Buying Cycle

In this episode of the Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall talks with ConnectAndSell's Customer Success Manager, Donny Crawford drilling it down to the three reasons Sales Teams don't follow up. When we hire people to sell for us, whether it's to sell meetings or whether it's to sell deals, we tend to put them under a compensation regime that emphasizes this quarter. Need happens at this moment to match up with what you can provide. And in order to determine their need, you have to have a discovery conversation with them. And until you have a discovery conversation, you don't actually know whether they need your offering at all much.
As we know that mounts the pressure to meet numbers of calls but doesn't usually accomplish closing more deals. Learn how yes, no, not now affects our emotion tied to rejection and perception of rejection - the ability to keep our emotions in check. This is part one of a two-part session.

The classic book, Crossing the Chasm, by Geoffrey Moore, is a manifesto, a field manual, and sales’ version of Dr. Spock’s book on “company rearing” for new entrepreneurs…all in one. To level set for a brief moment – and Googling an image of Dr. Moore’s chasm graph may be helpful for the episode here - marketers have traditionally identified different kinds of B2B tech buyers: Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority, and finally the Laggards.
The traditional model assumed that, in the lifespan of a product, the market is first dominated by the innovators, then the early adopters etc. down the line. This model implies a level of inevitability in the flow-through of one of these categories from another to another…as your business continues. Good in theory but not so easy in practice.
The reality of entering and competing for markets today, gaps exist between the categories in this model that are large enough to derail the most promising startups as they transition from one category of customers to the next.
And the biggest gap Moore writes about is the one between Early Adopters and Early Majority. This is where both bags of money and companies go to die. Because the GoTo market & sales strategies that win deals in the Early Adopters group, won’t necessarily work so well for the Early Majority group. Instead, you may find yourself at the bottom of a valley looking up at an el Capitan-like sheer vertical wall of market climbing ahead of you. The sales team by your side that did well in the early stage of capturing innovators and early adopters now find themselves often overmatched and underequipped by the challenge and technical nuances of a market wall this big.
Since it is vastly different market types, moving from early adopters to early majority requires new tools, new approaches, and a lot of new thinking.
So what is the new thinking? In this episode, I ask Chris about the simple differences in the type of team and skills and techniques you need to climb this wall and continue moving down Moore’s market path. Building trust is the core requirement – and without understanding how and why you need to manufacture it to scale this wall, you’ll be left floundering and eking for survival with other amateur but well-intentioned climbers at the lower reaches of this meager market wall. So once again welcome to the Market Dominance Guys and this week’s episode, “All dead companies are equally uninteresting.”

Rocky. The Karate Kid. The Average Joes. Rudy. Underdogs. We love them. They are the people who use their grit combined with their well-coached and newly acquired skills to make waves, cause the odds-makers fits, and run up the score. 
When you get funded by a VC and finally have the green light to release the Kraken and launch your vaunted sales machine, there is a temptation to run up the bill on the countless tools available in the sales and marketing stack and forget the meager stack from whence you came. 
“Stand back…I have capital and I’m not afraid to use it!”...you’ll think. 
Magic beans to make my phone ring?...I’ll take it!
A love potion to make my prospects swoon into a demo?...Yes, please!
A virtual dancing Elvis to get folks to download my white paper?...sure, why not?
You can spend the GDP of a small Caribbean country playing this game and feeling like you also have the perfect Millennial-friendly office, the best cold brew, and the ideal dress code and PTO policy. 
But the most sophisticated and successful stack and culture in the world can be had right now if you simply have a tight message that works combined with a mechanism to talk to hundreds of thousands of people a year…AND doing it with a small team of sincere and empathetic salespeople.
But is it realistic? 
In this episode I ask Chris if something like this only exists in the lab…or can it be really be seen in the wild.  
Welcome to the Market Dominance Guys and this week’s episode: “Mr. Miyagi and the Theory of Market Dominance.”

States, lots of ‘em, 50 states. Plus Red States, Blue States. States of consciousness. Physical states. Liquid/Gas…
How about the state of Markets, being Market Dominant, or simply being an “also-ran?”
The fact is there are only two states you can reside in as a company: you're either dominating one market or more, or you're dominating zero. And if you're dominating zero markets, you WILL go out of business in time unless you turn into a company that IS dominating at least one market.
Market Dominance is security, it’s collateral, safety, shelter, asylum, parlay; but most importantly, it’s freedom. Because the only two reasons a company dominating a market can ever go out of business is either financial mismanagement or if the market is just too small.
So how do you map your journey to market dominance? What’s changed over the past few years that makes it easier for some and more difficult for others to even get out of the gates? In this chat, I ask Chris for his insights into the real stakes of entering this Octagon of business without true dominating intent. This is the Market Dominance Guys and today’s episode entitled, “The Two-State Solution in Market Dominance: Dollars or Donuts?”