of our episodes a while ago, because he was quoted a lot in Sapiens, and he says, I'm quoting from Edward Hall, the [00:58:40] anthropologist, If you can learn the humor of a people, and really control it.
[00:58:46] Corey Frank: You know that you are also in control of nearly everything else. And we talked about this yesterday when we talked about cultural differences of selling to the [00:59:00] Japanese. Richard, you've tried, you've sold all the real differences in South Africa, certainly the differences in Europe or, or etc. And but I think what, what Edward Hall was saying is that and even the example you gave of of of the, the English coming in and negotiating [00:59:20] with Gandhi and Nehru, et cetera Richard, is that if I know that this is acceptable in a culture to laugh, poke fun, be nuanced, innuendo about, then I almost have this little unlock code, this cheat code that I'm in the know and that it's [00:59:40] okay to, to, to, to laugh at.
[00:59:43] Corey Frank: So let's end with, with your final thoughts on that.
[00:59:49] Richard Rabins: Well I think it's interesting, the cultural stuff is fascinating. And I think there's two [01:00:00] opposing themes. One is, I think there's some core human behavior that just has to belong to all eight billion people. But, I was mentioning last night that, in the English language, [01:00:20] the concept of somebody being responsible for something and potentially being at fault for something is well established.
[01:00:29] Richard Rabins: So if there's a vase on the table, you knock over, you are at fault and you say to your host, [01:00:40] terribly sorry, I did this. Can I replace it? Or something like that. But you are at fault. In, in the Japanese language, the concept of being at fault like that doesn't exist. What they would say is the vase fell over.
[01:00:56] Richard Rabins: without any assignment of who was responsible for the [01:01:00] bars falling over. And I think that probably translates into stuff that people find funny. So I guess the point is, if you are going to use humor in a different culture, say and I'd say largely, US, UK, Australia, It's, it's more similar [01:01:20] than, than different that's fine, but if if you're going to use it, say in Japan or some other place, you really have to do your homework because as you said, there's some level of risk in, if you use humor, not using humor as a straight path, it's a low risk path, [01:01:40] using humor is somewhat riskier, but also often necessary if you're trying to penetrate it's if, if you're facing a immovable brick wall, and everything else isn't working, humor, but, but you've got to, you've got to do your [01:02:00] homework.
[01:02:00] Richard Rabins: Okay. and understand that it may not always work. 
[01:02:05] Chris Beall: Yeah. I got a rule for you. If you're traveling, I used to do a lot of business in other places, right? India, China, Japan, Europe, all over the place. When you're in a, in another culture and every company you go [01:02:20] into is actually another culture and you're going to make fun of something, make sure you're making fun of yourself.
[01:02:28] Chris Beall: Don't presume that it's safe to make fun of anything or any person. other than yourself. 
[01:02:36] Corey Frank: Yeah. Other than myself or yourself. Because everywhere I go, I seem to have a [01:02:40] good traction when I make fun of you or you're talking to myself. 
[01:02:44] Chris Beall: Yeah. Well, I mean, this is what it means to be a sidekick. I am your sidekick.
[01:02:48] Chris Beall: You can make fun of me. That's why the kick part is in there. Otherwise I 
[01:02:53] Corey Frank: thought I was the foil. I thought that's the role that I play. So 
[01:02:58] Chris Beall: since we're confused about [01:03:00] our roles. I really don't know how we're going to get through this, but we hope for forgiveness from the audience and from Richard, who has to show up and have a laugh with us.
[01:03:10] Corey Frank: Absolutely. Well, Richard, final thoughts on your inaugural appearance on the Market Dominance, guys, man, the wisdom. [01:03:20] The tips and it's, 
[01:03:23] Richard Rabins: I've had a lot of fun just listening to this and, I think if you respect people, you like people, and you wanna engage with people, you're gonna, you're gonna [01:03:40] learn something, always gonna learn something.
[01:03:42] Richard Rabins: And I, I, I certainly didn't come up with this, but whoever came up with that's why human beings were given. Two ears and one mouth and that's kind of the, probably the ratio of stuff you really got to listen to and, and everybody's [01:04:00] interesting, everybody's got a story.
[01:04:01] Richard Rabins: I, I love, like when I go to a restaurant and one thing that's interesting, the waiter will come up to you and ask you how you're doing, et cetera. Invariably I'll say, I'm doing fine. Thank you. How are you doing? And it's surprising how many people are taken back [01:04:20] by that because it's not that common.
[01:04:22] Richard Rabins: And it's like you, you actually asked me how I'm doing. I'm serving you. It's yeah, how are you doing? I wanna know how you're doing. And I've had wonderful conversations with them. Waiters in restaurants and stuff like that. And, [01:04:40] everything's just a learning experience. But it does come, I really like your comment about noticing.
[01:04:47] Richard Rabins: It's, it's little details, can make huge differences.
[01:04:57] Corey Frank: Absolutely. Well, that's, that's just great. Well, I tell you [01:05:00] what Chris, we, we could have got to get Stephen right on next, I think maybe Conan and Brian, because I really think that It is a secret weapon. As we were talking, the three of us were talking offline yesterday and today, and I think there's something to deconstruct that and putting folks folks through the [01:05:20] crucible in a safe environment about how to test it.
[01:05:24] Corey Frank: And much like you gave, James Thornburg does it over and over again, till his timing is just impeccable. That's something I think we should look forward to in future Market Dominance podcasts is this how to leverage humor for for success. [01:05:40] Final thoughts to you, Chris. 
[01:05:44] Chris Beall: Well, I just happen to know something about Richard, and he's not gonna confess it, so I'm just gonna say it, which is, he keeps saying he loves he likes people.
[01:05:52] Chris Beall: Trust me, he likes dogs better. 
[01:05:55] Richard Rabins: It's true. I mean, I'll, I'll, I'll end on, on one thing [01:06:00] is often you say to somebody what, what your end ultimate dream, what do you want to do? And if I could open up a dog shelter, I'd be in in heaven, totally. Really? Yeah. Oh, 
[01:06:15] Corey Frank: That's awesome. That's great.
[01:06:17] Corey Frank: That's great. I will look for that. [01:06:20] If you need any volunteers, I think I could be persuaded to do that as well. Well as long as we're in the subject of sharing, my, my, my future endeavor is to be a short order cook at a truck stop, because I like doing things like that. Chris you're, you're next.
[01:06:38] Corey Frank: What's the what's the, [01:06:40] what's the, what's the dream gig? Dog shelter, short order cook, and 
[01:06:45] Chris Beall: Oh, the dream gig is being a pied piper of barefoot running in Quail Creek, Arizona. If I can pull that off, I'm in heaven. All right. Fair enough. Fair enough. 
[01:06:56] Corey Frank: Well, okay. Well, this has been a multi faceted, multi topic Market [01:07:00] Dominance Guys episode.
[01:07:02] Corey Frank: So Richard, thank you for your time and for Chris Beall and the rest of the Market Dominance crew behind the scenes. This is Corey Frank. Until next time. 
[01:07:11] Richard Rabins: Thanks a lot, Corey. 

In the second part of our conversation with Richard Rabins, CEO and Co-Founder of Alpha Software, we delve into the delicate balance of using humor effectively in sales. Chris Beall shares insights on guiding prospects through emotional transitions, from fear to trust, using the power of laughter and surprise. However, the discussion also explores the risks of pushing humor too far and the importance of knowing when to rein it in. Richard and Corey examine the idea of teaching humor, drawing parallels between sales and the world of comedy and performance. They emphasize the significance of confidence, vulnerability, and the ability to read your audience to avoid alienating prospects. Join us as we navigate the comedic conundrum of harnessing wit without crossing the line, and discover how to strike the perfect balance for building genuine relationships with prospects.
About our Guest:
Richard Rabins focuses on strategy, accelerating global growth and scaling the organization. Richard also served as CEO of SoftQuad International from 1997 to 2001, when it owned Alpha. In addition to his 30 years with the company, Richard played a key role as co-founder, and served as president and chairman of the Massachusetts Software Council (now the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council), the largest technology trade organization in Massachusetts. Prior to founding Alpha, Richard was a project leader and consultant with Information Resources, Inc. (IRI), and a management consultant with Management Decision Systems, Inc. Richard holds a master's degree in system dynamics from the Sloan School at MIT, and a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and master's degree in control engineering from University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He has served on the boards of Silent Systems, Legacy Technology and O3B Networks, and is co-founder of Tubifi www.tubifi.com.
Links from this episode:
Richard Rabins on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richard-rabins/
Company website: https://www.alphasoftware.com/
Corey Frank on LinkedInBranch49Chris Beall on LinkedInConnectAndSell
 
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Below:
 
[00:25:51] Corey Frank: Sure. I think you're getting into a different level of rapport building, Chris, I think it'd be a good reminder to talk about the [00:26:00] swirling blue orb and the, the reason why that works, because I think that ties in a lot of what Richard is saying here with regards to, building that, that rapport, which in essence is.
[00:26:13] Corey Frank: Moving from fear to trust, is it not? 
[00:26:16] Chris Beall: Right, I mean, we're always trying to help somebody along this [00:26:20] this emotional journey to a next emotional state where we can maybe help them see something new that might be of value to them. So it's always just one emotional transition. So fear to trust is one, trust to curiosity is another, curiosity to commitment is another.
[00:26:38] Chris Beall: And emotional [00:26:40] transitions are tricky things. We actually prefer to hold on to our current emotional state, even if we don't like it, because it is a comfort to us To feel as we feel. We really don't want to change anything in our life, much less how we feel. So in sales, we're trying to help somebody [00:27:00] change something in their life.
[00:27:01] Chris Beall: And if we cold call them, that something is, they're afraid of us. And we want to help them change that to being trusting of us, right? And it's actually why the second sentence in the breakthrough script that we teach. The one right after throwing yourself under the bus, which is raising the [00:27:20] tension, and it is surprising, to this little piece of relief, and it has the chuckle in it.
[00:27:24] Chris Beall: By the way, when people laugh, other people laugh. Right? Nobody knows why you're laughing, but you laugh because others are laughing. Laughter is, as they say, contagious in the same way that yawning is, but in a way that sneezing is not. At least, we hope, right? It ain't to sneeze [00:27:40] and have everybody in the room suddenly sneeze.
[00:27:42] Chris Beall: I mean, you might get a pandemic or something like that. But this, this business I know I'm an interruption. I mean, nobody expects to hear that. And, and almost nobody in sales, by the way, is confident enough to throw themselves all the way under the bus and have it [00:28:00] go ba bump, ba bump, ba bump, because buses, by the way, have that many sets of wheels, and then it backs up over you and goes ba bump, ba bump, 
[00:28:07] Richard Rabins: ba 
[00:28:07] Chris Beall: bump, right?
[00:28:08] Chris Beall: Now you're really under the bus. And then how do you switch your voice sincerely to being playful? A playful and curious voice is what allows somebody to have that relief. [00:28:20] from your initial statement, which is you throwing yourself under the bus, which creates tension. You talk often, Corey, about tension being important in sales.
[00:28:30] Chris Beall: Well, the story that starts out with, I just ambushed you, has got tension built into it, but it has more tension if you amplify it verbally. I know I'm an interruption. [00:28:40] And then you change your voice to PlayfulCuriousCat. Can I at 27 seconds tell you why I called? If you really want to see this in action, hear this in action over and over, just go out to James Thornburg's LinkedIn profile and listen to one James Thornburg video after another.
[00:28:58] Chris Beall: He will often end one [00:29:00] that's really brutal. He has a recent one that has somebody at the very end just going off on him, and he has to bleep most of it out. But right before that, he does his standard, what would you say to that at the end, which is so is it okay if I end this with the joke? What do you call five coal collars at the bottom of the ocean?
[00:29:19] Chris Beall: And [00:29:20] we only ever hear his side. Pause. He says, a good start. And then he goes on, right? Well, he says it, and it's really funny, because James Thornburg has great comedic timing. And he's very, very dry. He's the Stephen Wright of sales, of cold calling, right? He is a funny guy who can talk to you also about [00:29:40] slaughtering pigs, and make that seem somewhat amusing, even though that's a serious business.
[00:29:44] Chris Beall: So he raises pigs. It turns out he doesn't, he doesn't go slaughter other people's pigs. He kind of sticks to his own, right? It says he and his pigs have an agreement. This is how it's going to end. I have an animal example, by the way. This one [00:30:00] back in the first days of COVID, literally the very first days, Helen, who was at Microsoft, was on a happy hour.
[00:30:09] Chris Beall: They used to do this. They called them like team happy hours and everybody was introducing their pets and I was somewhere else in the room where I couldn't be seen, but it's a [00:30:20] happy hour. So alcohol is going to be involved and I'm listening and I'm just wondering where she is going to go when they come to the pet thing because Helen doesn't have any pets and what she says, I didn't anticipate.
[00:30:34] Chris Beall: It was funny to me, but I managed to participate. by Pantomime. Pantomime can be pretty funny, [00:30:40] actually, if you are lucky enough to get a chance. She says, well, everybody's been showing their pets. I actually don't have, well, I actually do have an animal. He's 6 '1 goes 2' 15 and at that point I walk up with a bottle of Blanton's and pour her a shot.
[00:30:57] Chris Beall: She says he fetches. And, [00:31:00] and he pours. That's funny. So he fetches and he pours became a trope joke, actually, and has run ever since then. Covid's now, that part is 3 years behind us, right? And it's still pretty funny. Fetches and pours, and that became a trope joke. kind of how I was known right up until the point where she renamed me as [00:31:20] almost a thing.
[00:31:21] Chris Beall: So now I am almost a thing that fetches and pours, which makes no sense whatsoever, but is also somewhat funny. That kind of thing, it is noticing, right? What was I doing? I was noticing that this situation is evolving and I could have just not done anything, but I [00:31:40] prepped. And why did I do that? What am I selling?
[00:31:42] Chris Beall: I'm selling this. a group of people that she's now not going to go to the office with, Helen, their boss. It is cool. You can hang with her. You can bring your problems to her. You, it's a tiny contribution, [00:32:00] but it had that effect, right? By the way, what can you do to develop humor? I don't know if this works for most people, but some people when they go to stand up classes to learn standup comedy.
[00:32:11] Chris Beall: where you're being workshopped over and over and over and over and over, you're workshopping over and over in order to be able to respond to something. What [00:32:20] you're learning to do is to pay attention to what the other person says within the context and respond in a way that reframes so that the dialogue goes forward and it might get to somewhere funny.
[00:32:32] Chris Beall: And that ability to notice, respond with reframing, and take the conversation in a direction that has a [00:32:40] positive resolution. In their case, standing up is funny, that is a good thing to practice, whether you will learn to be funny by doing it, I can't say, but I can certainly say the greatest cold callers I've ever known are people who are stand up comedians.
[00:32:58] Richard Rabins: Just to add to [00:33:00] that, I had the fortune or misfortune of going to business school. And, so I get the newsletters and magazines from the school. And I noticed that they had profiled a student. [00:33:20] who had gone off and started a company and was doing really innovative, good stuff.
[00:33:26] Richard Rabins: And she was talking about her experience. This was at the Sloan School, the MIT Business School. She was talking about her experience and that the best course she [00:33:40] took was apparently they started a course where the professor, is a joint professor at the business school, but also teaches drama.
[00:33:53] Richard Rabins: She teaches theater drama. And so it's [00:34:00] You know, I mean, humor is, it's part of a performance. It's comedy part is a performance. Getting back to your question, which is a really practical, interesting question is, can you teach humor? I suspect you're not going to turn someone who innately doesn't have a [00:34:20] sense of humor into someone who does, but I think you can certainly, sand the edges significantly.
[00:34:27] Richard Rabins: And it's, it's possible you could actually. Make progress in that area.
[00:34:38] Corey Frank: Yeah, I would, I would think you [00:34:40] can with a lot of noticing practice. Like we talked about the synopsis that are broken. There's something that maybe our listeners can look at. There's a rapper by the name of, of, Harry Mack. And he was just, there's a video that you can see it on YouTube and, and TikTok and [00:35:00] Instagram.
[00:35:01] Corey Frank: And he went into the New York Yankees clubhouse and he asked them for seven random words, a raid. OpeningDay, Sandwich. It's just non sequitur type of, type of words all globbed together. And he proceeded [00:35:20] to put together an M & M 50 cent level quality reduced wrap in real time. And it was incredible to the point where You know, it's not maybe our type, type of music, but the artistry and the [00:35:40] craftsmanship that went into developing the ability to see forward.
[00:35:46] Corey Frank: Right? Writing a sonnet in real time. I have to see, okay, A, B, A, B, A, B, right? The iambic, pentameter, right? I have to see ahead two or three stanzas to make sure this is the right number. And I think [00:36:00] that people who are very good at it. Warren Claff, Chris, certainly you're a master at it. Other public speakers that we know with, with this persona, this confidence, they have this ability to almost have this matrix out of time process to see time in reverse.
[00:36:19] Corey Frank: [00:36:20] And, I, I don't know of any other way to do that, except to put yourself out there, like you were talking about, about a good standup workshop and get your butt kicked. I'm sure. As James Thornburg has documented hundreds, if not thousands, of [00:36:40] calls in his years working with ConnectAndSell and BridgePoint, is that the latter performances are much better than the earlier performances.
[00:36:52] Corey Frank: And I would bet, Richard, that you are going into a presentation today, or Chris, you going into a [00:37:00] present today, you have nothing to lose. And so you're more at ease, and you're apt, more apt to notice things that are different or unusual in the world, than if you're a newer sales rep. You're so focused on your deck, the presentation, the body language of your prospect.
[00:37:18] Corey Frank: What are your What are your [00:37:20] thoughts on, on on that? 
[00:37:23] Richard Rabins: I think that's a really interesting point that I keep thinking about, I keep coming back to the fact that you need to understand that the other person is a human being. And, And [00:37:40] anything that breaks the expectation so the expectation is you're going to come in there, give a PowerPoint, very formal.
[00:37:50] Richard Rabins: It's not, it's not like initially a fun experience. It's not unpleasant. It's not a fun experience. But if you can, walk [00:38:00] in. And let's say, depending where you are, you look out the window and you see some mountain, you say, wow I didn't realize you guys were this close. Can you ski or whatever?
[00:38:12] Richard Rabins: You immediately, you, you change the atmosphere of the room. [00:38:20] And so I do think that When you're a young, inexperienced person, you don't think you've got license to behave like a human being. You, you feel like you have to follow in a robotic fashion. And as soon as you can get rid of that sort of [00:38:40] inhibition, and, and just be more confident.
[00:38:42] Richard Rabins: And, and also I think I realize that Even if it's a really important meeting or call, that if it doesn't go well, the world doesn't end. It's not the end of the world. I mean, how many times, Malcolm Gladwell [00:39:00] the author's interesting guy. So, in one of his recent books, he talks about the concept of, you can't take yourself too seriously, that there's a, a young girl.
[00:39:15] Richard Rabins: Somewhere, she's in high school, she's really, really good at chemistry. She loves [00:39:20] chemistry and she's number one in her school in chemistry. And her dream is she wants to go to Caltech or MIT, to go and study chemistry. She applies, she doesn't get in. She thinks the world has just ended. And [00:39:40] but she ends up going to another school, very good school, chemistry, and does brilliantly.
[00:39:45] Richard Rabins: And the reality is all the kids who go to MIT or Caltech, they were always probably number one or number two in their class. maths and physics. They come to MIT and by [00:40:00] definition, 50 percent of them have to be in the bottom half of the class. There's no avoiding it. You can't, so all of a sudden she might've gotten to MIT and there was a 50 percent chance she would be in the bottom half of the class.
[00:40:16] Richard Rabins: That would do a number on her ego and her self [00:40:20] confidence. So what, what William Gladwell describes, she goes to this other school, and she's like the top student in that class, and her career blossoms because it didn't affect her, her self confidence. Firstly, the lesson there is, [00:40:40] you didn't get in, should I literally jump off the next building, or do I say, okay, Plan B, and move on, and On a more serious tone, I think they've improved this at MIT, but MIT used to have the highest suicide rate of any college [00:41:00] for exactly that reason.
[00:41:02] Richard Rabins: You get these 17, 18 year old kids, their whole sense of self is tied up in how brilliant they are. And now all of a sudden there's this wet slap across the face. And in fact, When I was there, there was a building called the Green Building, the [00:41:20] tallest building, and they had to make sure that the top of the building wasn't accessible, because it was a perfect way to jump off the building.
[00:41:31] Chris Beall: Wait a second. MIT engineers are capable of taking a car apart and reassembling it in your dorm room. Certainly they can get to an inaccessible part of [00:41:40] the 
[00:41:40] Richard Rabins: building. That's true. Well, they, they still did in fact have. the high suicide. So there was a lot of successful, but you know, it's, it just, yeah, I think the whole thing is, if you're relaxed, I think Chris alluded to, if you're relaxed, the people around you all relax.[00:42:00] 
[00:42:00] Richard Rabins: And that, that's a good thing. 
[00:42:03] Chris Beall: You gotta have the goods. I mean, this is one of the, one of the things you gotta have, right? You have to be a very serious, hardworking student of whatever it is that you're an expert in. I mean, in sales, the job is pretty simple. You're an expert who is on their [00:42:20] side.
[00:42:20] Chris Beall: That's it. It's hard to establish yourself as being on their side. Because people are naturally wary of somebody who says they're on their side. You can't just come out and say it. Hi, I'm an expert. I'm on your side. Now let me see if I can find a pen here so you can sign this deal, right? It's a, it [00:42:40] doesn't work like that.
[00:42:41] Chris Beall: You're helping somebody come by themselves to the conclusion that you're an expert and you're on their side. Well, being on their side, you don't have to be funny. It turns out. But you're showing a little bit of vulnerability by your willingness to try to be funny. That is, you're actually going out on a limb.
[00:42:58] Chris Beall: If you say something [00:43:00] that might be funny, you're exposing yourself to the criticism of why are you being funny? That's not a funny thing, right? So you're actually going a little ways toward being on their side by being willing to be funny, but you're also going a long ways to being an expert by having the confidence to be [00:43:20] funny, and those two things go together in a kind of mutually reinforcing sort of way.
[00:43:27] Chris Beall: But once you get that going, you better not go too far with either one. 
In our next episode, we wrap up our conversation with Richard Rabins and delve into the fascinating cultural differences in humor and how they can impact sales interactions. Join us as Chris and Corey share their dream retirement gigs and reveal a surprising fact about Richard's true passion that explains why he's such a master at connecting with others.

In this episode, the guys explore the art of ricocheting your way to sales success. Chris Beall and Corey Frank are joined by Richard Rabins, the CEO of Alpha Software, to discuss the power of humor in disarming prospects and humanizing interactions. As Richard shares his personal anecdotes about leveraging laughter to close deals, the group delves into the age-old question: can humor be taught, or is it an innate skill? While confidence plays a crucial role, the ability to notice and connect seemingly unrelated things emerges as a key aspect of effective humor in sales. So, whether you're a golden retriever enthusiast or just looking to add some lighthearted surprise to your sales arsenal, join us as we explore the art of the ricochet and learn how to turn dead leads into living, laughing, and buying customers. Join us for this episode, “Ricochet Your Way to Sales Success: The Power of Humor.”
Richard Rabins focuses on strategy, accelerating global growth and scaling the organization. Richard also served as CEO of SoftQuad International from 1997 to 2001, when it owned Alpha. In addition to his 30 years with the company, Richard played a key role as co-founder, and served as president and chairman of the Massachusetts Software Council (now the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council), the largest technology trade organization in Massachusetts. Prior to founding Alpha, Richard was a project leader and consultant with Information Resources, Inc. (IRI), and a management consultant with Management Decision Systems, Inc. Richard holds a master's degree in system dynamics from the Sloan School at MIT, and a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and master's degree in control engineering from University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He has served on the boards of Silent Systems, Legacy Technology and O3B Networks, and is co-founder of Tubifi www.tubifi.com.
Links from this episode:
Richard Rabins on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richard-rabins/
Company website: https://www.alphasoftware.com/
Corey Frank on LinkedIn
Branch49Chris Beall on LinkedInConnectAndSell
 
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Below:
 
[00:01:04] Corey Frank: One, two, three. Welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys. A Branch 49 home-based mothership version with Corey Frank.
[00:01:13] Corey Frank: And of course the Sage of Sales, the Hawking of Hawking. and the Elvis of [00:01:20] EBIT. What do you think about that? The Elvis of EBIT? No? All right, we're still working on that one. And in the studio, all the way from Boston we have Richard Rabins, the CEO of Alpha Software. Richard, thanks for coming all the way to Branch 49 to have a little fun with the Market Dominance [00:01:40] guys.
[00:01:40] Richard Rabins: Fantastic. Great to be here. Thanks.
[00:01:45] Corey Frank: As is per custom, when Chris arrives here at the Branch 49 mothership, he gets the regalia, the full regalia of my office and as I sit here on the sales floor. So as we were talking about last night at [00:02:00] at dinner and a little bit today, that bled over.
[00:02:03] Corey Frank: One of the things that came up in the GoToMarket and the Sales Market Dominance Guide Strategy Richard, with you and, , and Chris, is we were talking about different techniques in GoToMarket and the subject of, of humor came up in the subject , of Chris, I guess what we're calling [00:02:20] ricochet opportunities.
[00:02:23] Corey Frank: Opportunities that I once thought were dormant, were dead. My marketing expenses has probably already been flushed. And what's some techniques I can, I can resurrect these things, maybe recoup some of the [00:02:40] costs of acquisition that I had that are creative, that certainly can be leveraged with a good message and, and a powerful weapon like ConnectAndSell.
[00:02:48] Chris Beall: Well, I'll, I'll speak to this. I'll tell a story about yesterday being on the airplane. So I was coming back from Nashville. To Phoenix in order to attend the event that we were all at [00:03:00] yesterday evening, Josh Wagner of InRevenue Capital invited us to a tremendous event and there were LimitedPartners, and PortfolioCompany, now called PortCos.
[00:03:13] Chris Beall: Eventually they're going to be called PCOS, but I don't know if that's really going to work so well. And we just have to keep shortening things. Finally, just [00:03:20] call them COS. But anyway, we were all going to get together there. I came back a little early, sat next to a nice, quiet woman on the airplane.
[00:03:29] Chris Beall: She was writing a screenplay. And just because the pilot inadvertently said we were going to Las Vegas instead of Phoenix, which created a [00:03:40] moment of surprise, then a whole bunch of humor, as everybody told jokes about or made fun of going to Las Vegas instead of Phoenix. That broke the ice.
[00:03:47] Chris Beall: She and I started talking, and at the end of that conversation, one thing led to another, and she said, Oh, now I have to be careful not to introduce you to my boss, the owner of the company, because they'll be so [00:04:00] successful with ConnectAndSell that they'll sell the company within two years and I'll lose my job.
[00:04:04] Chris Beall: That's an example of a ricochet that bounced all over the place, starting with the pilot saying, Phoenix. That would be a ricochet right there because you still got to get to Phoenix, but it caused a conversation to take place with somebody [00:04:20] that otherwise would not have taken place. And I think there's a lot of examples that are available.
[00:04:25] Chris Beall: I had one this morning. I was cold called by somebody. I couldn't quite recognize his name. I picked it up because it was a 206 number. And I'm waiting for a call from the Social Security Administration to tell me when I can [00:04:40] actually speak with them about something. This has been a four month process waiting to Get an appointment for a 10 minute conversation, and I knew it would be a Seattle number.
[00:04:52] Chris Beall: Well, it turns out it's somebody from another company, I think Paylocity, and I encouraged him to speak with our CFO. But [00:05:00] I pointed out to them that he could do his job much more easily, possibly, by using ConnectAndSell, pushing a button and talking to people. Again, that's why we call that a boomerang, which is a kind of ricochet.
[00:05:10] Chris Beall: But there's so many indirect ways, and I think in sales, we often think, Everything has to be direct, direct, direct, right to [00:05:20] I, like, why would I make a list of companies that hire people who do the job that I help with unless I'm going to talk to those people? Well, because you might want to talk to their boss.
[00:05:30] Chris Beall: But to get to their boss, you might have to talk to other people. So that's another sort of a more of an IED approach to ricochets, [00:05:40] put the weapon somewhere near, and if it flips the Humvee over, then at least you can have a conversation with the scattered former inhabitants of it. So we'll talk later about how that fits in with humor.
[00:05:52] Chris Beall: But to me, humor is the kind of the ultimate, always available [00:06:00] ricochet mechanism that can be used in sales if you have enough confidence. So that was kind of long, but it's a setup for what I think is kind of an unusual episode with Richard Rabins here, who is. He can introduce himself, but I'll introduce him.
[00:06:14] Chris Beall: He's the CEO founder of a company that's called Alpha Software, and Alpha [00:06:20] Software is going after something you gotta ricochet for. There's a lot of paper forms out there. They turn those paper forms into mobile capable forms that even work offline and are smart enough to keep you from making the stupid mistakes.
[00:06:35] Chris Beall: I have never correctly filled out a form in my life. They're probably going to ask me for the Social [00:06:40] Security Administration and fill one out. I will make a number of errors and I will wish they had Richard's software making that form because then I could do it on mobile and I wouldn't tear my head off and nail it to a coffee table, frankly.
[00:06:54] Chris Beall: So that's my intro to you, Richard. What do you think?
[00:06:56] Richard Rabins: Yeah, no, I think that's great. I'll dive in on, [00:07:00] on the humor, item and, we're talking offline and humor is a very powerful weapon. Obviously the person on the other side has to have a sense of humor. Otherwise the weapon's not going to work.
[00:07:18] Richard Rabins: But you know, [00:07:20] what it does is when you're in sales and it's a cold call there's this natural distance that the other person's on the other side of the table, he's not on the same side of the table, and what HUMOR does is it [00:07:40] warms things up in my case. I'm a big, I love dogs.
[00:07:45] Richard Rabins: So if I can, if I'm on a call with someone zoom and they're working at home and I see their dog, I'm golden because not pun intended, even if it's not a golden retriever,
[00:07:58] Chris Beall: I was going to say that was a good one. [00:08:00]
[00:08:00] Richard Rabins: Because that's a way of humanizing. And putting us kind of on the same level, because otherwise, if you're trying to sell to something intrinsically, your target has more power than you.
(COMMERCIAL)
[00:08:16] Richard Rabins: Talking about dogs is certainly one thing, but [00:08:20] using humor is, can be powerful. And I was telling you and Chris last night about one case that happened to me. That, but humor ended up being a game changer . Early on in my career, I was working for a [00:08:40] market research company and they did some very innovative stuff.
[00:08:44] Richard Rabins: So if you could get an appointment with the prospect, you had enough data and evidence. That you will, you were almost guaranteed to close business, but getting the appointment in the first place was not, was non [00:09:00] trivial. And I'd started, this was not younger. And I'd started in some sort of analyst role, but was promoted to a project manager, which sounded pretty cool until I found out you actually had to, [00:09:20] kill what you wanted to eat.
[00:09:21] Richard Rabins: And I knew nothing about sales. So I went to my boss at the time and told him I went. There was a popular course, maybe still around Xerox professional selling skills, which Xerox had used internally and had [00:09:40] productized. And I'd heard about this course. And I went to my boss and I said, please, can you send me to this course because I need to learn how to sell.
[00:09:50] Richard Rabins: And it was a lot of money, and he was reluctant and I just nagged him. So finally, he said, if you promise [00:10:00] to get out of my office, you go to the course. I went to the course and yeah, it was useful. You learned, you should probably listen more than you should talk about a bunch of course setting stuff.
[00:10:13] Richard Rabins: So my first. Sales opportunity after the course [00:10:20] got hold of a prospect and I went through the whole routine of why he should give me the meeting and all the objections handled it, perfectly, except he wouldn't give me the meeting. So at that point, I'm toast. Failure. [00:10:40] Failure. There's nothing to lose.
[00:10:42] Richard Rabins: So I said to the fellow, I forgot his name, Bill, Hey Bill, I got on a level with you. So that was already caught him off guard. I've got a level with you? And he said, well, what? I said, well, and I told him the story that I'd just gone to this, [00:11:00] professional selling course. My boss didn't believe in it.
[00:11:04] Richard Rabins: And, and I said, now I've got a dilemma. My dilemma is I have to get off this call, go into my boss's office and tell him that the course does not work, doesn't work. [00:11:20] And he thought that was funny. And I got the meeting and we closed the business. Because at that point, humor can really humanize it made him empathize with, with me, my situation, and versus if I had just pleaded with him and said please give [00:11:40] me the meeting, whatever, probably wouldn't have got the meeting, but humor was, it allowed me to be at the same level, and, fortunately, he thought it was funny and so that's just one example, but there's Tons and tons of examples of human Well, [00:12:00] let me ask
[00:12:00] Corey Frank: Richard and Chris, I would think that a classically trained MIT schooled engineer from South Africa.
[00:12:10] Corey Frank: That's not a bastion of influences that blossom into humor. So when you have it or your [00:12:20] sales reps have it, and Chris, to the larger question, is it something that's taught or is it something that. That just is, right? A lot of last borns have this irreverency gene, right? This humor gene. But Richard, if we were to come in to take your sales organization [00:12:40] and upskill them on many things, their CRM, their automation, their list strategy, their, their, their sales methodologies.
[00:12:50] Corey Frank: Where would humor fit in? And Chris, how do you teach, train, where does it come from this confidence to use humor? And [00:13:00] let's, let's, let's, let's start right right there.
[00:13:04] Chris Beall: Well, I've never been able to teach it, so I've given up. I am the last born, as you well know. And I also think everything's pretty damn funny, which helps if.
[00:13:13] Chris Beall: You're looking at humor. I mean there's an agility of mind that's required to be [00:13:20] funny at the moment. And then there's the ability to learn a bunch of funny things and trot them out. And the former, I think, is extremely hard to teach. That agility of mind to find something funny in the moment.
[00:13:33] Chris Beall: Because our minds go where our minds go. Mine happens to go mostly to puns. I reason, as I've said [00:13:40] before in this podcast, I actually reason in a solution sense by following the sounds of words rather than their meanings, because it gets me out of whatever box I'm in, because a word that sounds like another word is Very rarely gonna mean the same thing.
[00:13:56] Chris Beall: And so it takes me outta my rut and I'm like everybody else. I'm in a rut and I don't [00:14:00] like being in a rut. So I like the sounds of words. In fact I won't tell you what company it is, but with Helen, folks on the podcast know I'm married to this brilliant MIT trained. Mechanical engineer who happens to have written a wonderfully famous [00:14:20] book.
[00:14:20] Chris Beall: Everybody should read this book, by the way, love your team, because there's nothing funny in it, except one thing in one of the forwards. And if you can find that and send it to me, I will either send you a dollar or I won't. So anyway, we were talking about a company that's names she couldn't remember [00:14:40] just for whatever reason.
[00:14:42] Chris Beall: And I finally said, well, it rhymes with what's on her face. And suddenly she could think of the person that she knows who's running that involved with that company and go, Oh, it rhymes with what's her face. And she's gotten the name right ever since. Part of which is because that's a funny thing to say.
[00:14:59] Chris Beall: It rhymes with [00:15:00] what's her face. And it's very easy to remember things that surprised you, which is the essence of humor is humorous surprise, followed by relief. You're surprised, which is a negative. All surprises are considered a threat. Every surprise, good, bad, or indifferent, they're all a threat. [00:15:20] So as you talk about the croc brain, the crocodile brain, Corey, the crocodile brain always responds to a surprise.
[00:15:27] Chris Beall: as a threat. Now the question is, what comes next? So if what comes next is relief, it's not a threat, that's funny. And how do we advertise that relief to the people [00:15:40] around us so that they can relax because now they're no longer threatened by the surprise? We laugh. So laughter is a way of saying it's okay.
[00:15:50] Chris Beall: And that's why people like to go to catch great comedians because they get to laugh a whole bunch, which is a way of taking a pill that says it's okay. It's okay. It's okay. Oh, it's [00:16:00] okay when they know damn well very few things in their life are okay, and they're going to die relatively soon compared to what they would prefer, but laughter is the best medicine.
[00:16:10] Chris Beall: Well, it's also the best kind of dodge, right? But it's always a surprise. And the problem with surprise, it's hard to teach people to be surprised because they would [00:16:20] prefer not to be a threat. So you have to be, this is why humor raises your status. Because you're willing to be surprised. And it actually fulfills the same role as, I know I'm an interruption, which is another way of dealing with being a threat.
[00:16:36] Chris Beall: And nobody wants to be a threat, so very few people want to be funny. [00:16:40] It's just kind of fun, but if you can learn to overcome that, I don't know how to teach it, then you can be a
[00:16:46] Corey Frank: confidence thing? I mean, Richard and Chris, is it a confidence thing? If I'm a new sales rep and I'm listening to this and I say, I have, the chairman of the board of a very, very [00:17:00] successful software company, who knows the left brain, who knows how things work, classically trained MIT, and the CEO, holder of 24, maybe 25, he's not sure, patents.
[00:17:12] Corey Frank: And these aren't the exact old Abbott and Costello I want to learn from to say you should incorporate humor. But [00:17:20] after I get past that, I want to say, Should I, how do I learn it? How do I adopt it? Is, is is there, is it a confidence thing that I have to be bold enough to try things as you did, Richard, when you, when you talked about the Xerox training example with the prospector, or where should I start?
[00:17:38] Corey Frank: I think I think [00:17:40]
[00:17:40] Richard Rabins: it does require a good chunk of self confidence. I don't know if you can teach self confidence. I think there probably are certain techniques that can help boost your self confidence. And you also, [00:18:00] in a fundamental way, you as a human being have to realize there's some really serious things in life.
[00:18:08] Richard Rabins: And most of the, most everything else is not that serious. It's not a life or death matter. And at the end of the day, we're born, [00:18:20] we live, we die. And at the end of the day, you look back at all these things that you thought was so important and so critical, and you, and you look at them and you, you, you put them in a, I think probably proper perspective.
[00:18:38] Richard Rabins: So I think [00:18:40] if you go into, let's say a sales situation and you, if you are self confident and you do have, I think humor is an intrinsic capability. If you do have that capability, at least the self confidence will prevent you from suppressing it. [00:19:00] I, I gave you guys another example last night, so when I was in that same company, pitching, getting meetings, I got a meeting with J& J, big company, it was the Tylenol group.
[00:19:19] Richard Rabins: And [00:19:20] I was presenting, this was actually, we'd closed a deal and this was the findings and the company I was working for at the time, they would run these simulated test markets. So they would advise. consumer product companies on whether they should [00:19:40] launch a new product, a new cat food, a new shampoo, a new form of, in this case, Tylenol.
[00:19:47] Richard Rabins: And, I was pretty young, 25, and I'm presenting in this amphitheater in J& J's headquarters, probably 60 or 70 people [00:20:00] there. And the first slide comes up and there's a typo. And these guys have just spent 250, 000 on a market research project, and this 25 year old twit comes up with a typo. Again I don't know if you can teach this.[00:20:20]
[00:20:21] Richard Rabins: I had to think quickly, do I pretend that the typo is not there and assume nobody's going to see it? It's like people will see it out of 60 or 70 people, they're going to see it. And so you've got to acknowledge it. You know what I did, [00:20:40] I said, we're going to start this with a test.
[00:20:42] Richard Rabins: How many of you guys have spotted the typo? Now, why is that funny? I don't know why it's funny, but it's funny. And it basically took a negative, which is on a 250, 000 consulting project. There shouldn't have been a [00:21:00] typo, right? But yeah, there was a typo. And rather than let that tear you down. So again, there's a confidence issue.
[00:21:10] Richard Rabins: And it's also somebody, I mean, a lot of people have said, you've got to remember everybody, when they put their clothes on, it's one leg at a [00:21:20] time. There's no getting around it. At the end of the day, we're all human beings. And if you can somehow, it, again, it's, it's no reason to accept a lower status, when it's in a sales situation, you want to keep your status [00:21:40] as much as possible on the same level.
[00:21:44] Corey Frank: Interesting. I, I, I love that. I love that story. I think we were talking about the ability to notice. And, Conan and Brian, Conan O'Brien was had a podcast and he had [00:22:00] Stephen Wright, one of your favorites, Richard, on the podcast and, and what the advice that Conan O'Brien, was, was giving to other young comedians that were listening to this podcast is that you have to train your mind to notice.
[00:22:18] Corey Frank: When you notice the [00:22:20] typo, you notice something that was unusual. And he, he suggests to hone in, to develop your comedic skills, is hone in and be aware of your noticing abilities. It's all about scanning, scanning, scanning. And you, ultimately the best comedians [00:22:40] Chris, I think we've talked about this, the best comedians connect things that should be connected.
[00:22:45] Corey Frank: And Conan O'Brien's father made the observation as Conan was coming up into the business, father was a scientist. And he says, you're making a living in essence off of something. that [00:23:00] should probably be treated. In other words, the synopses aren't supposed to cross like that. They're not supposed to touch, but things are wrong in a beautiful way.
[00:23:12] Corey Frank: And somehow you see a connection. So if you can do that and in a modest way or in a [00:23:20] humorous way, like you did about identifying the tempo, I think things are on the track to identifying humor.
[00:23:27] Richard Rabins: Just talking about comedians. Some people love him, some people hate him. I happen to think Larry David is very funny.
[00:23:36] Richard Rabins: And if you look at his episodes, [00:23:40] they're quite complex, the script. There's three or four things woven in together, and he ties them in together. But one thing about what he does, it's back to the notice. He picks up on just little things that people do that you notice, but you ignore. [00:24:00] And he turns them into a big deal and it's funny, but it's all based on real world observation of humans and because we're very strange creatures, very complex, very strange and intrinsically we are funny.
[00:24:18] Richard Rabins: We don't necessarily mean [00:24:20] to be funny, but any observer I think the bottom line is people take themselves way too seriously. And on the other hand, if in the sales thing, if the salesperson can disarm you through humor humor [00:24:40] is generally enjoyable. And it also, as you've said, it relaxes you and it allows you then maybe to focus on or at least the conversation to focus on, hey, maybe this person has a Called me and has [00:25:00] something to offer that is valuable because there's this natural shield that goes up.
[00:25:07] Richard Rabins: If you're speaking to an unknown person and it's not coming from a recommendation, the shield automatically goes up. Mm-Hmm. . So you have to use whatever weapon you can. And, [00:25:20] whether it's commenting on the guy's golden retriever, which I, I find it works every time. You can take the stiffest, coldest call for someone, very formal, and if you're lucky enough that he's working, well, maybe even in the [00:25:40] office, and he has a dog or a cat, but generally a dog.
[00:25:43] Richard Rabins: You ask him it's like asking mothers about their babies. What mother doesn't want to talk about their baby, 
 
OUTRO:
In this episode, Richard and Chris explored the delicate art of wielding humor in sales. But as Chris hinted, there's a balance to strike - you can't take the funny too far.
Join us next time as Corey, Richard, and Chris dive deeper into this comedic conundrum. They'll discuss the risks of overdoing it with humor and share tips for harnessing wit without alienating prospects.
Until then, keep sharpening your comedic chops and ricocheting your way to sales success!

Welcome to a special episode of the Market Dominance Guys podcast, where we dive deep into the power of nurturing relationships through multiple conversations over time. In a world where many salespeople focus on quick wins and low-hanging fruit, our guests today reveal why playing the long game is the key to achieving true market dominance.
Join Corey and Chris while they explore the insights of sales experts like Marc Hodgson, who shares his strategy for building a massive queue of relevant conversations, and Chris Beall, who explains how data gathered from ongoing prospect interactions becomes an appreciating asset. We'll also hear from Jim Graf on the cascading effect of conversations, Ron Brooks on the importance of mastering the art of sales dialogues, and Chris's conversation with Sushee Perumal on the art of "tapping the bells" to find the perfect fit.
Whether you're a seasoned sales professional or just starting out, this episode will provide you with actionable strategies for mastering the craft of sales conversations and nurturing long-term relationships with your prospects. We hope you gain a lot of ideas from this episode, "The Conversation Queue - Nurturing Sales Relationships for Market Dominance."
Episodes included in this topic-driven collection:
EP199: Conversational Alchemy - Transforming Sales in the Age of Cheap Outreach
EP85: When the Time Is Right, the Magic Happens
EP36: Celebrating a win isn‘t anything, it‘s just preparing for the next thing.
EP105: Data & Trust: Your Assets in Market Domination
EP179: Conversations Over Headcount: What VCs Should be Counting
EP242 - The Minding Your Business Podcast with host, Ron Brooks
 
 
 
 

Welcome to this special Market Dominance Guys compilation episode featuring highlights from some of our most downloaded episodes in the first quarter of 2024.
In these segments, Chris Beall and Corey Frank are joined by expert guests Shane Mahi and Helen Fanucci to explore critical topics for sales and marketing leaders navigating the evolving landscape of go-to-market strategies, data-driven targeting, and the impact of AI on authentic human connection.
You'll hear eye-opening insights on the future of software development in the age of generative AI, why conversations are the often-overlooked key to unlocking your total addressable market, and how to coach reps effectively by providing immediate feedback.
Helen shares her framework for leveraging proprietary data to identify your best opportunities and align resources accordingly. The discussions also examine the challenges of territory assignment and the power dynamics of sales leadership.
Shane and our hosts dive into balancing the power of AI tools like ChatGPT with the irreplaceable value of genuine, trust-building conversations. And you won't want to miss Shane's story of how combining the entrepreneurial operating system with AI helped him rebuild his business in record time after previous setbacks.
These clips from Chris, Corey, Shane, and Helen will help you learn how to position your organization for market dominance through the right mix of data-driven strategy, technological leverage, and authentic human engagement. 
 
Links from this episode:
Shane Mahi on LinkedIn
MEGA.ai
Corey Frank on LinkedIn
Branch49
Chris Beall on LinkedIn
ConnectAndSell
Helen Fanucci on LinkedIn
Full episodes for this segment:
#10: EP215: Sales Artisans: Thriving Alongside Smart Bots
#9: EP216: Conversations, The Kryptonite of MarTech?
#8: EP213: Ethical AI Selling - Reality vs Hype
#7: EP208: Balancing Relationships and Efficiency in AI Sales
#6: EP209: Your Only Product Is the Meeting
#5: EP214: The Future of Sales: Balancing AI and Authenticity
#4: EP212: Reps Dread It, Managers Avoid It: Coaching
#3: EP211: Conversations Convert to Pipeline Power
#2: EP210: Sales Targeting Beyond LinkedIn and Navigator
#1: EP145: Building Trust Must Always Be Step One
 
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Below:
 
#10: EP215: Sales Artisans: Thriving Alongside Smart Bots
The economy always gets reshaped around new capabilities in ways that surprise everybody who is thinking about it. So it's never like that. This is going up and this is going down and it crosses or whatever. It goes along as it goes along with increasing efficiencies in certain areas until somebody innovates a flip and the flip turns it on its head and now it's new, whatever the new thing is, and now you have the old way competing with the new way and the new way since it's enabled by new material science. By that I mean a new capability that does tricks you couldn't do before. It always wins, but it always starts where it has the obvious advantage. The skyscrapers are not out in the desert, they're in Manhattan. It depends where you look, but once you get 'em going in Manhattan, I pretty much guarantee you the little three story building that you used to have that you had some offices in or whatever. First the offices go, then the condos and it's all skyscrapers. Take a look at New York. It's all up, right? Take a look at Des Moines. It's a little up. Take a look at Scottsdale or Tenny. It's just how it goes.
Shane Mahi (01:09:35):
You can even see in Dubai, Dubai was what? Flatland desert. DJ Khalifa Burj Khallifa  is the biggest one up. And now, I don't know if you guys are familiar with the line in Saudi Arabia, same kind of concept, complete desert. Now there's what, a quarter mile long, two pieces of glass inside a metropolis that is going to be heavily tech-orientated, flying cars, all kinds of weirdness. So if Saudi's doing stuff like that, at what point do the outbound agencies or even tech companies realize we've got to kind of adopt the same kind of thing?
Chris Beall (01:10:08):
For sure.
Shane Mahi (01:10:08):
Who is that going to be? Chris, Chris and Corey. Who do you guys have your eyes out on in those markets who are going to be those game changers, those market shapers for AI and tech in our space?
Chris Beall (01:10:22):
Who I don't know. I don't know and I don't care. I don't know and I don't care. I know who the big early winner is going to be with ai. This is actually fairly simple. Microsoft pulled off a trick that nobody even thought of and that trick was to invest 10 billion to get an unlimited royalty free forever license to not only the tech, but all the learning that goes into it, all the training. That was a very good trick because they've always been in the business of helping folks build new things. And the most obvious thing about all this gen AI stuff isn't what it does to sales, which is trivial. It's what it does to what used to be called software development. Software development essentially is in the same state right now as a sugar cube is in a hot cup of tea. You can be pretty sure that game is over right now.
#9: EP216: Conversations, The Kryptonite of MarTech?
Yeah. Is there a natural aversion to that or is it just Occam's razor where it's too simple? Or they're going about a complex formula, methodology, and technology pathway. When you forget to dance with who you are, what are my prospects? What are my people in my TAM saying, what are the people in my ICP? What do they want? What pain do I solve? And gosh, if I could just have a conversation, not send them a survey, not send them an email, but actually have a conversation that can open up these veins of trust that that's the key versus carpet bombing them with content, with white papers, with Gartner magic quadrants, and there's no dialogue there. That's monologue,
Chris Beall (15:20):
Right? This is kind of the awkwardness that I noticed in the entire thing. I'd asked this question, what if you could just talk to people? It's like, oh, well, you can't just tell Chris spiel that you can't talk to people. That one doesn't work. You can't go down that road. I'm sorry. No, you can't talk to people. Then it's like, well, but you'd still need, and then they'd tell me that you'd still need, and I tend to agree. I mean, my thing I was telling folks is, look, I think all the digital stuff is fantastic, but why not cheat by starting with the conversation? You can't get enough conversations for it to be worth cheating. And I said, well, isn't go to a SDR or BDR world if you had 40 conversations a day with targets, that's the equivalent of 40 targeted Google ads that caused somebody to go to your website. So that's pretty good right there. What would 40 targeted Google ads to a vice president or whatever you're trying to reach that actually caused them to go to your website, what would that cost? And they generally go like 30, 40 bucks each. Well, that's $1,600 a day without any meetings of value that you're getting from the advertising of just having conversations. Surely you're not paying your BDRs $1,600 a day. There's margin in there.
(16:39):
And the idea that, oh, talking to people could be a form of marketing that is, I think where the edge is. It's almost like, but talking to that's
Corey Frank (16:48):
Interesting
Chris Beall (16:49):
Light or something. If marketing can't include talking to people nowadays,
Corey Frank (16:55):
It's like bottled water. Hey, we're out of water, we're out of bottled water. We're going to die of thirst. Well, what about this little thing called the tap? I tell my kids all the time. It's like, Hey, dad, the ro, and we're awa. It's Arizona. You got springs all over the place. So sometimes I suppose we're trying to overly complicate something where there's conversations all around, but what do you say to that rebuttal if you can't have enough conversations to make the math work? I think you and I would disagree on that, right? But is that where fundamentally the mindset is? Is that Chris? That's cute. You can talk with a couple people, but I'm talking about sending out mass emails and segmentation, and I do more before 7:00 AM than you do all day with a conversation.
Chris Beall (17:37):
Well, I would say that that level of confidence is not what I was seeing at the conference. It was more like this, which is really, that seems unlikely. And I sometimes have my phone with our current statistics just for the day. I could go look at it right now and probably find how many conversations did we connect yesterday? So we have this thing that's called daily dials, and  if I were to look at daily dials, here we go, daily dials, I can probably find some numbers. And this is one of the things that I tend to do is just look at the numbers every morning when I get up. Actually, I'm kind of lazy, so I lie in bed and I reach over for my phone, and here I am looking at the Daily Dials report, and it said that ConnectAndSell customers had 19,352 conversations yesterday.
(18:35):
Not over some vague period of time, but literally yesterday. And out of those, say that they only set 1,679 meetings, and one of our customers sets lots of meetings. They set 983 with just one of their groups. Really, really kind of a good brand. So if I bring this up and I go, well see here, there's this group of folks and it's 242 companies, and they had 19,352 targeted conversations. It's like, yeah, that's them, but not everybody can afford that. And I'm thinking, well, wait. So I talked to somebody who does advertising, saying we wanted to send an ad or have an ad associated with all the online activity, the phone, particularly activity of everybody we talked to. So that'd be 19,432 people a day of everybody our customers talk to. Is that doable? Oh, yeah. And how would that work? Well, it costs you $20,000 a year minimum.
(19:32):
You have to sign up, you have to commit. It's like, well, why? Well, I mean, for $20,000, you'd have a lot of conversations. Yeah. Well, it's just like, it's almost like I'm trying to come up with a good analogy. I love your bottled water analogy.
#8: EP213: Ethical AI Selling - Reality vs Hype
Certainly with your round table that you've talked with a lot of CEOs like Chris, but that authenticity, whereas as humans, we perceive those little subtleties and mood and those complex needs through a simple conversation. And when a tell happens from an ai, either Chris, to your point from a text or a bot, how do you combat that? Is that the racist to get as authentic as possible or because that's where I think the Delta ethics happened. Chris is, wait a minute, I thought you were a real person, but now you're a machine. So Shane, what do you think about that and bridging that gap?
Shane Mahi (00:23:29):
So Chris mentioned it yesterday and it drove a lot of the discussion, which was it's the ability to tell the truth and just being truthful about anything upfront. And I used it when I started, and it comes from the 27 seconds, is the point of inoculation. And it's stating a fact before somebody has that objection. And if you are using any type of artificial intelligence, computer robot, I think the most authentic, genuine thing to do is to tell the truth. And that comes from, Hey, this is a robot, Corey, I'd like to have a conversation with you. If not, would you like to be speaking to a human? You'll then say, sure. The robot then has the advantage of saying, Hey, Corey, it's going to take about five to six minutes to patch you through. I can probably get your questions covered in the next 45 seconds.
(00:24:18):
Do you want to have a chat with me or do you want to have a chat with the next person? And for me, that makes all the difference because time for a ceo, for a business professional is absolutely everything. And the ability to cut out that wasted time is everything. I'll give you a quick example. I called, I mentioned it yesterday, right, Chris? I called Pizza Hut the other day and it took me six minutes to remove onions from my pizza because the guy kept battling from me that I said, you can't just pick the goddamn onions off the pizza. I don't like onions. And it was a nightmare. Now, had a bot just been able to say, Hey, which toppings would you like to add or remove if any? Just remove onions. My pizza's at the door in 10, 15 minutes. And for me, again, the truth allows that time to be shortened, which gives you more opportunity to take care of other things that are most important in your life.
(00:25:13):
And another thing that I think is really important, I just watched it the other day, and that point you made on authenticity and being genuine and the truth. Mackinac, I'm sure you both have seen that. I had no idea. I think Sam Altman is an ex Mackinac that's swear God, because when that person, the robot locked the door, obviously it's playing with the guy. I'm a sucker for women, absolute sucker for women. So if I was in one of those situations and they were manipulating me without knowing it and putting the love spot, well, were you really interested in me? He's lying to you, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, to get out. That is where everything changes for me. And now after seeing that movie, I'm wondering, Chris is very smart, Cora, you are very smart. Are you going to start peeling off your skin one day and saying the same thing to me?
Corey Frank (00:26:11):
Well, but I think that's part of it. It's a brilliant point. I love the trust thing
#7: EP208: Balancing Relationships and Efficiency in AI Sales
(8) If there's skepticism or resistance from sales teams or clients towards AI tools like ChatGPT, how do you recommend addressing these concerns?
Well, a couple of different ways. There will always be skepticism about new technology. There should be. New technology means new, it's unproven. We're not sure what it does. Really, really cool technology that makes you think something that's not actually true. Like, hey, ChatGPT is a person who's talking to me. That's not actually true. Hey, ChatGPT is thinking about this. That's not actually true. It's the next engine. It knows a lot of stuff that it's read so to speak, and it knows how to spit out the next token, think token word, very similar concepts. And so when ChatGPT is talking to us so to speak, it's really just going next, next, next. Now maybe our minds work like this too, and our voices work like this. 
Chris Beall (18:52):
I have a feeling we do a lot of next, next, next, ourselves. It's just the way the world is. We love to think that we're really brilliant, having deep, deep thoughts and all that. Probably not. We're probably just spitting out the next word that comes to mind. That's why we call it. And so its natural skepticism is natural. The way skepticism is overcome is through two things. One is transparency, it let's be open about things. And the other is track record. So if the track record is good, and we note that over time some particular function, and I'll go back to those conversations where you take a discovery meeting, and the AI compresses it down to 10 points. Well, the first time I read one I might think maybe it's missing some things. By the time I've read a hundred of them, which only takes me a hundred minutes that I might've spread over a couple of weeks, I'm starting to go, Hey, I think this is pretty good. 
Chris Beall (19:47):
I don't have any big misses yet. But it just takes time. It takes time, and it takes experience. This is why the most skeptical people who are really, really smart plunge in and start experiencing what I call in anger or with an intent for a meaningful outcome, a new technology that is clearly as powerful as ChatGPT and all the things that are like it. So if you haven't gotten in there and put your hands on it, so to speak, and made some mistakes, try writing some prompts and seeing what happens. Don't just do the same thing over and over. Your skepticism only will go away appropriately and correctly with experience that leads to a track record because now you kind of know where the landmines are. 
How about question number nine, future trends. 
#6: EP209: Your Only Product Is the Meeting
(Not this one - it's another short compilation episode)
#5: EP214: The Future of Sales: Balancing AI and Authenticity
We picked the most lovely industry to go into, and that's telemarketing and cold prospecting. And what was it? And the only reason that I was able to get to the truth faster was because read about Daniel Disney when the pandemic hit found, cog found ConnectAndSell, bought Cog, bought ConnectAndSell, spoke with Gerry, did Flight Scool, had seven meetings in six hours, and that's where it started. It was the ability to have your script, be honest, open, and just get into those conversations. And by doing that fast, quickly, efficiently, and at scale, we were able to progress our business much faster, I think, than a lot of people. We actually had 444% growth from year one to year two from using ConnectAndSell and implementing a system called the Entrepreneurial Operating System™ by Gino Wickman.
(00:35:15):
Now the authenticity of our brand, and even what is happening right now, came from all of the mistakes we made. And those are typically our storytelling, selling mechanisms, the mistakes we made and the path we took got us to a place where we made all those mistakes, learned everything, and served customers. I obviously lost my business because of some bad decisions I had to let go of my business, A lot of bad decisions. But I've recreated my business. That took me three years in three months with the use of ChatGPT. And why is it because I prompted all of my problems, all of my stakes helped me build a business plan that bypasses these mistakes and gives me the outcomes I'm looking for in half the time. And in that now, my marketing, my messaging, emails, prospecting, research, everything that, again, like you said, rightfully so, anything in the future is anxiety.
(00:36:12):
Anything in the past is regret. The only thing that matters is right, right now. And what's happening right, right now is yes, you better get on board because AI is happening. As much as you are worried about what can happen 5, 10, 15 years in the future, that shit is going to happen whether you like it or not. So it's either get ahead of the curve or get with the curve, or you are going to be that. They're just bums, bums who want to stay behind and complain and say, this is going to ruin me. This is going to take my job. Get with the program, dude, get with the program. Start using it. I was a novice, an absolute novice using ChatGPT when it first came out. The only thing that drew my attention was a hundred million users in one week for that alone. I was like, all right, let me see what this is about. I'm a novice still to this day, but the amount of times I've set up till three in the morning, six, seven hours, prompting, prompting, prompting to the point, the only reason I went to bed is because it said, you've maxed out your attempts. You can't use us anymore.
Corey Frank (00:37:13):
You finished the internet, you exhausted ChatGPT. 
Shane Mahi (00:37:18):
That’s right, and that happened multiple times. And my knowledge comes, which is why I believe podcasts, even to the education of AI and ethics and sales and marketing, everything behind it has come from listening and watching podcasts. That's the only reason I was able to learn.
#4: EP212: Reps Dread It, Managers Avoid It: Coaching
CLIP 1:
So that's really key to getting coaching to work. The coaching has got to be immediate. Most coaching is way, way, way, way too late. Coaching somebody on Friday I about a performance they had on Monday, don't bother. It's just not going to get anything done. This is where I think managers often confuse what I'll call deal work with coaching. They think that they're coaching, they're actually talking through how a deal might go, what some tactics and techniques might be, and they get an agreement from the rep to do something better, different whatever in the next interaction that they have with the prospect. And that feels like coaching, that's more like advising and it's nice and it's important unless it's just war stories. But coaching is really to improve performance and you need to have the performance and the coaching and the performance and the coaching be very close to each other in time. 
Chris Beall (16:28):
Minutes are okay, not very many minutes, hours are too long and a week may as well be forever.
CLIP 2:
got to have a chance of listening for the same thing over and over. So it's really, really important to do it. But most of what's called coaching isn't really coaching, it's kind of advising it's too far after the fact. 
So if you can figure out ways, be listening behind the scenes, coming in and whispering to somebody immediately after a conversation and helping them perform that little bit better on first failure, you'll find over time that and fairly short amount of time that what you're hoping for in the bottom line, which is conversion rates, small number of conversations, leads to a bigger number of meetings, and a larger number of meetings are being set per rep hour, which is the key number. You'll find that stuff improves on its own. So start from the beginning, you'll get to the end. Eventually, you'll get some great results
#3: EP211: Conversations Convert to Pipeline Power
Because let me tell you, if you think you know, you're fooling yourself, you're fooling yourself. If you aren't getting feedback from the market through conversations at a short enough cycle time and a high enough frequency, you're just guessing and your problem is competitively, somebody else might choose not to guess. And I think Helen's going to help her clients choose not to guess. 
Corey Frank (08:33):
And so with that, the helping knuckleheads like me choose not to guess. Where do you start, Helen, right? I'm a small mid-size VP of sales. I have a decent patient board. I have a SaaS software product. I got some funding. I think I'm doing everything right. I have enough people, I get more people as soon as I start proving myself and go to the board. So I think I'm doing okay, but where would I start with something like this? With people's power? 
Helen Fanucci (09:05):
I would start by looking at the data that you currently have in your CRM system or whatever your system of record is to find out one, where you're winning, who you're winning with, what types of people are making the buying decisions as a business. You may or may not already know. That depends on how you have been crawling through your own data. So I'd start there to look at the current state and try to draw some conclusions or at least illuminate where resources are aligned and are they aligned to where you're currently winning or are they misaligned? So I would start looking at the current state to build a hypothesis of what you could do more of to accelerate your revenue, and it might be repositioning some resources to an industry that you're doing well at or trying to then going to find people. Let's say you have some folks that make the decision, so you have some champions or economic buyers, what do they have in common across each other? 
Helen Fanucci (10:24):
And I don't just mean job titles, but the characteristics. You can look on LinkedIn and see what the characteristics of those and then go find some more like that within a defined addressable market or where you think you want to go. I think some of those things are places to start. This begins to get the closed loop feedback here. You have data, you have some results and dispositions from your go-to market, even if it's closed loss or not now, not interested, what have you. So trying to apply current data to then make some recommendations of how to move forward. The other thing too is what information do you have or that you capture that's proprietary to you? Because they can't build a defendable market dominance position on publicly available information. So what is it that you're collecting or that's proprietary and how do you get more of that that's relevant to your business? And I don't know if that's something in my experience anyway, that's not really a deliberate thing that people put. Time sort of happens and some people have more insights into their customer set, but doing that in an organized fashion to build up insights that your competitors don't have, or at least that's proprietary to you, makes a lot of sense and differentiating yourself and defending your position in the market. 
#2: EP210: Sales Targeting Beyond LinkedIn and Navigator
Helen Fanucci (22:01):
One of the things that was interesting is this idea of territory assignments, and we have a rep that has a locked in territory and people, I guess feel a comfort zone with that versus well, okay, here you have maybe 10 accounts, but all the other unnamed accounts are fair game and they go to whoever gets a meeting in those accounts. It's so interesting to see how anxious or irritated people are by having an open territory concept. It's like everyone wants to have their patch defined, locked down so they can pursue it as they wish. So is that going smaller and smaller? It probably is, and it was just fascinating to me to observe the dynamics around that and the discomfort with having all these accounts that were fair game for anyone to go after. I wonder if you have seen that much in what your thoughts are about that, but when you talked about the shrinking world or shrinking view, that's kind of what I was thinking about is, yeah, you can zero in, but then you lose sight of what's possible where you're not looking. 
Corey Frank (23:21):
Yeah, it's funny. I think it's probably the same reason why a lot of sales reps have the security of a bloated pipeline. They can't disqualify folks in this particular quarter. Hope Springs eternal that this person will always close for this angst, this fear that if I keep sending them touch base emails, not picking up a call and having a conversation, not promoting something new, that I'm seeing what's happening in the world from 40,000 feet that's relevant or German to them. But if I simply do touch base emails, which is the equivalent of did you decide on choosing me and giving me your money yet? Or is there a better option that's out there? But that's why pipelines remain large. I can see that there is certainly from the team that all three of us collectively and Broaden knows we're a sales organization. The bigger, the more states I have, and Chris, you and I have talked about this when it comes to people too, if you're a sales manager, the more people I have under my purview, under my fiefdom, certainly the more prominent I am, I guess the more secure I feel. You probably saw this a lot at some of the larger companies you were with Helen, right? Is how many headcounts are under your particular p and l, and that somehow is a status thing. 
Helen Fanucci (24:33):
Well, it's power. You have more resources as a sales leader. You don't have a budgeta compared to headcount. So headcount is more resources. It is a version of power to be able to get bigger revenue, bigger quotas, because headcount always comes with bigger quotas. The more headcount, the more quota. So if you're willing to take that on, great. Why not?
#1: EP145: Building Trust Must Always Be Step One
(not this one - this was a small topic compilation episode that continues to be their top episode for over a year!)

In our brave new AI-augmented world, navigating tech integration while retaining that human trust factor remains a tricky balancing act.
So who better to provide expert guidance than our sage of sales, Chris Beall? Today our very own ChatGPT steps in as co-host for Corey to pepper Chris across the AI-sales trust landscape. Should we unleash these bots to comb leads? How do we mitigate client skepticism? Does transparency enhance trust? Chris distills hard-earned wisdom on these questions and more.
From specific use cases in training and process efficiency to ethical dilemmas around transparency, you’ll gain critical insights for smoothly integrating AI without severing those all-important human connections. Chris even gazes into the future, weighing engaging versus alienating roles for our robot friends.
Chris offers actionable advice so we can deploy AI judiciously while cementing bonds of respect and rapport. Time to bridge that tech-touch gap in this episode, Balancing Relationships and Efficiency in AI Sales
 
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Below:
Chris Beall  (00:14):
Hey everybody, this is Chris Beall, CEO of ConnectAndSell. And today I am not joined by Corey Frank, my co-host. Corey runs the awesome company, branch 49, in addition to many other things, finishing school for future CEOs by providing folks who want to be great professionals in the world of business with the opportunity to learn how to talk to strangers by cold calling them. So I asked chat GPT today to come up with 10 questions to play the role of Corey and kind of interview me Now, poor chat, GPT doesn't get to listen to the answers. I could probably have it do that, but I'm not going to do that. But I asked it to give us an opportunity to talk about a topic that is near and dear to me, which is the relationship between trust and efficiency in B2B sales in the era of chat GBT. 
Chris Beall  (01:12):
And there's a lot of speculation out there as to where all this is going. I've been fairly immersed in AI for a long time, since 1992 in fact, and certainly am delighted that we have the ability to get to the next level with ChatGPT and all the GPT-4 stuff. And it does lots and lots of neat things. Many people speculate on what it might be able to do in sales, replace salespeople and so forth. I thought I'd explore just this one question, which is how about trust and efficiency? Are they actually at opposite ends of the spectrum? That is if we ramp up efficiency too far in B2B sales, do we ramp down trust or is there a case to be made for trust and efficiency actually working together in B2B sales. Now, just to remind my view of B2B sales, pretty simple. We need to establish ourselves with somebody else, another human being as an expert in a matter that's important to them and as on their side. 
Chris Beall  (02:18):
If we can do that, we become what's called a trusted advisor. And a trusted advisor has a lot of freedom to get good information, quality information from another party so that they can bring their own expertise to bear and guide the process of coming up with a potential solution to a business problem that can result in a commercial transaction between the seller's business they work for and the buyer business, the one they work for. So trust is super important, but efficiency is important too because there's a question of, well, who are we going to sell to? There's a lot of folks out there we could talk to. Most of them will not be ready to 
Chris Beall (02:58):
Buy in the near term, even if they fundamentally need our offering, and most of them probably don't need our offering if we're at all specialized. I happen to work for a company called ConnectAndSell that provides something that lots of B2B companies need, but not all of them need it to the same degree. And so we have an efficiency problem just like everybody else. How do you efficiently go through the market and find the folks that are worth exploring with further, this is why the end of every sales interaction or the outcome of every sales interaction is the same. It answers the question, should we mutually decide to go down the road further together? So I asked chat GPT to play host Corey. It is standing in for you right now. And here's its first question.
 
Chris, could you start by giving us a brief overview of how chat GT and similar AI technologies are currently being integrated into B2B sales processes? 
Chris Beall (03:56):
Well, one place we know they're being integrated into B2B sales processes is in conversational intelligence. Almost every conversational intelligence technology now, and in technologies like the one I'm using here Zoom video, I've got the ability to summarize conversations using a GPT model. What does that really give us in B2B sales? Well, one thing it gives us is time compression. If I'm a manager and I'm trying to understand how are all the deals going, I can talk to my reps and have one-on-ones, I can have one-on manys where we do some pipeline review or deal review, all of those things are available, but if I could take every 30-minute conversation and have it compressed down to me into 10 relevant points that I can rely on, I can actually learn what's going well, and also where it might be worth bringing some other resources to bear, whether they're technical resources, whether it's a senior executive, whether it's some brainstorming, other resources might be worth bringing in at a certain point. 
Chris Beall (05:07):
And these technologies are awfully good at this. So they're helping us be managers to participate more in the sales process without interfering in it. And it's really an efficiency play. Now the efficiency comes from taking a 15, 20, 30 minute conversation, maybe longer compressing it down to 10 relevant points that can be read in about one to two minutes. So that's call it 30 to one compression of time. And that means as a manager, if I had time for say 10% of all the conversations that are happening to come into my brain, so to speak, I now have time for a hundred percent and it only takes 30% of my day. So it's quite an amazing breakthrough. And how does it speak to trust? Well, it's kind of interesting. We need to trust that GPT compressor that took the information from a 30-minute conversation and the transcription engine that gave that information to the GPT engine for analysis. 
Chris Beall (06:14):
We need to trust that it's kind of getting the whole thing that is, we wouldn't want to find out, oh, it gave me kind of a vanilla compression or a vanilla list and there's a disaster going on in there and I didn't notice it because once we rely on something like a piece of technology to help us out, it can often introduce blind spots. This happens quite literally when you're driving old-fashioned car mirrors, you have a blind spot right next to you, but you're relying on the mirror to tell you who's right next to you and you can make certain kinds of errors more frequently. So that's a place anyway where these technologies are being used in a very efficient way. They're also being used to write, I'll call it better emails. And I don't mean these automated emails that are being sent out effectively as spam, let's just face it too many, many folks. 
Chris Beall (07:10):
But really just writing better than most reps. Let's face it, most sales reps did not grow up as readers and writers. Some did, but most are better talkers and listeners. And so having an assistant, a co-pilot as they're called to actually draft an email for you to do it in a professional way and to do it in what it thinks is your voice, it's dynamite, saves a lot of time for the rep, but that's not mostly the time. The rep can maybe get to the point of trusting that technology to frankly write better than the rep does. It's certainly more efficient. So let's go into the second question. So ChatGPT or Corey in stand-in mode here is asking me.
 
(2) In your experience, how has the incorporation of AI like ChatGPT affected the level of trust between sales professionals and their B2B clients? 
 
I would say not at all in the case where trust is actually being established, but I think it has kind of fooled a lot of sales professionals into thinking that they can generate trust in a mechanical way by having some AI write lots and lots of very clever emails, very wonderful emails and just send 'em out to folks. 
Chris Beall (08:29):
And somehow, that will generate trust-level relationships. I don't believe it. I still believe that there are those seven seconds that we have in an ambush call or a cold call to get trust, and that has to do with how people work on the inside. So if I read something that may have been generated by a bot, and I know that's true of everything that comes my way at this point, it affects the level of trust immediately because I think, well, why would I trust a vendor's bot? I know what its job is. Oddly enough, I will actually be more inclined to trust a salesperson that I know is a person, but how do I know that that's a person? Well, I can't know it through a bunch of texts that's on the screen an email. I need to actually be speaking with that person and they need to be acting like themselves, so to speak. 
Chris Beall (09:20):
So even if they were replaced with a bot, it'd have to be a really, really good bot. It's not enough to fool me into think it's a person. It has to enable me to comfortably say, yes, this is this person and by the way, get me to the point where I believe they're an expert and they're on my side. 
So how about efficiency improvements? 
 
This is question number three that chat GPT came up with playing the role of Corey Frank, 
 
3) Can you provide specific examples of how AI tools made B2B sales processes more efficient coaching?
No difficulty coming up with an example or two. I've already given one of them. I think there are more to come. I believe we'll actually get to the point where AI tools will help us look for how a whole team is doing or how a campaign is doing right now. 
Chris Beall (10:10):
It seems to be very much one at a time. Here's a conversation, analyze the conversation, take a look. What about analyzing all the conversations or a bunch of conversations that fits some criteria or finding the challenges that are thematic within a team's efforts to reach out to the market? Do we really know who our message is resonating with in ways that one of these AI models can pay attention to? These things are tremendous at finding patterns within vast amounts of detail. So that would make it more efficient to find out who to talk to or more efficient to find out where our own team is challenged or those kinds of things. Bigger chunks I would call it. So those are some examples. By today. Most of it is conversation at a time or doing some writing and also doing some research for us. So if we are out trying to do some research before a conversation, a meeting that we're having with somebody, certainly AI can help us a lot because it reads faster than we do. 
Chris Beall (11:17):
It's probably already read about this person. But one thing for sure, and this is about trust, remember GPT technologies hallucinate facts. So if you rely on facts that have come back from an interaction, a chat with a GPT technology, you probably are going to be brought up short someday. This is why lawyers have been caught recently trying to use ChatGPT and similar technologies to generate citations, legal citations, and they'll use them confidently and it turns out well, it wasn't a citation, it was a hallucination.
 
Alright, so next question from our virtual bot named Corey Frank,  
(4 )How do you see companies balancing the use of AI with the need for human interaction in sales? Is there a sweet spot? 
 
Well, let's work the other way around on this one. The need for human interaction in sales is absolute because of what I already said, which is we need to establish ourselves as the seller, as an expert who is on the other person's side. 
Chris Beall (12:24):
We can afford to be on their side. We're the expert after all, they're the buyer. They're a generalist about what we are an expert on. So is there a sweet spot with regard to using AI? All of research is a sweet spot because the AI can lead us to understanding things about the world that would be too expensive for us to go find out, like who should we be talking to or what's going on in this particular field? Or there's some new developments that we should be paying attention to and so forth. So AI is great for research, great for drafting, but we have to be a little careful in final form. So proposals, sure, draft a proposal, you GPT model, but am I going to s end it off without taking a look at it? No. It actually implies that there's going to be other human interactions kind of to check that what the AI is producing is accurate and compliant, which is also a big issue. 
Chris Beall (13:22):
Well, how about in sales training? How can, this is question number five. 
(5) How can Che GPT and similar technologies be used in training sales teams to enhance their efficiency while maintaining trust with clients? 
 
Well, one thing you can do with the GPT model is make a simulator that plays the role of a client. And certainly, if you're working off an awful lot of client responses, which are all out there for almost every kind of product in the world, getting a simulator out of a GPT model is pretty straightforward and chat is a very natural way to do it. Now I'll give you the caveat on this, which is when it comes to establishing trust with the human voice, the human voice is a human voice, not a human keyboard. So you can simulate by going back and forth using your fingers. You can also do it using speech-to-text, but it's the sound of your voice that is crucial, especially in those first few seconds. It's actually always crucial, and it may well be that, fairly soon, these AI models can listen to the sound of our voice and give us feedback as to how trustworthy we sound. That would be a wonderful thing. Right now, they're not quite there. They're fairly easy to kind of fool into thinking that we sound wonderful. It's very subtle what human beings pick up on with regard to trust. I've often said people are to trust or 
Chris Beall (14:51):
As wolves are to fear, they can smell it. And if you're not trustworthy folks, they can so to speak, smell it in your voice. I know that sounds weird, I'm not talking about some synthesia either. So how about ethical considerations? What are this? 
(6) Question number six, What are some ethical considerations the companies should keep in mind when deploying AI in their sales process? 
There is one, keep this in mind. If your bot is talking to a client, it needs to say it's a bot. That's pretty simple. Transparency is always the way to get to a high level of ethics, and I have a bad feeling there's going to be a lot of folks saying, well, that wasn't me. That was my bot after the fact. Instead of saying it upfront, you got to be upfront. So that's a big, big ethical consideration. Another one is, if your bot or your AI is giving advice, expert advice, you better make sure it's actually expert advice because you take on a little bit of what I would call kind of a Hippocratic stance. 
Chris Beall (16:01):
That is, first you do no harm. When you advise somebody, you have to be conscious of the harm you might be potentially doing to them when they follow your advice. And so, just blindly saying, Hey, the advice from my GPT model is just go ahead and follow it without having it checked. It's not just a problem that you might not be trusted. You might be committing a pretty serious ethical breach. 
 
Alright, so how about question number seven. 
(7) From your perspective, how do B2B clients generally perceive the use of AI and sales interactions? Does it enhance or diminish trust? 
Chris Beall (16:44):
It depends. If you give me something that you say was generated by your AI, by your chatbot or by your GPT model and you say, Hey, I had the GPT model whip this up for you and I took a look at it, it looks pretty good to me. Let's discuss. No worries at all. In fact, it might enhance trust because you're being open and transparent about using your technology, this technology to be more efficient and to bring in maybe other points of view or to digest more data that might be useful to the client. So in that case, I think you can enhance trust. I think destroying trust is really, really easy. I think I just hit on it in the previous answer, which is, hey, ask somebody to trust a piece of automation that you're providing and don't tell them that it's automation. That one is going to cause not an erosion of trust, but a step function down from some number, probably not quite one if one is the highest number but to zero, and once trust is lost, it is not something you can go and get back. 
Chris Beall (17:52):
So how about skepticism this question number eight,
(8) If there's skepticism or resistance from sales teams or clients towards AI tools like ChatGPT, how do you recommend addressing these concerns?
Well, a couple of different ways. There will always be skepticism about new technology. There should be. New technology means new, it's unproven. We're not sure what it does. Really, really cool technology that makes you think something that's not actually true. Like, hey, ChatGPT is a person who's talking to me. That's not actually true. Hey, ChatGPT is thinking about this. That's not actually true. It's a next engine. It knows a lot of stuff that it's read so to speak, and it knows how to spit out the next token think token word, very similar concepts. And so when ChatGPT is talking to us so to speak, it's really just going next, next, next. Now maybe our minds work like this too, and our voices work like this. 
Chris Beall (18:52):
I have a feeling we do a lot of next, next, next, ourselves. It's just the way the world is. We love to think that we're really brilliant, having deep, deep thoughts and all that. Probably not. We're probably just spitting out the next word that comes to mind. That's why we call it comes to mind. And so it's natural skepticism is natural. The way skepticism is overcome is through two things. One is transparency, it let's be open about things. And the other is track record. So if the track record is good, and we note that over time some particular function, and I'll go back to those conversations where you take a discovery meeting, and the AI compresses it down to 10 points. Well, the first time I read one I might think maybe it's missing some things. By the time I've read a hundred of them, which only takes me a hundred minutes that I might've spread over a couple of weeks, I'm starting to go, Hey, I think this is pretty good. 
Chris Beall (19:47):
I don't have any big misses yet. But it just takes time. It takes time, and it takes experience. This is why the most skeptical people who are really, really smart plunge in and start experiencing what I call in anger or with an intent for a meaningful outcome, a new technology that is clearly as powerful as ChatGPT and all the things that are like it. So if you haven't gotten in there and put your hands on it, so to speak, and made some mistakes, try writing some prompts and seeing what happens. Don't just do the same thing over and over. Your skepticism only will go away appropriately and correctly with experience that leads to track record because now you kind of know where the landmines are. 
How about question number nine, future trends. 
(9) Looking ahead, how do you think the role of AI and B2B sales will evolve? What new developments should we expect?
I think the main developments we should expect are around efficiency. We will get much, much more efficient in B2B sales when two things happen. One is we have a better idea of who to talk to, who to go out and have conversations with that is very efficient. Secondly, we will be able to efficiently assess new people coming onto our team, assess performance of people on our team and help them get better. There's a lot of detailed information and patterns that can be detected, and those can be detected in meetings so they can be detected in targeting or in messages and we will be able to bring that stuff together much, much more efficiently so that we can generate trust more frequently. And if you think about B2B from a sales perspective, it's essentially the manufacturing and management of a portfolio of trust. So first, you have to be worthy of trust; okay, that might be the hard part. 
Chris Beall (21:48):
But once you're worthy of trust, are you being trusted by enough folks who might be able to take advantage in a good way of what it is that you provide? Probably not. I see AI, this GPT type, as being able to help us sift through, make sense out of detect patterns in larger amounts of data with different data sources so that we'll just do a better job of having the right people talk to the right people often enough and generate more trust because that's how it works over time and do so efficiently. So, allowing the generation of trust efficiently I think is going to be the main role of AI for quite a while in the world of B2B. And then finally, advice for sales leaders number 10. So Corey, here you are being played by ChatGPT who asked the final question.
 
(10) Finally, what advice would you give to sales leaders looking to integrate AI into their strategies without compromising on the trust and personal connection that's vital in B2B sales? 
Chris Beall (22:53):
Well, my advice is kind of always the same, and I know people might get a little bored with it, but it is what it is; that is you're trying to essentially pave a market with trust. A market is a list of people that if any one of them decides to do business with you, it reduces your cost and risk of doing business with every single other person. And therefore, their are companies in that market. Now that is not an oversimplification, but it hides some things like the flow of people through that list. Some come on, some go off, they retire, they go to new companies, they do all sorts of things. So there's a lot that goes on. And usually your market is not defined very, I'll say, coherently. That is markets normally are simply made up. Oh, we're going to sell to all industrial companies who have more than a thousand employees who are located in these states or something like that. 
Chris Beall (23:51):
That's a kind of target market that you can think of, but it's not a true target market because it doesn't follow the rule that we were just talking about. So okay, so I got this market out there. Now what's my advice? Well, you had to pave the market with trust, but you have to do that both in a targeted way and a little bit of a promiscuous way. That is you have to take the current opportunity and you have to identify it targeted, not just among those who might need what you offer, but among those who are more likely to need it. So we're going to have more application of AI to determine different levels of intent. Now we tend to determine intent from something super simple, which is, oh, they visited a website or they went to G2Crowd or whatever it happens to be, right? 
Chris Beall (24:41):
Action indicates intent. Well, there's a lot of other ways that folks express intent, mostly through investment and mostly maybe about investment in people. So there's going to be a lot to be done with regard to paying attention to how you can identify the folks that you need to pay attention to in the market while also helping the 11 twelfths of your market that's not in market right now be more accessible and that you understand more about them and more favorably inclined to think that you are somebody they can trust to be an expert in an area they care about and that you're on their side. 
So just by sticking to those principles, then we are very free to use these technologies in creative ways. When we abandon those principles, we enter the danger zone and we're probably not going to do too well. So I just want to thank my virtual Corey Frank here, ChatGPT for asking. 
Chris Beall (25:42):
I answered these questions. I think they're pretty sharp questions. Did ChatGPT think them up per se? No, it responded to a prompt. 
Here's the prompt, 
 
please play the role of Corey Frank, co-host of the podcast Market Dominance Guys, you will be interviewing Chris Beall on the topic “the relationship between trust and efficiency and B2B sales and the era of ChatGPT”. Please generate 10 questions for Chris to answer. So Corey may well be a next engine himself and spit out questions like this one word at a time. I think he probably goes into a little bit deeper conceptual well than ChatGPT. But ChatGPT, you did a pretty darn good job there. I really appreciate it. And until next time, for Corey Frank, this is Chris Beall, Market Dominance Guys.
 

Discovery calls are typically auditory-only affairs, but this episode of Market Dominance Guys reminds us that we are physical beings having a full-person experience. As Chris emphasizes, you don't converse with a brain in a jar, so why disconnect your body from the persuasive power of discovery? From micro-prancing, to miming props, to the hepatic value of gestures and pauses, your physical presence profoundly impacts connection, emphasis, and revelation. Body language not only expresses what pure words cannot, but it heightens the musicality and truth-emergence Chris describes as “letting the silence breathe.” So start envisioning your prospects, get your blood pumping, and bring your whole self into alignment with the call. It’s time to let your full-bodied discovery create breathing space for truth. What non-verbal techniques will you incorporate next call?
This is a continuation of last week's discussion with Henry Wojdyla and Shawn Sease. You can listen to the previous episode here.
EP206: Mastering the Art of Silence How Pauses Can Improve Discovery
Links from this episode:
Shawn Sease on LinkedInHenry Wojdyla on LinkedInCorey Frank on LinkedInChris Beall on LinkedIn
Branch49ConnectAndSell
 
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Below:
 
Corey Frank (00:00):
Chris, I know you and fetching Ms. Fanucci got back from a recent trip to the wine country in the south of France, and I think you told me a few stories about how certain wines need to breathe after they're open differently than others. And Henry, it sounds like what you're trying to teach us here is that there are certain questions that you can just let, is there a French term for that, Chris, that breathing? What's the wine? 
Chris Beall (00:24):
My French sucks, but it is ironic when you think about it, right? I think this actually is a pretty APTT analogy you've brought up. The wine is corked so that it almost doesn't breathe. It actually breathes a little bit. This why real corks are considered to be important in some kinds of wines because there's a little oxidation that needs to go on over a long period of time. There's a little breathing, but then you went a lot of breathing reasonably fast. I have no idea what that is called In French, my French got better after 21 tastings one morning before lunch, and then we climbed a mountain together that it was really quite fluent, I'm sure at that point. But I don't think I knew how to talk about this, but it is really something. I mean, this is true in music also. The silences are where the music has actually heard, so to speak, when you're learning to play. 
Chris Beall (01:13):
Henry is a musical person. He's been involved in this sort of stuff too. When you're learning to play as a little kid, the rest don't mean nothing to you. And when somebody's a virtuoso, the rests are everything. It's the timing of the silence and the precision of the silence that allows the listener to become part of the music. And that's what you're really looking for in discovery is you want the other person to become a producer of the music of these truths that are coming out and you're working together on them as shunts. I love that. We're going to do this together. We're not going to do it. I think that's not so much of a command, like I'm setting up a set of conditions. Either you do this with me or we're not going to do it. It's a statement of fact. Either we're going to do it together or we're not going to do it, as in we're not really going to get it done. 
Chris Beall (02:02):
We're just going to kind of sound like we're getting it done or act like we're getting it done. And getting to the bottom of stuff is quite difficult with folks. It takes pregnant pauses. I mean, pregnant pauses give birth at some point, and sometimes they give birth to stuff that's pretty magnificent to something new and it's the hardest thing we love to fill in. You imagine a podcast, say we ran the podcast like this, Corey, you ask a question. We all just sit here and look at the audience for, I don't know, 30 or 40 seconds. 
Corey Frank (02:34):
Yeah, yeah. Take off the glasses once in a while, right? We've talked about that here at branches is the world of hepatic and NLP, and I know we have to cut you loose here in a minute, Henry, for a seven or eight, nine or figure deal here that you're pursuing. But can you use those verbal disfluencies, the hepatic, the pregnant pauses to take off your glasses and lean forward as if we were together where there's a figurative me reaching out just slightly touching your knee as I take off my glasses and leaning forward a good doctor would like a good therapist would, and tell you what I think. And with the deep baritone with the late-night FM DJ voice that our friend Chris Vos talks about, there's a musicality of that glorious bastards, right? One of my favorite scenes is towards the end when they're trying to impersonate, they're an Italian film crew. 
Corey Frank (03:25):
We all remember it. Christophe Waltz knows that they're not Italian, but he has them introduce themselves name by name, and he says, what's your name? And is his Antonio Margarita or whatever his name is? Well, say it again. Let the music flow. He says, let the music of your name flow. And I just thought that was incredible that there's certain words that you can enunciate and Henry's got a great tone. I could listen to Henry read the phone book Vincent Price, and you have Christopher Lee and there's one that will post to this that I tagged Yuan, a LinkedIn post from a gentleman who I thought had, what an incredible novel way to introduce himself. His name is Andrea Kliman. Chris, I don't know if you saw that. Ronan a good friend, Ronan Ssar, but his intro, the gentleman, and you remember this call Shawn. It was all pushed forward by his tone. 
Corey Frank (04:19):
It was very novel, it was very serendipitous and it wreaked of authenticity because of that and the trust he had me, and I've never heard an intro like this before. We'll link it to this podcast here so people can hear of it. Then I did while you were talking, Henry and Chris, I think my French sucks too, but the appropriate term is eon, I guess to aeration. And so I think we said Eon de latia. So the Wtia method is to ask a question and to just let it breathe and let it aate. Let ruminate. 
Henry Wojdyla (04:56):
You're making it sound far more eloquent than it probably really is since you've mentioned a few names. Someone for me is a more recent discovery. I'm sure you're been aware of him for some time. And Corey, he's in your neck of the woods there in Scottsdale that really I think has some good thinking and training around this is Jeremy Minor. I'm assuming you're familiar with Jeremy. Don't know what your thoughts are there. Not really tremendously get into it, but I've just found some of his thinking around it. Helpful. At least for me. 
Corey Frank (05:20):
He uses hepatic a lot where he'll use the props, right? Henry of take it off his sunglasses and emphasizing, and we have Chris and Shawn Miller. We have a lot of standup desks and I'm Sicilian, so I have to talk with my hands and I have to have a prop in my hands at all times. And so I think maybe the last thought, Chris and Shawn and Henry for you, certainly as you're dealing with high stakes deals is things and props and pacing mechanisms. You do the micro prancing, Chris, which I'm sure keeps you on pace for your phone calls, but maybe we'll put a bow in it and go around the horn between Henry and Chris and Shawn here on your go-to techniques. If I'm a new sales rep and I don't employ just fluencies or tonality or I'm not aware of my tonality or I don't use props or micro, give me your one go-to that I should have in my arsenal as a new sales rep when I'm doing discovery. So Shawn, let's start with you. 
Shawn Sease (06:12):
I got here. I'm afraid if I say something, I'm going to steal Chris's thunder because I've been mentoring under him for so long that I might say something that I learned from him. 
Chris Beall (06:21):
Don't worry, Shawn, I ain't going to run out of thunder anytime soon. 
Shawn Sease (06:24):
Yeah, yeah, go ahead Chris. 
Chris Beall (06:28):
Well, I was on somebody else's podcast yesterday and we're talking about language thinking and speaking. What happens when we speak and we tend to be very abstract about these concepts. We act as though we might be chat GPT, and it's just one word after another coming out. We add the disfluencies, we add the tonality, we start to sing, and we think that we're doing that with our brain and maybe some little part of our voice box or something like that. I truly believe that we think with our whole body and we've never walked into a room none of us have, and there's a brain and a jar and we have a conversation with it, right? The person is a whole person. When I'm micro prancing, I'm a whole person in motion. I realize not everybody in our vast audience will know what micro prancing is. Just so you know. It's a technique I accidentally developed to train for a very difficult marathon, the Mount Lemon Marathon in Tucson in a room in India, that in which I had 10 meters in which to train, and I'm getting ready to run 23 miles uphill, one mile flat, one mile super uphill, one mile, very down. So that's what micro prancing is. For those of you who want to learn more about it, there is no place you can go to learn about micro prancing. It just is what it is. Well, 
Corey Frank (07:47):
Actually, sorry, Chris. There is a place you can go see the old Monty Python Ministry of silly walks. I think that's probably the closest that people will get to your microprancing. But go ahead. 
Chris Beall (07:57):
Yeah, that was Michael Prancing too, which is a special thing. But to me it's like when you're bringing your whole person to be helpful to somebody else, you are a whole person. You're actually a physical person. You're not just a bunch of words streaming out. You're not a recording of something. It's not a trick. You're there to be authentic. You have to also be in your physical self, and it's fun to play with people like that. I do it on calls all the time. I'll do a thing where I do this. It's like we're talking about cold calling us. I hold up the flight school shirts. I see flight school, right? Because it's real. And that's how we think about others too. We think about what we're hearing from other people with their bodies also, and that's why you have to be highly respectful of the late great Stephen Hawkin. 
Chris Beall (08:47):
Can you imagine having that little control of your body and being able to think and express thoughts that big? It's one of the most amazing bridging of a gap that's fundamental that we take for granted. However, he had a wonderful physical struggle, which was actually physically communicating. So without that, the game can't be played at all, so to speak. So anyway, my advice to folks about this is you and the other person are both real people. Zoom didn't make us into anything else. We're still physical bodies and references to that. My story about my first conversation with Helen of substance where I said, use the word blood. There are words that invoke physical reactions in us or evoke them that allow us to get closer to the truth with each other, that break down some barriers that offer opportunities for silence that's productive, and it's smart to learn how to use those words fluently so we can use them fluently when appropriate. You cannot be disfluent on any words that you can't emit fluently. It just doesn't work. It just doesn't. Your body has to be capable of executing the language in a way that works for the other person all the way through if you want to execute the language in a way that works for them even better. 
Corey Frank (10:09):
It's not mere words that matter. It's not just belief. As we've talked about right now, you have the triumvirate of your words, your belief and your body, it sounds like. That's great, Henry, thoughts on that? 
Henry Wojdyla (10:21):
My answer is going to be a little bit different. In fact, in some ways it's not necessarily contradictory, but I think you use the term hepatic. Is that correct, Cory? Just to show how little I know about this. 
Corey Frank (10:30):
Yes, it's part of this. When your aunt grabs your cheek, when people touch your elbow, they touch your knee just naturally at the base of conversation. 
Henry Wojdyla (10:37):
I think when it comes in the context of discovery call, and if I'm really getting into a deep, I almost might go to the other direction, meaning I will often close my eyes, sometimes I'll even rest my head on my hands, whatever. Again, these are telephone-based, so I'm not mostly on a Zoom. I'd probably conduct a little bit differently if I was in that format, but somewhat like I was saying, shut up to allow them to speak. I'm also shutting up in blocking out all of their sensory perceptions. So I'm really truly listening, very simple, not necessarily the most elegant answer, but it's the truth, and I'm finding that it's actually really helping. Nothing else that's going on through my mind. I'm not looking at all the multiple screens that are in front of me, any distractions. It is 1000% focus on that prospect. The words that are coming out of the mouth, the what they're saying, the way they're saying it, what they might not be saying. It allows me to really, really just drill down, distill things, and I kind of get that mental image of the confessional that Chris and you talk about. So that's probably the mental imagery that's going on, but that's how I try to physically manifest it. 
Corey Frank (11:38):
Yeah, I can see that. I'm sure, Shawn, when you close your eyes, you still see and feel and hear the drill instructor from when you were 17 years old. But what other advice would you have for somebody jumping onto a discovery call in this world? What's the one technique you would give to them as we round out this version of the market Dominus, guys, 
Shawn Sease (11:58):
Earlier today, I shared another phrase with you that I believe, I think it's universal truth and it's kind of self-evident that the truth is curative, right? The truth is curative. And I mean, if we're going to actually be able to share secrets with each other and have real confessional-type conversations that it has to be genuine. And then you bring up the concept of how to listen, right? How do you listen? And just one technique that I have found, I picked it up along the way from other psychologists people before me again, is to say things back to people, to say back to somebody what they said to you, right? It requires that you listen. And I think another important add-on to that is to say it back to them. If you can have the acumen and experience and so on, to say it back to them in a way that maybe fortifies or even improves what they said. 
Shawn Sease (12:41):
And from a discovery and sales perspective, if you want to build, truly build trust, say it back to, even if you disagree, if it doesn't fit with where you need them to go, which would be persuasion and convincing and things like that, which I am just not a fan of, I'd rather have a conversation with somebody, say it back to them and they say, you know what? That's interesting. Or say it back to them in a way that fortifies their argument, especially if you disagree. And then when you hand that baton back to 'em, my experience and what I've learned from trying it is that they'll continue to talk or they'll say, that's right, the gvo thing. Right? Negotiation. That's right. Great. Okay. Next, let's move on to the next thing. So that was a lot in there, authenticity, listening. The truth is curative all outside of the scope of very popular things like persuasion and bending people to your will and being crafty and things like that. It's just simply not my way. I prefer to go that other route that is genuine and authentic, and those are some of the tools I use to get there. 
Corey Frank (13:34):
Beautiful, beautiful. I love that. Especially that word you do it effortlessly is certain words that resonates in the language for me. And I have a list of 'em, but the one that you just mentioned, you said fortify. That's a very underutilized word, wouldn't you say? Think Chris and Henry. That's a good word to use earlier. Chris Henry, I think you and I peaked up when Chris used the word longitudinal qualities. Things have longitudinal clients. It's that's a good one. But the last question, lightning quick here, Henry. And I know you've been very gracious with your time, but I'm curious, do you screenplay and script out your discovery calls? Do you have the first X amount of questions? Do you have a goal in mind? You've done this so many times, the hundreds of millions of dollars in worth of properties and assets that you've sold and helped a broker through. But for your discovery calls in this new era over the last few years or so, do you screenplay them or script them out, or how do you structure them to make sure that they're replicable? 
Henry Wojdyla (14:32):
I do have the euphemistic playbook I talk about, which is literal. I've got the copyright here in my desk in front of me. The discovery call is structured and scripted and thought through. I will tell you I'm using it less and less, and it's partly for the reasons of the topics that we're discussing here. Some of it's perhaps just having gotten the reps now so many times that some of it's just getting ingrained. But I'm finding that if I'm truly discovering and truly letting the prospect, more importantly, it becomes less and less reliant upon scripts. There's still a basic framework in place. Obviously, you have to have a certain objective, and we have a little bit of benefit perhaps because we're in a very narrow niche. It's very well defined. We know who we're speaking with. There's not really much in the way of qualification that needs to go on. 
Henry Wojdyla (15:16):
They're definitionally qualified if they're in our tam. So that's a separate topic. So there's certain freight that doesn't need to be carried in our particular discovery context that might be in others. So with all those caveats in place, I'm finding that I am moving further away from a kind of regimented discovery call. If I had to guess, just take the long view here, I'm going to probably cycle back. But when I get back to the more structured approach, it'll be a re-engineered, reconstituted approach that's going to be much more heavily reliant upon tonality and sub-concepts we've been discussing here. 
Corey Frank (15:48):
I get it. I am more of an advocate myself, Chris, and I'll give you the last word as we round up this episode on screenplay Out, every pause and in the Discovery, the Cohen Brothers from Big Lebowski. Every “dude” was screenplay, was scripted, was written in there on purpose. David Fincher from, I think, Fight Club. Every nuance is written in there. And there are certain directors that are just adamant that what they write, they want the actor a pause, an “er” alike to be in there. And I find that helps replicate because we have a larger team, Henry, obviously with your team there as a contributor with your practice. But we're trying to scale it up, and I'm trying to look for the factors that would diminish the opportunity in that discovery call. And so every nuance or word matters, but Chris, give the last word to you on this episode of discovery and tonality in the world of discovery calls. 
Chris Beall (16:50):
Well, I love the point you just made. I mean, we practice as professionals at anything so that we can improvise based on what's happening without the practice. We have no foundation for improvising, without being willing to improvise. We can't adapt to reality. So reality, that's where the truth, the truth is out there somewhere and everybody has a plan, as they say, until X, Y, or Z happens. But you better practice your plan, so to speak, so that your speech can be ballistic, so to speak, right? It's like you can't throw a ball or you can't do anything that's athletic, a little tiny piece at a time. You've got to get to the point where you can do it smoothly. And then having learned that you can do it in reality, where there's going to be things that interrupt the smoothness, you can riff safely 
Corey Frank (17:41):
For sure, or right. When in doubt, just let it aerate. Just let it breathe. 
Henry Wojdyla (17:46):
Let it simmer. Let it simmer. 
Corey Frank (17:48):
That's beautiful. Well, excellent. Well, thank you gentlemen. Thank you, Henry, for jumping on this episode of Market Thomas. Guys and Shawn, thank you for having, it was a pleasure, the professor, professor of Prospecting, stop on by the studio. 
Henry Wojdyla (18:03):
I'm glad we could. So it's good to see everybody, Shawn and Snake to make your acquaintance been a fan of yours on LinkedIn for a while, so it's nice to thank you very much. Yeah, absolutely. 
Corey Frank (18:12):
That's beautiful, 
Chris Beall (18:12):
Guys. That was really cool. I love it 
Corey Frank (18:16):
So far. Chris Beal from Connected Cell. This is Corey Frank. Until next time.
 

Chris and Corey continue their conversation with Dr. Mindy Weinstein, as they delve deep into the psychology behind scarcity and its profound impact on consumer behavior. You'll uncover invaluable insights on how scarcity appeals to different generations, especially the younger demographic, and how you can leverage this powerful phenomenon to drive sales success. Drawing from their wealth of experience, Corey and Chris share practical strategies on positioning salespeople as indispensable resources in a scarce market, fostering authentic connections, and building trust through genuine expertise. By the end of this episode, you'll be equipped with actionable tips and powerful communication techniques to elevate your sales game and unleash your full potential. Don't miss out on this opportunity to transform your sales approach—tune in now and unlock the untapped potential of scarcity!  Join us for this episode, "Using Scarcity Tactics in Sales: GenX vs. GenZ Psychology."
Links from this episode:
Dr. Mindy Weinstein on LinkedInCorey Frank on LinkedInChris Beall on LinkedIn
Branch 49ConnectAndSell
 
Full episode transcript below:

So, what's the biggest challenge in sales? Today, the guys have a special guest, Hitesh Shah, CTO and CPO of ConnectAndSell. As Hitesh puts it, it's the fact that we don't like to be sold to. That's why sales is about helping, not selling. And if you want to succeed in sales, you have to understand who your target audience is and what their business problems are. You have to start at the bottom and work your way up, building relevance and trust with each person you talk to. Hitesh says there are two things, one is always trying to understand what happened. And, when it goes against your instinct -  what did you expect it to do? Be open to the possibility that you may have missed something. Corey says that this requires a level of humility that doesn’t exist in high quantities in sales, even though it should.
One of the things these three have learned over the years is that when something starts working when it shouldn't, it can be scary. But in the digital world, everything is deterministic. There are causes and effects, and there's no such thing as waiting or hoping that something fixes itself. As Hitesh puts it, you have to have a childlike curiosity and naivete, especially in the digital world where computers are deterministic. Join us for this episode of Market Dominance Guys, “The Power of Childlike Curiosity in the Digital World of Sales”
 
Full episode transcript below:

CROs, VP of Sales or VP of SDRs need to be able to persuade like Atticus Finch, write and email like Tarantino, and perform like DiCaprio. You’re actually looking for people to have a decent conversation with somebody that is built on trust and authenticity. You can’t solve that if all you want to do is hire more SDRs. David Dulany continues his conversation with Corey and Chris. He says, “The number one recommendation that I would make if people were asking is do not hire five SDRs First, hire a really good operational person that can connect the dots and set the stage and set the foundation between all the technology and the processes and the playbook to get that in place and then start to layer on the people that can actually execute on that. “  If companies have a good sales operations person that has the bandwidth to be able to help the SDRs, it makes a huge difference in helping them quickly learn how to create that trust. There’s more to this success plan than this, but you’ll have to listen to get the details on this episode of Market Dominance Guys, “Hiring Pipeline Builders Who Can Build Trust.”

“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.

In this episode of the Market Dominance Guys, Corey and Chris agree on the importance of building trust before anything else can happen. They are joined by Transformational Coach Jennifer Standish, Henry Wojdyla, Founder and Principal at RealSource Group, Matt McCorkle, Manager of Branch Operations at Kaiser Compressors, and hosts Ty Crandall on the Business Credit and Finance Show, Jeff Lerner from Ep 150 of Millionaire Secrets, and David Dulaney on the Sales Development Podcast. The full episodes to the ones included here are listed below:
EP91: Borrowing from the Best
EP109: Being There for Your Customers
EP123: Hire Yourself a Grandma
The Business Credit and Financing Show
Sales Development Podcast https://www.spreaker.com/user/9196584/episode-164-done
MILLIONAIRE SECRET #150 Unlock Your Potential with Jeff Lerner