Data

We're shaking things up today with Helen Fanucci, CEO and Founder of Pipeline Power, taking the reins as our host. Helen engages Chris Beall in a thought-provoking exploration of dormant leads - those overlooked opportunities that could be gold mines for your business. Chris reveals a startling statistic: "91% of $18 billion is wasted" on leads that never get a conversation. This episode uncovers how this massive waste could be your next big opportunity. Helen and Chris dissect the challenges of following up on inbound leads and discuss innovative strategies to breathe life into these sleeping giants of sales potential.
Some of the key points covered in part 1 of this conversation include:
Definition and origin of dormant leads
Statistics on conversation coverage for inbound leads
Importance of quick response times to inbound leads
Comparison of web form submissions vs. inbound phone calls
Introduction to ConnectAndSell's Instant Response and Lead Injection features

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 second episode of a visit with Chris, Corey, and guest Brian Perks they dissect the evolving landscape of data, innovation, and sales in the modern economy. They explore how utility-like standardization is reshaping industries, drawing parallels between electricity and data as foundational infrastructures. The conversation weaves through the challenges faced by innovators, the importance of reasoning in a data-rich world, and the potential for AI to enhance decision-making. Brian offers insights on the future of shared scientific innovation and data resources, while Chris and Corey tackle the complexities of avoiding reasoning errors in high-stakes business decisions.
With a mix of analogies ranging from 737 pilots to Wile E. Coyote moments, the trio unpacks why clear thinking is crucial in a world where data utilities can make or break a startup. And just when you think it's all serious business talk, Chris reminds us that sometimes, all an entrepreneur really needs is for someone to walk in with a cold Alaskan amber. It's a deep dive into the world of B2B sales and data strategy that'll leave you pondering - and possibly thirsty. Join us for this episode, “Wile E. Coyote, Data Utilities and Empty Beer Bottles.”
Links from this episode:
5x5Brian Perks on LinkedIn
Corey Frank on LinkedInBranch49Chris Beall on LinkedInConnectAndSell

Corey Frank and Chris Beall welcome Brian Perks from 5x5, a revolutionary data cooperative. They dive deep into the changing data landscape in sales and marketing, exploring how traditional data brokerage models are becoming obsolete. Brian shares insights on 5x5's innovative approach to data as a utility, emphasizing the importance of data standardization, accuracy, and accessibility. The conversation touches on the challenges of fragmented data across various platforms and how 5x5 aims to solve these issues. The guys discuss the concept of data as a living, evolving entity and the importance of having your copy for innovation. This episode is a must-listen for sales leaders, marketers, and entrepreneurs looking to leverage data for business growth in today's fast-paced, data-driven world. Join them for this episode, “The Evolution of Business Data Transformed From Brokers to Utilities.”
Links from this episode:
5x5Brian Perks on LinkedIn
Corey Frank on LinkedInBranch49Chris Beall on LinkedInConnectAndSell

Are you ready to sculpt your way to market dominance? In this episode, Chris Beall embarks on a solo journey to explore the art of crafting your perfect target list. He's also apologizing to you for glossing over this essential aspect of your sales strategy, and now he's determined to make things right. Just like Michelangelo's David, your ideal market is hidden within a huge block of data, waiting to be unveiled. But unlike marble, this data is more like clay - you can always add a bit back if you trim off too much. Chris will be your guide as you shape and mold your list, navigating the tricky landscape of false positives and negatives and using conversations as your tools to refine your market-dominating masterpiece. So, roll up your sleeves and get ready to get your hands dirty - it's time to uncover your own David (and no, we're not talking about the statue's abs). Join us for this episode, “Michelangelo's Market Dominance Secret for Sculpting Your List."
Links from this episode:
Corey Frank on LinkedInBranch49Chris Beall on LinkedInConnectAndSell

In this solo episode of Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall explores the potential of AI-powered data analysis using ChatGPT. Chris demonstrates how this cutting-edge technology can uncover valuable insights from complex sales data in a matter of minutes, a process that would typically take a human analyst days or even weeks. By utilizing ChatGPT's Data Analyst feature and uploading data from ConnectAndSell, he's able to quickly examine the correlations between sales reps' skills and key business outcomes, Chris showcases how AI can help identify the most critical factors influencing pipeline generation and financial success. This eye-opening episode is a must-listen for CEOs, CROs, and CSOs looking to leverage the power of AI to make data-driven decisions and optimize their sales strategies. Join Chris as he delves into the future of sales analytics, revealing surprising findings that could revolutionize your approach to sales training and coaching. Join us for this episode, "Your New Data Analyst BFF Uncovers Surprising Sales Insights.
Key points and timestamps from the episode:
(00:01:37) Chris Beall introduces the topic of using ChatGPT to analyze sales data and uncover insights.(00:02:39) Chris shares his experience working with ChatGPT to write a book summarizing Market Dominance Guys podcasts in just two days.(00:04:20) Chris discusses using ChatGPT for a pricing exercise at ConnectAndSell, balancing customer ROI and company profit.(00:04:55) Chris explains his plan to use ChatGPT to analyze the correlation between reps' skills and business outcomes.(00:07:37) Chris walks through the process of uploading data to ChatGPT and having the AI analyze the columns and data structure.(00:08:34) ChatGPT identifies key columns relevant to the analysis, including activity metrics, conversion rates, and skill scores.(00:19:49) The correlation matrix reveals that asking for the meeting has the strongest correlation with positive outcomes, while professionalism has a surprisingly low correlation.
Keep listening for the analysis results:
The regression analysis shows that 24.1% of the variability in direct amounts is explained by the combined skill metrics.
The breakthrough score has a significant negative coefficient, suggesting that higher breakthrough scores might be associated with lower direct amounts.
Conclusion:
Chris emphasizes the value of using AI for rapid, unbiased data analysis to gain insights and make data-driven decisions in sales.
 
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Below:
 
[00:00:00] Susan Finch: Welcome to another session with the Market Dominance Guys, a program exploring all the high stakes speed bumps and off ramps of driving to the top of your market with our host Chris Beall from ConnectAndSell and Corey Frank from Branch49.[00:00:20] 
[00:00:23] Susan Finch: In this solo episode of Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall explores the potential of AI powered data analysis using ChatGPT. Chris demonstrates how this cutting edge technology can uncover valuable insights from complex sales data in a matter of minutes, a process that [00:00:40] would normally take a human analyst days or even weeks.
[00:00:43] Susan Finch: By utilizing ChatGPT's Data Analyst feature and uploading data from ConnectAndSell, he's able to quickly examine the correlations between sales rep skills and key business outcomes. Chris showcases how AI can help identify the most critical factors influencing [00:01:00] pipeline generation. and Financial Success.
[00:01:02] Susan Finch: This eye opening episode is a must listen for CEOs, CROs, and CSOs looking to leverage the power of AI to make data driven decisions and optimize their sales strategies. Join Chris as he delves into the future of sales analytics by uploading his own data and [00:01:20] feeding in complex prompts. This reveals the surprising findings that could revolutionize your approach to sales training and coaching.
[00:01:27] Susan Finch: Join us for this episode, your new data analyst BFF uncovers surprising sales insights.
[00:01:38] Chris Beall: Hey everybody, Chris Beall [00:01:40] here with another episode of Market Dominant Skies. My co host Corey Frank is actually in Armenia right now. And while technically I'm sure it's possible for us to co-host Market Dominant Skies Armenia and Southern Arizona at the same time. Well, let's let [00:02:00] him be. It's getting pretty late there.
[00:02:01] Chris Beall: It's about 2. 35 in the afternoon here in Arizona. Intuitively, I know that's got to be very, very late in Armenia. So I want to try something today and let's see if it works. It could be a little bit tricky, because it could require following a fair amount of verbal input from [00:02:20] me, I guess output, input to you, for something that's a little bit complicated.
[00:02:24] Chris Beall: But here's what I want to look at. I want to look at an example, maybe inspirational, maybe more step by step, you can use it in some way or another. to an example of how to use ChatGPT in [00:02:40] particularly to analyze some information that you might have and point the way forward, maybe give you some surprises.
[00:02:48] Chris Beall: So I've been doing a fair amount of work with ChatGPT since it came out, at least since I was introduced to it. By a couple of smart young people in the backseat of a car coming back from Whistler, [00:03:00] and they were using it to do something that was kind of surprising to me, but made a lot of sense. Once I understood it better, that was to write a yearly family letter and the results were great, but it was the process that really intrigued me.
[00:03:14] Chris Beall: So I decided to learn a little more about it, ended up working with ChatGPT, so to [00:03:20] speak, to write a book that summarized a bunch of market dominance guys podcasts, and I wanted to see, could you do that in a couple of days? The book wasn't great. It never got any human editing, but it was usable. You could read it and you could get something out of it.
[00:03:38] Chris Beall: And two days is pretty [00:03:40] short for a book. Half a year, a year, a year and a half, two years is pretty common. So I thought that's really interesting. And it was very straightforward. As I proceeded through 2023, more and more taking time with ChatGPT to see what I could understand, [00:04:00] uh, building some scoring capabilities for reps skills on cold calling as part of that process.
[00:04:07] Chris Beall: I thought, well, let's, let's just see how far we can go with this. And at one point I did a pretty. Substantial pricing exercise for the products here at ConnectAndSell, trying to balance the customer's [00:04:20] return on investment with ConnectAndSell's own profit on any given deal, at any given price point, given structure.
[00:04:28] Chris Beall: And what surprised me was that it was a better analyst than any human analyst I'd ever worked with, part of which was, it was just comfortable. There's something about asking a bot to do [00:04:40] something for you that has both an impersonal quality, but kind of gives you a feeling of, I'm in control of this.
[00:04:46] Chris Beall: There aren't going to be a lot of, yeah, but I'm not going to deal with a whole bunch of bias. It's going to make mistakes. I'm going to have to pay attention, but not a bad experience at all. In fact, a very, very good experience. So I thought, [00:05:00] Hey, there's a lot of things we all believe that might be subject to analysis.
[00:05:05] Chris Beall: And one of them is that RepSkill in conversations is correlated with outcomes, business outcomes. So I thought I'd take a skills analysis done by a GPT 4 model using a skills [00:05:20] rubric itself written by a. GPT 4 model that was provided originally with an input of about one hour of a detailed description by an expert of exactly what needs to happen in a cold call, second by second by second, and what skills need to be demonstrated.
[00:05:39] Chris Beall: So the [00:05:40] rubric was good. It's kind of long. It describes for each one of the skills that it invented, by the way. It describes what happened at sort of a zero to one point level, you know, two to three and so forth. And it was a 10 point scale. And so just ran that against a whole bunch of data that we [00:06:00] happen to have about our own reps.
[00:06:02] Chris Beall: And pretty much just took the transcripts of all their conversations they had for a few weeks, put them together in, uh, in a form that the GPT. system or the GPT model could digest, apply these skills rubrics to it [00:06:20] and basically score all the reps one week at a time on these different skills. So that was something that was fairly straightforward to do, but it required a lot of, I'll call it kind of mechanics, you know, grabbing a hold of the recordings and turning them into transcripts and making pipelines of [00:06:40] data that went to processes that did X, Y, and Z.
[00:06:43] Chris Beall: But once I had it, I thought, you know, I wonder, we kind of assume that these skills mean something with regard to outcomes. Why don't I take a look? So here's an analysis that was done by the ChatGPT [00:07:00] data analyst, which is one of the kinds of flavors of ChatGPT that you can get nowadays. And I'll actually read through it and tell you how long it took.
[00:07:11] Chris Beall: So this entire process. It took about 12 minutes end to end once I had all the skills in an [00:07:20] Excel file. And here is my initial prompt. I said, let's analyze a collection of weekly results of the ConnectAndSell sales team's cold calls. I will upload an Excel file and walk you through what the columns mean.
[00:07:33] Chris Beall: And we can then conduct a regression analysis to understand the impact of each rep's skills on [00:07:40] three business outcomes. Meeting set per prospecting hour, meeting set per week, and amount of new sales pipeline influenced directly or indirectly by those reps. Now one thing I like about ChatGPT, I don't know, I feel a little foolish liking this, but, ChatGPT.
[00:07:55] Chris Beall: com Our emotions count is it comes back [00:08:00] usually with some encouragement. So it says, that's, that sounds like a great plan. Please go ahead and upload the Excel file. And we can start by reviewing the columns and the data. Once I understand the data set, we can proceed with the regression analysis to examine the effects of the rep skills on the specified business outcomes.
[00:08:18] Chris Beall: So I upload away. [00:08:20] And the data analyst comes back and says, thank you for uploading the file. By the way, no analyst has ever thanked me for anything before. So this is great. Let's start by loading the data so I can understand its structure and contents. I'll check the first few rows and provide a summary of the columns.
[00:08:35] Chris Beall: The dataset contains a detailed breakdown of weekly results from sales [00:08:40] representatives activities. Here are some of the key columns that might be relevant for our analysis. And then it lists the columns. The rep name. The week start date and week end date, the dials, connects and conversations, the number of meetings, the total session time, total talk time, total wait time, total wrap time.[00:09:00] 
[00:09:00] Chris Beall: Those are relevant in ConnectAndSell LAN. Session time is how long we're using the system to call people. Talk time is obviously talk time. Wait time is the time between when you push a button and get a conversation. And wrap time is the time you spend wrapping up, taking notes, And setting next steps and [00:09:20] formulating your teleprompter for your next conversation.
[00:09:23] Chris Beall: So then it says conversion percentage, conversion rates from dials to meetings and from conversations to meetings. Scores. There was a greeting score, an opener, breakthrough, a meeting score, an objections score, [00:09:40] and a score for assertiveness, professionalism. And there was also an overall score, which was.
[00:09:45] Chris Beall: Actually weighted based on the number of conversations that got the subscores. So then it says there are also more complex fields like direct amount by stage and positive amount by stage, which seem to indicate financial [00:10:00] metrics related to sales pipeline stages. I'll stop reading here and just say that was pretty good.
[00:10:07] Chris Beall: It got everything right, including the financial metrics. And I'll explain these financial metrics here in just a moment. Since we're interested in regression analysis, it goes on to understand the impact of rep [00:10:20] skills on business outcomes. We should identify which specific metrics and scores will be most relevant to use as independent variables, predictors, and dependent variables, outcomes.
[00:10:31] Chris Beall: Please guide me on how you would like to proceed. Specifically, which outcomes and variables we should focus on for the analysis. Now, that was a [00:10:40] fair amount of output for a fairly small amount of input, and it sort of nailed everything. These financial metrics, by the way, are from an attribution report that we have in ConnectAndSell that looks at opportunities by stage, and opportunities [00:11:00] by how they were influenced.
[00:11:01] Chris Beall: So some opportunities came about after a meeting was scheduled. Some after a positive conversation, that was the positive amount by stage, and some after any old conversation, and that's called possible amount by stage. So all of this data is in the spreadsheet. It's a very, very wide [00:11:20] spreadsheet, and it has a lot more columns in it that talk about things like.
[00:11:24] Chris Beall: Which objections were the most common? How were those objections handled? And also, what was the rationale for each score? But I wanted to stick to the numbers here. So now I'm about, what, maybe 2 3 minutes into this entire process. I get this [00:11:40] set of analyses and guesses as to what the columns are. And they look pretty good.
[00:11:45] Chris Beall: So I said, well, let's take a look at the columns with Amount in their name. And it said the columns in the dataset related to Amount are DirectAmount, Direct financial outcome associated with activities. This means meetings, by the way. Positive [00:12:00] amount. These are associated with positive activities. Now, GPT, the ChatGPT got that wrong.
[00:12:08] Chris Beall: It said positive financial outcome. It actually was intended to mean is financial outcome from positive conversations or preceded by positive conversations. But [00:12:20] is good enough for this purpose. I didn't need to correct it. And then there's a possible amount, which is the same thing, but it's possible attribution, possible influence.
[00:12:29] Chris Beall: And then it went on to say these amounts are also broken down by sales pipeline stage. So we could look at every stage and look at, say, the closed one only, or look at [00:12:40] contract through the closed one, or whatever it happens to be. Then it goes on to say these stage specific columns likely provide a more detailed breakdown of financial outcomes according to different stages in the sales process.
[00:12:51] Chris Beall: Given this information. It says, by the way, this is the ChatGPT analyst. Given this information, we could analyze how [00:13:00] these financial metrics are influenced by various factors, such as the number of dials, connects, conversations, and different score metrics of the sales reps. Would you like to explore any specific relationships between these financial outcomes and other metrics in the data set?
[00:13:16] Chris Beall: And I said, we will focus on [00:13:20] direct amount. As the financial outcome of interest. So that means a meeting has to be set. Well, it's really not shocking that we're gonna find a high correlation of direct amount to guess what meetings that are set. It won't be a hundred percent. 'cause not every meeting set is actually a meeting attended, and nor is [00:13:40] an opportunity created for every meeting set, although in our way of doing business at ConnectAndSell.
[00:13:45] Chris Beall: We tend to create an opportunity as soon as a meeting is set, because that way we can track it more clearly. So the data analyst says, great. I love that, by the way. We'll focus on analyzing the [00:14:00] direct amount as the primary financial outcome to see how it's influenced by various factors. We can investigate its relationships with 1.
[00:14:07] Chris Beall: Reps performance scores, 2. Activity metrics, such as dials, connects, conversations, and meetings. Thanks. Given the potential complexity and size of your data set, let's start by [00:14:20] exploring the correlations between direct amount and these various metrics. This will help us determine which factors might have a more significant impact on financial outcomes and are worth including in a more detailed regression analysis.
[00:14:34] Chris Beall: Shall we proceed with this correlation analysis? I love that it asks. If there is [00:14:40] any specific subset of variables or additional factors you're particularly interested in, let me know. And I said, this is the easiest of the prompts. Yes. That means I'd like to proceed. It immediately outputs a correlation matrix between direct amounts and all the predictors.
[00:14:59] Chris Beall: Of [00:15:00] course, every predictor maps to itself perfectly, so that correlation is one. And then there are correlations of Meetings, as an example, with outcomes and that correlation is very strong with the outcome of direct amount. Meetings correlated at a [00:15:20] 77 level. That's a high correlation and with conversations at a 59 level.
[00:15:28] Chris Beall: That's not too surprising. It's really hard to set a meeting in ConnectAndSell. Unless you have a conversation first. So it doesn't say that all you really have to do is just [00:15:40] have tons of conversations, but it does say that conversations are highly correlated with meetings and meetings are highly correlated with direct amounts.
[00:15:48] Chris Beall: Therefore, conversations are correlated with. DirectAmount. That's just kind of the way it goes. That correlation of conversations to direct amounts is 56. It's almost the same as [00:16:00] the correlation to meetings. So, it gave me this beautiful matrix. So, down one side it says DirectAmount. That's the answer, so to speak, what we're correlating to, that's the financial outcome.
[00:16:11] Chris Beall: And then Dials, Connects, Conversations, Meetings, and then the Scores. The Greeting Score, Opener, Breakthrough. That means how well did they [00:16:20] execute the breakthrough portion of the conversation. The part that goes something like, I believe we've discovered a breakthrough. That completely eliminates the need to To do a bunch of manual analysis in order to have a detailed and comprehensive set of insights based on complex data.
[00:16:38] Chris Beall: I just made that up right now, [00:16:40] but that's an example. And then meeting, which is asking for the meeting and re asking for the meeting and re asking for the meeting. Objections, objection handling, assertiveness, and professionalism, and then the overall score. So this map is red. I'm not showing it to you because we don't do that here on Market Dominance, guys, [00:17:00] but could.
[00:17:01] Chris Beall: Red is the 1. 0s. That's a 100 percent correlation. Most everything's correlated to itself. And then there's sort of an orange, that's some lower level of correlation, kind of a white, which is medium level, and then it goes into the cold blues. All the way to, to a dark blue. So [00:17:20] it shows me the correlation matrix.
[00:17:22] Chris Beall: I can look at it right, there is huge value in making a correlation matrix like this in Excel or some other way. I don't know if I would've done it. It's just too painful. It's too much work. This is a huge time saver, and I can look with my eyes at it and let my visual system [00:17:40] call things out that are surprising and I say, huh, 
[00:17:44] Susan Finch: we'll be back in a moment after a quick break.
[00:17:52] Susan Finch: ConnectAndSell. Welcome to the end of dialing as you know it. ConnectAndSell's patented technology loads your best sales folks up with 8 to [00:18:00] 10 times more live, qualified conversations every day. And when we say qualified, we're talking about really qualified. Like knowing what kind of cheese they like on their Impossible Whopper kind of qualified.
[00:18:12] Susan Finch: Learn more at ConnectAndSell. com[00:18:20] 
[00:18:20] Chris Beall: Here's something that's surprising. There is a very low correlation 0.05, which is almost the same as zero between how professional the reps are, professionalism and meetings, and there's also a very low correlation. Which is 03, [00:18:40] even lower, between professionalism and the direct amount of pipeline that's built through meetings.
[00:18:48] Chris Beall: So I wouldn't have expected that. I don't think you would either. One would think that. A rep that is more professional, that comports themselves in a way that we would say is professional, they don't get rattled, they don't [00:19:00] have emotional responses that don't make sense, that that would be correlated with positive outcomes, and it's not.
[00:19:07] Chris Beall: It's funny, though, because it's a negatively correlated with the number of connects and negatively correlated with dials, which kind of makes you think that if you have too many conversations, you might lose a little bit of your [00:19:20] professionalism, something to keep track of out there. Assertiveness was a little bit better.
[00:19:26] Chris Beall: It was a 0. 28 correlation out of 1, so 28 out of 100 with the direct amount. So it's not nothing, but it's not strong. Objection handling is [00:19:40] 0. 32, a little bit better than assertiveness. But nothing to write home about. And then BreakthroughScript itself. We prize our BreakthroughScript. We think it's really fabulous.
[00:19:52] Chris Beall: That adhering to it makes a difference. Well, the correlation with direct amount is 0. 17, 17 out of 100. The [00:20:00] opener also we think is super important, and yet it's correlated only 0. 12, 12 out of 100. Hmm, that's pretty low, right? Same thing with the greeting, 0. 15. So the greeting The opener and the breakthrough, which is the first kind of chunk, most of the [00:20:20] bulk of the breakthrough script and all of these reps are using our breakthrough script.
[00:20:23] Chris Beall: And these are all cold calls. They don't amount to much with regard to booking meetings and therefore getting opportunities on the books that required booking meetings. The strongest correlation of all was the [00:20:40] correlation with, guess what, asking for the meeting. And then kind of insisting that the meeting is a good idea.
[00:20:47] Chris Beall: That correlation is 40 out of 100. So it is approximately 2 point something times how well you do in the opener, or the greeting, or the breakthrough, and [00:21:00] it's about maybe, you know, something like 33 percent more important than objection handling. And assertiveness is vastly more important, uh, you know, more than 10 times, probably 12, 13 times more important than professionalism.
[00:21:18] Chris Beall: Not that we want people to [00:21:20] be unprofessional. I'm just saying it doesn't lead to measurable results. You probably shouldn't be coaching it too hard unless you're just doing it for your own feelings. So, then, I just explained all that to you, your listener, but ChatGPT Data Analyst explained it all to me. And it [00:21:40] basically said, key observations from the heat map.
[00:21:43] Chris Beall: Meetings have the strongest positive correlation with direct amount, suggesting that as the number of meetings increases, the direct financial outcomes tend to be higher. One could say, well, duh, but it feels kind of bad to say, well, duh, to a well meaning bot, right? So I'm going to say, oh, that's, that's good that you [00:22:00] saw that.
[00:22:01] Chris Beall: It actually. it is kind of comforting that this obvious connection was made. Conversations and Connects also show positive correlations, though not as strong as Meetings, indicating their importance in influencing financial outcomes. Now this is important in a very simple way. You actually have [00:22:20] control if you're running an organization to some degree over how many conversations the team has.
[00:22:25] Chris Beall: Your data could be better than it is right now, and it would take fewer dials to get conversations. You could use technology like ConnectAndSell that gets you more conversations. And you could also look at the reps' activities and ask, [00:22:40] is too much time being spent wrapping up or pausing or hanging out, petting the cat and drinking coffee?
[00:22:47] Chris Beall: Could that time have been spent? Without abusing the rep in actual conversations. Sometimes reps have fewer conversations than they otherwise could. Jeff Blunt says one more dial. [00:23:00] We always say one more conversation here at ConnectAndSell. Then it says most of the score metrics show positive correlations.
[00:23:08] Chris Beall: Those are the skills with direct amounts, but these are relatively modest. This suggests that while higher skills ratings do relate to better financial outcomes, the strength of these relationships [00:23:20] varies. So then it says, given these insights, a regression analysis focused on meetings, conversations, and perhaps some of the higher correlated scores could provide further understanding of their impact on direct amounts.
[00:23:32] Chris Beall: Would you like me to proceed with a regression analysis based on these findings? Or is there any specific aspect you'd like to explore [00:23:40] further? Now, this is super important. At this point, I could go with the flow and say, yeah, that's about it. But on reflection, what I'm really interested in is. What about the skills?
[00:23:52] Chris Beall: We work a lot in sales on skills. We coach skills. We don't work as much on data, [00:24:00] even though it could increase the number of conversations easily by getting better data. I mean, say all of your data was for calling was data that told you that these are people who answer the phone. Or their actual propensity to answer the phone.
[00:24:15] Chris Beall: Now we actually have that data in ConnectAndSell and it's automatically integrated into every [00:24:20] calling session, but it's still one of those things that management pays less attention to than they do to skills, at least with regard to lip service. I'm not sure how much attention is actually paid to skills.
[00:24:34] Chris Beall: Because I'm not sure that the breakdown of skills is actually done that cleanly. But here's what I [00:24:40] said to my friend, a ChatGPT data analyst. The correlation with meetings is actually mechanical, in that direct amount is defined as, quote, pipeline that resulted from meetings set in cold calls using ConnectAndSell.
[00:24:55] Chris Beall: This is also true to a lesser degree with regard to conversations and connects. [00:25:00] Even though the score metrics, that's the skills, have a weaker correlation with direct amount, they're actually more interesting to me because the impact of skill scores on business outcomes is an unexplored research topic.
[00:25:13] Chris Beall: So let's try the regression analysis with the score metrics and see what we get. Now, one of the [00:25:20] things when you're working with generative AI, and I work a lot with ChatGPT and then some other GPT 4 turbo models that we've created. is, hmm, it'll do anything you ask it to do. It'll give it a shot. This is highly different from most human employees, especially [00:25:40] analysts that you work with.
[00:25:41] Chris Beall: If you say something to an analyst and they don't really agree that that's worth studying, you're not going to get their best. I love the fact that there's no complaint about rework. or delving in again, or correcting it and giving it another shot by this particular [00:26:00] bot data analyst. I think it's huge because it lets me be more creative.
[00:26:04] Chris Beall: I can simply ask it to do what I want it to do, look at the results. I didn't put a lot of mental energy into the mechanics of producing the results because That's what it did. And I can be more reflective. I can think [00:26:20] more about what I'm seeing and what I'm learning. So, the data analyst here, when I said, hey, let's do the scores, it says, that makes sense.
[00:26:28] Chris Beall: Ah, comfort to me. Focusing on the score metrics, the skills, to explore their impact on direct amounts will help us understand how rep skill levels influence business outcomes. Since [00:26:40] this aspect hasn't been deeply explored, it could provide valuable insights. We'll perform a multiple regression analysis using these score metrics as independent variables and direct amount as the dependent variable.
[00:26:53] Chris Beall: I'll prepare the regression model and show you the results. Let's proceed. And then it goes ahead and does the analysis. [00:27:00] Now, if you're like me, you probably could do a multivariable, multivariate regression analysis. With some effort. Using Excel. I don't know how you might do it, but you could probably get it done.
[00:27:17] Chris Beall: This wasn't much effort. I just said, please do it. [00:27:20] And here's what I get. The results from the regression analysis using the RepSkill scores as predictors for direct amount are as follows. Regression summary. R squared. 0. 241. That means that about 24. 1 percent of the variability in direct amount is explained by the combined score metrics.
[00:27:39] Chris Beall: [00:27:40] Which indicates a moderate level of explanatory power. So this is really important, because even though skills, it turns out, are not highly correlated with outcomes, there are some things we can go after and try to make better. And 24 percent of your pipeline is a lot. So if 24 percent of the [00:28:00] variability in your pipeline, at least in this case produced from meetings, is explained by these score metrics.
[00:28:05] Chris Beall: Well, okay, it might not have been super strong, but it could be worth pursuing. And then there's an adjusted R squared, adjusted for the number of predictors. And it indicates after accounting for the [00:28:20] number of variables, the model explains about 18 percent of the variance. So less than 24%, still not zero.
[00:28:28] Chris Beall: And think of it this way. If there is potential variance in the pipeline from 1, 000, 000 to 1. 18 million, or [00:28:40] some number like that, the skills could actually influence your ability to get that extra 180, 000 of pipeline. So these are not locks, by the way, because we really don't have cause and effect here yet.
[00:28:51] Chris Beall: We have correlation, but worth knowing. And then it gives me the individual coefficients, [00:29:00] and the individual coefficients They tell you how statistically predictable these predictors are, that is, how wrong they are. So it says the greeting, opener, objections, assertiveness, and overall score are not statistically significant predictors of direct amount, as their p values are [00:29:20] greater than 0.
[00:29:21] Chris Beall: 05. That is, the p value means probability of the variance just due to Randomness. So, would you get the same thing over and over and over, or would it spread all over the place, so the p value is basically, say, percentage due to chance, eh, kind of high. The score [00:29:40] breakthrough, the breakthrough score has, get this, a significant negative coefficient.
[00:29:45] Chris Beall: with a p value of 043, suggesting that higher breakthrough scores might actually be associated with lower direct amounts, which is an interesting and possibly counterintuitive finding. Now this is the analyst, [00:30:00] the GPT analyst, telling me that this is interesting and possibly counterintuitive. So if you kind of think about that.
[00:30:07] Chris Beall: That's pretty amazing that a bot that just knows how to spit out next tokens and next, effectively, words, would conclude that this is an [00:30:20] interesting and possibly counterintuitive finding. So I find it counterintuitive also, especially since I'm Kind of one of the people who came up with the breakthrough script.
[00:30:30] Chris Beall: And I would think following the breakthrough well would be a good thing, but maybe not, or maybe it's only in the case where you're trying [00:30:40] to follow the breakthrough and you fail that that's a good thing. So again, we don't know, but it pointed that out. The analysts pointed that out. The meeting score.
[00:30:49] Chris Beall: This score has a significant positive coefficient with a p value less than 001, it's a really small chance that it's due to chance, indicating a strong [00:31:00] positive impact on direct amount. This suggests that skills in securing meetings are crucial for achieving higher financial outcomes. Well, in one way, that's well dubbed because if you don't ask for the meeting, you don't get the meeting.
[00:31:12] Chris Beall: But in another way, it tells you, hey, if you're going to coach something, go coach that, asking for the meeting. That would, in sales [00:31:20] in general, be considered to be coaching for closing. There's whole books on this subject, but I think it's particularly interesting that the mathematical analysis says it's kind of where it's at.
[00:31:30] Chris Beall: And then the last one is professionalism, which also shows a negative coefficient. and p value close to the threshold for statistical significance, [00:31:40] suggesting a possible negative impact on direct amount. So, then it gives me an interpretation. We're almost done. I hope that this was tolerable for you to listen to all this, but I thought it might be interesting because I'm going to go back and just go through the prompts and tell you how long this took.
[00:31:57] Chris Beall: I don't think I could have done this kind of work if I'd been [00:32:00] left alone for a day, and I wouldn't have trusted the results. I would have had to go back and check them. More than once. And then also, if I presented them to somebody else, they surely wouldn't have trusted the results because they go, hey, Chris, these are your results.
[00:32:15] Chris Beall: So, here's the interpretation. The most influential skills based on this model are [00:32:20] related to handling meetings, that is, asking for the meeting, and breakthrough moments in calls. With meeting skills being particularly critical for financial success. So, interestingly, one was positive and the other was negative.
[00:32:34] Chris Beall: This analysis suggests a selective impact of different skill areas on [00:32:40] financial outcomes, highlighting the importance of specific training and development focuses for sales reps. So now it asks me, would you like to delve deeper into any specific aspect of these results, explore other models, or adjust the analysis in any other way?
[00:32:55] Chris Beall: And I'm going to do a live demo right here, and I'm just going to add a prompt. [00:33:00] Let's consider The impact on another financial metric, which is possible. Now, I'm testing it here to see if it can figure out that possible means possible amount. It does a great job. It says we will now analyze the impact of the REPS skill scores on another [00:33:20] financial metric, possible amount.
[00:33:21] Chris Beall: Possible amount means some conversation took place, and later,
[00:33:30] Chris Beall: So, what happens here? Interestingly enough, even if the conversation did not [00:33:40] lead to a meeting, you have the same correlations of the skills, the greeting, the opener, the objections, the assertiveness and professionalism to the outcomes, which is pretty much nothing compared to what Except for one thing, [00:34:00] professionalism has a strong negative impact on possible amount.
[00:34:03] Chris Beall: Now think about that. Isn't that just fascinating? That you can be more professional and maybe you sound a little stiffer. Maybe you're harder to trust. Anyway, it's a strong negative impact on the possible amount and on the [00:34:20] amount directly from meetings. So I think that's quite fascinating, and the breakthrough score is still negative, but it's not as strong as professionalism, and the meeting score, asking for the meeting, has a positive coefficient on the overall amount, that is, whether it's from a meeting or not.
[00:34:39] Chris Beall: Now, [00:34:40] we have to have a little bit of warning here. When you're looking at results from any analysis, whether this kind done by a GPT model or done by hand, By an analyst, you have to be careful of certain things. So this particular analysis has a flaw in it. And the flaw is a kind of selection bias, and that is [00:35:00] the overall metric, which is, Hey, did you get anything in the pipeline at all?
[00:35:06] Chris Beall: Includes the metric from the meetings. That is, from the direct attribution from a meeting leading to the pipeline. So what I should really do is subtract out the, [00:35:20] uh, the pipeline that was generated from meetings and make sure that it's not being included. And I could go ahead and do that even without reloading the spreadsheet.
[00:35:29] Chris Beall: I could ask the analyst to make up a new metric that subtracts the possible.[00:35:40] 
[00:35:46] Chris Beall: So again, I'm going to recap the purpose in this whole exercise. The reason I'm doing this is just to show you that there are deep insights, or at least interesting insights that can be gotten much more rapidly than you might think. And I [00:36:00] think in a more compelling way, it's easier to think about because you didn't wear yourself out on the mechanics of the analysis, and you didn't end up with the biases of your data analyst and just using a GPT model, like ChatGPT, and I recommend that the GPT 4 Turbo Model Data Analyst, just because I'm using it here.
[00:36:19] Chris Beall: I'm sure [00:36:20] there are others that are Equally good, and perhaps better, but using that in a simple way by loading up some data and then telling it what you're trying to do. As I said, let's analyze a collection of these results and look for a regression analysis to understand the impact of skills. On business outcomes [00:36:40] and just be guided by the response of the GPT model.
[00:36:44] Chris Beall: It comes back and says something, you ask another prompt and away you go. This entire process for me, the first time, I think, took 12 minutes. It would have taken me about a week. I get one pretty picture out of it, which is a correlation matrix, which I [00:37:00] can share with people. I get an analysis that I can share with a little copy and paste.
[00:37:06] Chris Beall: I got some, I can't do this because the file has gotten stale. So I reloaded the file and did it again. The whole analysis again, I didn't even have to tell it what to do other than let's switch over to the possible amount from [00:37:20] direct amount. So, I hope this is somewhat enlightening. The main thing I want to do is, I want to encourage folks to use these large language models as their partner in reasoning through business situations and understanding them without relying [00:37:40] On a human analyst, you might take you a day, two days, five days, or forever to come back with results and may be injecting their own bias, either through selection bias or survivorship bias or something else.
[00:37:54] Chris Beall: And you can avoid a lot of arguments this way, get yourself some insights, and [00:38:00] then they're packaged up nicely so you can discuss them with others. So a very different episode of Market Dominance, guys, but hey. We believe in data here and unanalyzed data. Well, it's kind of like an unexamined life. Is it worth living?
[00:38:15] Chris Beall: We don't know, but unexamined data or unanalyzed [00:38:20] data generally is not worth very much. So for Corey Frank, Enjoying Armenia and Chris Beall, this is Market Dominance, guys.
[00:38:37] Susan Finch: Selling a big idea to a skeptical customer, [00:38:40] investor, or partner is one of the hardest jobs in business. So when it's time to really go big, you need to use an uncommon methodology to gain attention, frame your thoughts, and employ successful sequencing that is fresh enough to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world.
[00:38:56] Susan Finch: From crafting just the right cold call screenplays, to curating and mapping [00:39:00] the ideal call list for your entire TAM, Branch49's modern and innovative sales toolbox offers a guiding hand to ambitious organizations in their quest to reach market dominance. Learn more at branch49. com. Never miss an episode.
[00:39:19] Susan Finch: Go to any of your [00:39:20] favorite podcast venues and search for Market Dominance Guys, or go to market dominance guys. com and subscribe.

In this solo episode of Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall unveils the ultimate sales KPI: pipeline dollars generated per rep hour. This metric is a game-changer for CROs, CFOs, and CEOs looking to optimize their sales efforts and drive business growth. Chris explores the importance of measuring and maximizing this KPI, sharing insights from ConnectAndSell's own data and revealing the significant potential of a well-executed market dominance program. He breaks down the different types of attribution, ideal conversation and meeting rates, and optimal prospecting hours per week. Whether you're a sales leader aiming to improve your team's performance or a C-suite executive seeking to understand the economics of your sales efforts, this episode will help you discover how pipeline per rep hour can help you take your company's revenue generation to new heights.
 
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Below:
 
[00:00:00] Chris Beall: Hey everybody, Chris Beall with Market Dominance Guys with an episode about a bunch of numbers, a bunch of KPIs. And I decided since it's just going to be numbers I'd leave Corey to do something more useful than ask me questions about numbers.
[00:00:16] Chris Beall: So, I came up with the questions myself and [00:00:20] I'll play you with them. It's right now, the 4th of April, 2024, right before Tax Day. And I was speaking last week, had the pleasure of speaking with Mike McCracken, the Founder and CEO of McCracken Alliance Partners, who provide all the information. amazing help with regard [00:00:40] to finance things, not just taxes, which is that'd be fairly straightforward, probably, although they can be complex, but really how to make your company sing, how to make your company dominate even with the help of financial professionals who know what they're talking about and who will work with you to make [00:01:00] some stuff happen that you probably didn't believe could happen.
[00:01:03] Chris Beall: So I asked Mike a question. I said, Hey, Mike it kind of bothers me that ConnectAndSell, which primarily has two impacts on companies that one would think CFOs would be interested in. One is immediate increase in pipeline, and everybody [00:01:20] knows that pipeline is a leading indicator of future revenue, and CFOs sure like to be able to forecast future revenue with 
[00:01:27] Chris Beall: greater accuracy, specificity, and fidelity. And then it also allows you to decrease costs immediately because you can do more with less. And [00:01:40] less tends to be unnecessary headcount, extra headcount. You can also do more with more if you're in the mood to do that. But in any case, there's an efficiency play and capital efficiency is of great interest to CFOs.
[00:01:51] Chris Beall: And Mike, he gave me a great answer. He just like, boom, hit me between the eyes. He said, Chris, you gotta come up with a KPI that [00:02:00] is meaningful to CFOs, that's meaningful to the business. And I said, well, we have one of those, and it's called Pipeline Built Per Rep Hour. And I thought, as I was out doing my little barefoot trot today, getting the usual comments from folks, what is it about going barefoot that makes everybody think that you're weird?
[00:02:19] Chris Beall: I [00:02:20] don't know. In any case, I was out there trotting along in beautiful Arizona sunshine, and thinking, why don't I just say what some really good values would be for some, KPIs, some metrics that folks tend not to think about very much. And so I, I just thought I'd share [00:02:40] some we measure at ConnectAndSell what we call attribution, and we measure three kinds.
[00:02:47] Chris Beall: So one kind is what we call direct attribution. That's looking at all the pipeline that's been built directly from meetings, appointments that were set in, ConnectAndSell. We know that happened because there are [00:03:00] dispositions that indicate that a meeting was set and there. Certainly is pipeline out there to be measured, and you can link it together a number of different ways.
[00:03:09] Chris Beall: The most straightforward is by the account name, by the customer name, and you can say, hey, set a meeting with somebody. Pipeline shows up later. How much pipeline? [00:03:20] What stage is it in? And you get a pretty good read on what you're prospecting is accomplishing in terms of dollars of pipeline. That are being set by your reps, but what's in the denominator and the big question that I think really is out there for all of us who care about prospecting and anybody who doesn't care about [00:03:40] prospecting, certainly they either got some other weird kind of magic going on.
[00:03:45] Chris Beall: Or and bless you if you do, right? You don't need prospecting, you're in a special place. But most businesses need prospecting. And, in fact, Jason Lemkin just wrote an article this week talking [00:04:00] about how the new KPI for venture finance companies, not just net retained revenue, not even just gross retained revenue, all the stuff that's about, oh my God, what if we lose a customer?
[00:04:13] Chris Beall: We got to keep them all very conservative sort of way of looking at the world. It's about your [00:04:20] ability to add new customers. Well, add new customers is what prospecting is all about quite frankly. So now we have tied prospecting to the new, most important KPI that venture capitalists care about, which is adding new customers.
[00:04:37] Chris Beall: It actually made me go take a look and I [00:04:40] was pretty happy with what I saw for our company. It was interesting to see, a little bit more than a hundred percent new customers added over the last year. Some of which have come through partners who are working on an appointment setting basis, and they're doing things for companies that would rather have somebody else do it, most of which are [00:05:00] customers of ours that are having ConnectAndSell help them do prospecting so they can get new customers and get new pipeline in a reasonably efficient way with predictability, visibility, and control.
[00:05:13] Chris Beall: So that's really interesting. Pipeline is the number that we tend to look at. [00:05:20] And new customers are a, another number. I'll call those numerators. But what should we be looking for in the denominator? Well, I'll go to pipeline right now. We measure something called pipeline per rep hour. And we measure it, as I said, one way, which is what we [00:05:40] call direct attribution.
[00:05:42] Chris Beall: That means came from meetings. We measured it another way, which is came after positive conversations. Positive conversations are like, I'm interested, send me information, that sort of thing. And then, there's the pipeline that comes from any old conversation. So any old conversation could be a negative [00:06:00] conversation, could be a blow off.
[00:06:02] Chris Beall: The fact of the world is, when you talk to somebody, they're more inclined to take a look at your website. And they're much more inclined to answer that email that you wisely sent them that says thank you for our conversation today and also much, much, much more inclined to actually speak with you if you call them in the future [00:06:20] because you've already demonstrated that they answer the phone.
[00:06:23] Chris Beall: And it's more likely to be a good conversation because you've had a conversation, however brief, and you can open the next conversation effortlessly with what you wanted to say, but kind of didn't get to say. How to, start that next conversation is something you make [00:06:40] available to your future self and in a set it and forget it kind of way, you become a sales genius.
[00:06:46] Chris Beall: But what's in the denominator? Okay. So there's pipeline measured three ways. In the denominator. must be, it seems to me, the number of hours that reps spend prospecting. Now, I venture to [00:07:00] say most of us have no idea how many hours our reps spend prospecting. And one of the, I think, appeals of the SDR BDR revolution is, hey, I've got reps that are just prospecting, so I can allocate all of their hours, I can tag all of their hours, categories, categorize all of their hours [00:07:20] as prospecting hours.
[00:07:22] Chris Beall: I don't know if this is true or not, but I am sure that when somebody's in a ConnectAndSell session and they've pushed the button, as we say, and they're having conversations, that we have verifiable time spent prospecting. And that's a cost to the business. Those reps cost money. [00:07:40] They're fully burdened rate is whatever it happens to be that can be burdened with just the usual, but you could also throw in all the tools and technologies and data and all that kind of good stuff you have to provide and you can get an idea of what a rep costs you per hour.
[00:07:56] Chris Beall: You can, if you know how much pipeline was built by that [00:08:00] rep, by each rep, in each hour, and you know it in all relevant ways, one way would be directly through meeting set, that's the one that most folks will measure, if they measure anything, by the way. Another one is positive conversations that lead to pipeline.
[00:08:15] Chris Beall: And another one is the really the good one, this you probably [00:08:20] won't believe, but it is the best KPI. Is. Pipeline built per hour from any conversation. You don't know what really has happened. A lot of stuff kind of goes out into, I'll call it sort of the action cloud. That is what's going on out there when someone has been spoken with by [00:08:40] one of your reps.
[00:08:41] Chris Beall: You don't know. They can, that person, that target. They could talk to somebody else. They could go to your website. They could have a thought about what it is you do. They could check out you and your competitors, which is not a bad thing, by the way, if they haven't been thinking about a solution in your space.
[00:08:56] Chris Beall: They certainly can answer an email or at least [00:09:00] read an email that you send them. So there's a lot of things that can happen. You can advertise to them. A lot of things can happen after a conversation. But the pipeline is pretty easy to measure. It comes right out of your CRM. Opportunities are there.
[00:09:11] Chris Beall: They're in stages. Therefore different accounts, and you know that you talked to somebody at that account. Certainty is not the goal here. You can get [00:09:20] a perfectly good KPI without certainty. And, like all good data, you can measure it over time. You can trend it. And then you can go and correlate it to the final results, which is 
[00:09:32] Chris Beall: ultimately bookings and then revenue and if you're a kind of an ARR or MRR kind of company ARR and MRR [00:09:40] because those could be interesting too. So number one new KPI to pay attention to pipeline generated per rep hour, and I'll give you some numbers that will sound different from what you might expect. I'm looking at the last year.
[00:09:57] Chris Beall: So today is I'm [00:10:00] treating it as the end of March, so sort of April of last year, which is 2023 to end of March 2024. And I'm looking at a fair number of companies, about 130 of them, that I have pipeline per rep hour measured for. So, a really good number, [00:10:20] a fantastic number, is also a really big number.
[00:10:24] Chris Beall: Some of these you kind of look at and you go, well maybe they're a little early in the game, but some of them are pretty stunning in any case. So one of our customers, for instance, and I won't say their name because they haven't authorized me to do that. They sell deals in an [00:10:40] average of about $73,894. And the pipeline that they're building per rep hour in the last year is $378,082 of pipeline per rep hour of prospecting.
[00:10:57] Chris Beall: Now, darn well they're not paying any [00:11:00] of their reps. $378,000 an hour. Do we know what their gross margin is? So we'd actually be able to say how much money is coming in, do we think, from these deals. Do we know what the probability of the deals are? Do we know when the deals are going to close?
[00:11:14] Chris Beall: Yes, we actually do know all those things, and those are very interesting to break down. But the [00:11:20] first thing to know is , you got to generate pipeline across all the different stages with a lot of different cycle times when they're actually anticipated to close, a lot of different probabilities in order to have business.
[00:11:34] Chris Beall: That's just the way it is. So this is $378,082 an hour. The [00:11:40] next one down is a very large company that is pretty fascinating, actually, if you kind of looked at what they do. But their deal sizes are really big, like $2.77 million per deal. And they're generating $265,047 of pipeline per rep hour. And now I'm going with the pipeline that [00:12:00] is from all conversations, not merely that came directly through meetings, although we could look at that, but this is, I believe, the true most important KPI to pay attention to.
[00:12:12] Chris Beall: So next is $258,586 of pipeline per rep hour, [00:12:20] $164,766. So let's go down a ways. I'm going to get to a company that is at about number 30 on the list. So actually, I'll go with our company, ConnectAndSell. How much pipeline do we generate per rep hour? So, our average deal [00:12:40] size is not huge. We do initial deals that are in the sort of $20,000 range.
[00:12:45] Chris Beall: There's, some of them can be very large, some can be smaller, but we like to get started with folks in a way that really makes sense for their business. And we do a lot of prospecting. How much prospecting in that last year? A lot of prospecting. [00:13:00] 13, 578 hours of prospecting. That's a fair amount to generate a fair amount of pipeline.
[00:13:10] Chris Beall: So when you look at it, that's 132 million dollars of pipeline. So it's $9,731 per rep. hour [00:13:20] of prospecting that can be measured. This is not taking all of the hours in the day for these reps. This is the hours they're spending. in sessions where they're pushing button, talking to a target, and then wrapping up, we call it, which is taking notes, setting the, that little teleprompter for their future self and [00:13:40] setting a disposition.
[00:13:40] Chris Beall: So, and we're gaining intelligence as a company about all of these conversations and also separating out and segmenting the market into folks who answer the phone, we know answer the phone because we spoke with them and folks who haven't answered the phone yet. Across all of those, of course I don't, know why we wouldn't do [00:14:00] this.
[00:14:00] Chris Beall: We measure their tendency to answer the phone across the entire community. We crowdsource that tendency to answer the phone and keep that current every day. Not for everybody, but for about 24 million folks that are worth talking to. We call it fast phone numbers. So all that intelligence is coming back.
[00:14:17] Chris Beall: But the other thing that's coming back is [00:14:20] opportunities going into the CRM and those opportunities have dollar amounts associated with them. They also have probabilities and stages and all that kind of good stuff. But right now I'm talking about the most important KPI that's probably new to you. And if you're measuring this KPI already, pipeline [00:14:40] dollars per rep hour, I'm super impressed, unless you're already a ConnectAndSell customer, in which case we're measuring it for you.
[00:14:47] Chris Beall: And then you're getting to understand it and break it down. We break it down for you, trend it, see how it's associated with individual reps. Would you like to know that each rep that is doing prospecting [00:15:00] is generating pipeline, and how much? Because being able to do attribution to marketing spend is one thing, but being able to do attribution to what you're spending on the actual folks that are out prospecting, that's whether they're SDRs and BDRs, or whether they're account executives, in our case, it is a mix.
[00:15:18] Chris Beall: Everybody at ConnectAndSell [00:15:20] prospects. Big surprise, right? So when you look at all of your numbers and you think about your business, whether you're a CEO, whether you're a CFO, whether you're a CRO, whether you're a business development manager, a BDM, a SDR manager, a sales manager, a VP of sales, whatever you are, [00:15:40] this KPI is the KPI you should be paying immediate attention to. Now, once pipeline per rep hour, you've kind of simplified this production of pipeline, which is you either add more rep hours or you improve the pipeline [00:16:00] being set per rep hour by improving either the number of conversations and impact of those conversations. So conversations per hour, is important.
[00:16:10] Chris Beall: Now we're going to go to the other end of the spectrum. What are the drivers, right? So the simple drivers are conversations per hour. Have more. What's a [00:16:20] reasonable number of conversations per hour that makes sense to have? There's a number somewhere between six and say 12 really can make a difference.
[00:16:31] Chris Beall: Our average over all of our customers last year is about 9. 4, but it's highly varied because they're using different [00:16:40] protocols. Some are connecting on live voice, some are connecting only when the target answers. But if you've got five conversations an hour going on with your reps, you're probably doing pretty well.
[00:16:50] Chris Beall: Now they're probably setting meetings. That's direct attribution. How many meetings per hour is a good number. About half a meeting per hour is a great target. If you're setting [00:17:00] half a meeting per hour per rep, you're probably doing quite well. How many rep hours per week really depends on what your reps are doing.
[00:17:08] Chris Beall: If they're SDRs, my view is they should be doing as many as they can manage. That number is probably about five or six a day. And I know it [00:17:20] sounds like it's terrible talking to people for five or six hours a day. It's actually pretty fun. As long as you don't have to dial, navigate phone systems and do all that kind of junk.
[00:17:29] Chris Beall: So that's that's a number that is interesting in the SDR world. Not many people achieve that. Our reps at ConnectAndSell, they run at [00:17:40] about 5. 8 hours of prospecting per week if they are SDRs. And they run at about 2. 5 hours of prospecting per week if they are account executives. So you can see it varies.
[00:17:54] Chris Beall: The AEs are busy doing other things, but they find time to prospect. They tend to prospect together, by the [00:18:00] way. Together in time, not in space. They're all over the place because it's more fun. And because management then can talk about what we're trying to do in this particular session and we can gain more insights than just the data might give us.
[00:18:15] Chris Beall: So this is about is it, this is a tough one, but I [00:18:20] would say for an AE two and a half hours a week prospecting, real prospecting measurable, probably get the job done. And for an SDR if you really want to dominate, you're probably talking about five and a half hours a week. Then you've got, okay, all this prospecting, prospecting is going on.
[00:18:38] Chris Beall: Have we got the conversations [00:18:40] per week that are, or per hour that are happening? So we now know maybe 60 conversations a week on average, but again, very different between SDRs and account executives. And the same thing with dials that should be done for them. No rep should ever have to do a dial.
[00:18:58] Chris Beall: It makes no sense [00:19:00] whatsoever. Reps should push buttons and talk to people, or hey, if you can talk to people without pushing buttons, that makes sense too. So what do your conversion numbers need to be in order to make this happen? Well, there are two kinds of conversion numbers, cold and follow up. Cold should be North of 5 percent if you're in a market [00:19:20] dominance program, but the main reason you're talking to folks is to segment the market into people you can talk to.
[00:19:25] Chris Beall: Those who answer the phone and people you need to kind of go after a different way. Those who don't answer the phone. For those who answer the phone on the first conversation, what we call a cold call, you're going to be shooting for around 5 percent across all [00:19:40] of your reps. If you have a rep languishing at 2%, or then you have a skill issue.
[00:19:45] Chris Beall: If you have all of your reps languishing at 2 or 3%, you probably have a targeting issue. The issue is that either your target market is being chosen incorrectly, or more likely, your scripting is allowing that easy [00:20:00] exit where somebody just says, "Thanks, we're all set." Almost every cold call script has got a major flaw in it that is going to drive your conversion for cold calls way, way down.
[00:20:11] Chris Beall: Now, not to worry, even if your conversion for cold calls is way, way down, the money is actually in the follow ups anyway. So as long as you're having enough conversation, say a [00:20:20] rep is having something on the order of 50 or 60 conversations with targets per week. That should be generating something on the order of 40 to 50 follow ups.
[00:20:31] Chris Beall: Follow up opportunities. That's people we know answer the phone that you can talk to next week or more likely next quarter. And you can nurture through the 11 [00:20:40] quarters in the future it's going to take for their company to finally want to do business with anybody. And that could include you because you've got the inside track.
[00:20:48] Chris Beall: So you've got a kind of a two distributions called bimodal around the conversion rate. So the conversion rate can be at 5 percent for cold calls and should be at north of [00:21:00] 10 percent for follow up calls. And that also will, interestingly enough, follow up calls reduce the conversations per week just a little bit, because they tend to be longer conversations, but everything kind of comes out in the wash.
[00:21:14] Chris Beall: So, how many conversations should you get, by the way, per dial that's executed for you? Highly [00:21:20] variable, but the cold call world, about 5%. And in the follow up world, something around 12 or 13%. And then, when you kind of look at it overall, you've got dials going on, how many meetings should you have per dial.
[00:21:32] Chris Beall: I don't think this is a particularly compelling, KPI, unless your reps are doing the [00:21:40] dials, but it's kind of good to know. So a number of about 0. 6 percent is a decent number for meetings per dial. And after that, what are the drivers? So let's figure out how can we make the number that we want go up?
[00:21:55] Chris Beall: Well, you can make your average deal size go up, but your market probably determines [00:22:00] that. So I don't think you should push on that one, but that's that one can be interesting. Mostly the big correlation, interestingly enough, and obviously Well, pipeline per rep hour, let's just increase the number of rep hours and we increase the pipeline.
[00:22:18] Chris Beall: It seems too simple, [00:22:20] but it actually is the key to everything. The number one correlation between any of these KPIs and the number of dollars a pipeline produced per day or per week, or per month, whatever it is that you care about, it's actually primarily driven by [00:22:40] simply prospecting time. And a little bit of prospecting time goes a long way.
[00:22:45] Chris Beall: If your pipeline per rep hour is big $100,000 or even $10,000, just add more hours to get more pipeline. But what if I want to get my pipeline per hour up also, not just [00:23:00] add more hours, but add more pipeline? What do I do? Number one thing to do is increase the percentage of follow up calls, follow up pipeline generating prospecting calls compared to cold calls.
[00:23:14] Chris Beall: For some reason, folks get obsessed with cold calling, which they don't even like to do. And it's [00:23:20] like, well, we talked to this person, talked to this person. It's almost like scratching lottery tickets and hoping to get lucky and hope might be a strategy in the world of lottery tickets, not a great strategy in the world.
[00:23:31] Chris Beall: of Market Dominance. So what do you want to do? Well, you want to make sure that your reps are talking to people it [00:23:40] makes sense to talk to, and your follow up lists automatically are full of those people because they either expressed enough interest or your rep decided it was worth talking to them in the future, and they're easier to get a hold of.
[00:23:53] Chris Beall: So that's number one. Number two is fix your messaging so it resonates. Your [00:24:00] messaging probably is driving folks away because it contains too much value. And the value statements in your messaging, we do X and Y for companies like you, blah, blah, blah, are causing somebody to get to achieve their goal in the call.
[00:24:16] Chris Beall: Which is to get off this call with our self image intact by [00:24:20] simply saying, "Thanks, we're all set." So that's the next thing you should do. Why should you do that before you change your targeting, your actual lists? For a simple reason. Until you, you really get there and get to a point where you're confident that at least you don't have a structural, psychological issue in your messaging, [00:24:40] then until you get there, you don't really know how well it's working for targeting.
[00:24:45] Chris Beall: That is, you can't really tell what's resonating. You can get lucky sometimes. But you've got to have what we call a calibrated message. Then you need to get at least one of your reps to the point when, where when they deliver the message it is, consistent. You're going to get [00:25:00] consistent read. That comes back in the form of meeting set per rep hour.
[00:25:06] Chris Beall: So that's, a good one. It also actually comes back in conversion rate, meeting set per conversation. So you need to get to the point where, yes, we know what that, that is, what the conversion rate is, and how it ties to the reps [00:25:20] time. Then we're free to say, okay, now, what part of our list is this working well for?
[00:25:26] Chris Beall: And what part of the list is it not working well for? And you can do segmentation that is more fine grained than what you have today. This is actually a little bit tricky to do, but if you take the [00:25:40] folks that you're setting meetings with, then you take them off to a company like Rev, at GetRev. ai.
[00:25:46] Chris Beall: Fred Mondragon was on one of those. Market Dominance Guys talking about this. You can have them point to a whole bunch of companies that are in this exographics way, in a significant way, similar to the ones that you're setting appointments with. That is, [00:26:00] you don't have to even wait until you've got a whole bunch of business.
[00:26:03] Chris Beall: You're brand new, you're going after a new market. What's the first signal that says that you're going to have pipeline built? It's meetings set. So go and use that. You can also look at the pipeline that's being [00:26:20] set in the CRM based on the conversations. That's the, we call that the possible attribution.
[00:26:26] Chris Beall: So you have two very nice signals that you can use in order to improve your targeting. Once you've done all of that, then it makes sense to actually increase the amount of prospecting time. Until you've got it all calibrated, if you [00:26:40] just increase the prospecting time, you just irritate yourself and people.
[00:26:43] Chris Beall: And you actually, you can burn out a team and you can burn through lists in ways that don't make a great deal of sense. And you can also trick yourself into thinking that you're seeing things, positive and negative things, that aren't actually there. You got to get to the data to see the reality. So, that's that kind of [00:27:00] wraps it up.
[00:27:00] Chris Beall: That's a whole bunch of numbers, but I'm going to come back to the main one. Pipeline dollars per rep hour is the KPI that you need to be looking at. And to do that to have that number to hand, you have to have a way of measuring the actual rep hours spent prospecting and [00:27:20] tying that to the pipeline that's sitting in your CRM.
[00:27:23] Chris Beall: Again, it's something we do at ConnectAndSell as a convenience for you. It's just go ahead and hook up your CRM and we'll measure this every single day and break it down all the way to the individual rep, or to the list, or to the team, or whatever it is that you want, and you'll have that [00:27:40] KPI in hand, but without that KPI, it's really, hard, unless pipeline dollars that are being built per rep hour, it's really, hard to figure out the economics of a market dominance program.
[00:27:54] Chris Beall: So for Corey Frank, you got a day off, Corey, and Chris Beall, this [00:28:00] is Market Dominance Guys
 

As sales leaders, we're ultimately responsible for revenue growth. In part two of this must-listen episode, Helen Fanucci and Chris Beall reveal how to build an asset that drives results: pipeline power. Learn why phone and conversation intelligence beats guesswork. Discover how to arm your team with the right data to fill your pipeline with serious opportunities. We dive into the critical questions you must ask on every account to accelerate sales cycles. Helen emphasizes that trust builds between companies early on, so executives must engage alongside reps. Tune into part two for tangible tips on avoiding over-strategizing in favor of authentic conversations. You’ll pick up tactics to leverage intent signals, stop playing pipeline games, and create alignment around valuable targets. The key takeaway: with closed-loop feedback, your pipeline can become a core competitive advantage that speeds up cycles and boosts revenue.
Links from this episode:
Helen Fanucci on LinkedIn
Corey Frank on LinkedIn
Branch49
Chris Beall on LinkedIn
ConnectAndSell
 
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Below:
 
Corey Frank (00:01):
Chris, you've said many times marketing has budget, but no headcount. Sales has headcount, but oftentimes no budget. I would imagine certainly one of the things with pipeline power, Helen, in this consultancy and this advisory that you have on helping clients get more refined targeting to think about their targeting differently is about giving more power to the sales folks. And perhaps if you're talking to the marketing folks, giving more power to the marketing folks, how to allocate their budgets and allocate the resource probably a little bit more efficiently. 
Helen Fanucci (00:38):
Yeah, I think so. But it also may be, it depends on the size of the organization, but I think there is a strategic, there needs to be a decider, if you will. Okay, this is the strategic decision, the direction we're going in because the targeting is a representation or a manifestation of the strategy of the business strategy. So that could be the head of sales, it could be marketing, it depends organizationally where that lands, or it might be the CEO if it's a smaller company, but it does absolutely point to a business strategy. Now, if you get more efficient with targeting and are able to do more with less, that could be threatening to some sales leaders who want to have a bigger organization headcount wise, or that might mean higher quotas. So it just depends on the dynamics and I think it's really going to take some iteration and conversations with some, if you will, friendly customers, friendly folks that I have relationships with to actually kind of see what that dynamic is and what the sweet spot is in terms of the offering as well as really the business challenge that these companies are looking to solve. 
Helen Fanucci (01:59):
Because it may not be targeting, per se, I say targeting, but it actually may be market expansion. They want to test more markets. I mean, there's a lot of ways to apply that methodology and thought process. It could be, as I said, grow revenue fast here, get feedback, do more, or it could be okay, we want to expand and we want to try out some new markets. So it'll be interesting as I get more time and focus engaging with my potential market to see really what's resonating and what the core, I have an idea of the core challenges, but I think in some organizations it will be different titles that care and it will resonate with some folks and other folks it might not resonate with. 
Corey Frank (02:54):
Well, I see Helen on this. There's a market maker to open up your aperture when you look at your total addressable market is right. How everybody's taught is total addressable market, and then you have your service addressable market, and then maybe even under that, you have your serviceable, attainable market, right? So if TAM is your total potential market demand and then you have your sam, which is the portion that a business can realistically target, and then the OMM service attainable market is the portion that your business can realistically capture. If you're helping me expand again or open up that aperture a little bit tot to grab folks that maybe I didn't have access before, it seems like that aperture opening is good for small mid-size companies, especially because I don't have, at Microsoft you probably had X amount of account managers walking through the halls. You had X amount of client amazement managers, so you could fill in the gaps where maybe I couldn't see if I'm a small mid-size company to know, oh, no, no, no. Hey, Helen does the same thing that Chris, but Chris has a different title than Helen and she's on LinkedIn and Chris doesn't believe in that and he's not on that. Would you see that Chris, from market dominance perspective is that that whole aperture gets a little bigger? 
Chris Beall (04:17):
Yeah, I think it gets bigger and then you get to wrestle with the big factor in business, which is time. One of the huge differences among businesses is just how long can they go without eating? So just like among animals, right? Really big animals like me, I won't say anything about you who have had plenty to eat and are genetically engineered by nature to be of a certain size. We can go without eating for quite a little while. 
Corey Frank (04:47):
At least an hour. At least an hour, yeah, 
Chris Beall (04:50):
At least in my case, I've made it 37 minutes once and it was quite good. So a very small animal, it might have to eat once every hour or something like that. And I think a lot of what constitutes advice in sales and marketing go to market is advice that if you're the wrong size company and you take it, you die, you actually die of starvation. It becomes a pretty serious business actually. So one of the factors you have to take into account is kind of like how much do you have to kill and eat in the amount of time you have before you get skinny and die? And when you're opening that aperture, now that translates into how fast can you explore that new chunk of market you're thinking about before it takes too long, right? So now the cycle time of exploration is super, super important. 
Chris Beall (05:42):
And if you believe that conversations of the means for exploration and frankly I don't know of any other that delivers enough highly reliable high fidelity information, then the cycle time to next conversation within somebody hypothetically is worth speaking to in that wider aperture becomes the dominant feature in the execution of your strategy, and that actually becomes the dominant feature. The feedback becomes the dominant feature in your actual strategy because having a strategy you can't execute is kind of ridiculous. And yet we all start out with strategies we can't execute. We must because we don't know enough to choose a strategy, we can't execute. So our strategy is a hypothesis. We need to go out and engage. It always reminds me of when I first met Helen, we went sailing together and there was a little piece of equipment that was on the mast and she knows sailing and I don't, she races sailboats and I serve as ballast, kind of animate ballast, right? 
Chris Beall (06:42):
There's killer whales and you can't get them to come up on the boat and do the job, so you use me instead. So I noted that when she saw this piece of equipment that was very small and looked out of place that she ran, actually went physically fast toward the mass, then stopped and examined. That's what you need to do in markets. You need to go fast into a point where you're engaging, which is the conversation. She was having a conversation with this loose piece of equipment with her eyes and her MIT trained brain, her engineer's brain, and then she came up with a strategy. The strategy from where she was sitting in the back of the boat and the stern would've been a poor strategy because she didn't have enough information. She needed the information from engaging the market, this little piece of metal that was hanging there looking funny in order to be able to go, oh, this is what I'll do. 
Chris Beall (07:36):
I can safely tuck it away and ignore it, or I can take some time and fix it or whatever. I think that's a great analogy for this kind of work that Helen is embarking on with pipeline power is look, you got to have somebody go run into the market and engage it and talk with it, not for the purpose of making a sale this quarter, but for the purpose of efficiently gathering information that will inform your strategies. You even know which of those three strategic layers with regard to Tam you're in. 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 got for 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 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 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 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. 
Corey Frank (12:06):
Well, it also sounds like right Chris, defending, Hey, I got 4 0 9 a's that I have to do every year. If I can make an argument that I have some proprietary IP with regards to my cybersecurity database versus everybody else's, that could be an advantage from an acquisition or funding or valuation perspective. Could it not, Chris? 
Chris Beall (12:31):
Oh yeah. I mean when you come right down to it, growth is the big driver of valuations and proprietary information is the big driver of growth. We actually, I think everybody knows that. It's like I want my really good reps out talking to people and learning what their needs are, proprietary information. That person told me what their needs are. I want to know when they're thinking of doing something. I want to know what other systems and processes we need to fit together with. I need to know who are the other people who are important in making a decision. I need to know if they're in a macro situation that tells me and tells them, Hey, we got to sit tight for a while, say in the middle of an m and a circumstance, but we think it'll be kind of done and integrated within three months, four months, five months, whatever. 
Chris Beall (13:21):
All of that proprietary information that that's what is fundamental to being competitive. Your product features, your product capabilities are almost never going to be able to stand up to the market over time. Because if they're good people will copy them and they'll copy them. In fact, the innovator's dilemma tells us they will copy them with something that is cheaper than what you sell and not quite as good, but occupies a pretty big chunk of your addressable market. You're now obliged to defend from above, right? This is those who haven't read their professor, Clayton Christensen should grab their innovator's dilemma and reread it, and I would recommend rereading it twice actually, because most of us don't get it. When I read it the first time. It's interesting to me again, I told you, I just read a book over the holidays here about the second law of thermodynamics, which is about the second law is the one that says you can't break even. 
Chris Beall (14:18):
You always lose. So the three laws are like, you can't win, you always lose and you can't get out of the game, right? Well, the one that says you always lose says things just get more disordered. Your job as a business is to create order by using energy up in the environment to do something. Well, what does that order? That order that lower entropy is in the form of information that allows you to go to the market more efficiently, talk to this person rather than this person. Have another conversation with this person in four weeks. Stay away from this person or this company because they don't have any need forever. Come back to these in a year because they will have need develop your product so it integrates with this product because that would give you access to this entire set of the market. All these things are driven by information that comes to you that creates order so that you don't dissolve into chaos, into entropy. 
Chris Beall (15:14):
Like everything else in the universe, you're trying to fight against the tendency of the universe, which is to go crazy, to go disorder. The glass when it falls and breaks doesn't ever reassemble itself. Well, it's your job as a business to reassemble broken glasses or keep them from breaking. There's a lot of things that we can do. So what Helen is suggesting is one of the things we can do is let's pay attention to where we have a chance, but let's also find out if we have a chance that is let's make some good first decisions, hypothetical decisions as to where to go learn more, then let's go learn more, then let's make better decisions based on that information of where we should go learn more. Sales is actually a learning process primarily, and the exhaust of sales is deals and revenue. 
Corey Frank (16:02):
That's great. Chris, you heard that one yet, Helen, from him. Sales process is predominantly a learning exercise and the exhaust and residue is revenue. 
Helen Fanucci (16:14):
I think that that's not a compelling value proposition for a business, particularly when talking to sales leaders. They're accountable for revenue and yeah, okay, the learning thing, alright, maybe it's a more CEO executive conversation, but for most sales leaders, I don't think that's a winning proposition. That's just my opinion. I don't disagree with Chris, but I think there's probably a more elegant way to frame it that would resonate more with the audience. 
Chris Beall (16:50):
I love that. Well, that's why I think most sales leaders last such a short amount of time in their jobs because they are held accountable for the quarter and maybe the next quarter, but the company is trying to do something over a longer period of time and you get this sort of mismatch. And so it's one of the big issues that we have now is it used to be salespeople. Were formally, informally responsible for nurturing their territory. We give you a territory. We don't expect you to leave the territory next quarter. We're actually thinking the longer you're in the territory, the more you're going to control the territory and the revenue you generate from the territory will become more predictable over time. That's kind of why we do it. You get Cory, you get Phoenix. Well, we don't know how big Phoenix is for us revenue wise, but we're pretty sure that if your butts on the line, your family's fortune's on the line and you're good, you're going to figure that out. 
Chris Beall (17:44):
In a world where geography no longer dominates, territories become challenging. And now we've got to ask ourselves, well, so what are we really doing? And what we're really doing is we're saying sales, you've got a new problem. You've got to also nurture relationships over time. The old problem that you had when you had a territory, but now you have to do it with a lot less territorial clarity. And I think almost all conversations with sales leaders now are relatively uncomfortable for a whole bunch of reasons, including the macro economy, which doesn't help at all. They're held accountable for what happens when interest rates go up too. Interestingly enough, I actually agree with Helen. It's not a compelling value prop, but it's a fact of the world. And the fact is those who sell really, really well turn out to be those who learned the fastest and turn those learnings into compelling value for those that are ready to buy now and nurturing relationships with those who will be ready to buy later. 
Corey Frank (18:49):
Well, and with what both of you have been saying, if it is indeed a learning exercise, and it may not be attractive to say that, hey, the residue is revenue, it also would yield the premise that the faster I can learn, the faster I can get to revenue, the more cycles I can put into that learning exercise. IE through nurturing, through cold calling, through understanding who my targets are out of the gate. It's measured three times, cut once and versus how a lot of organizations are. I give you all these tools. I'm going to bring in all the reps for outreach and SalesLoft and LinkedIn navigator. You're going to learn as a sales professional how to do it. But maybe my nature isn't to be a farmer. My nature isn't to be a nurturer. My nature maybe isn't to be a closer, my nature isn't to be a presenter, but I have an armed with all these tools. 
Corey Frank (19:41):
I'm saddled with a number, a million and a half. I'll see you in 12 months. And that's usually where it ends. And the sales leaders are there to help support them, meaning let me know if you have a deal that has a couple of commas in it, because I'm going to come in and I'm going to help close that deal for you. But the tactical efforts are maybe probably geared around how your hygiene in Salesforce is. Maybe that's the majority of the tactical communication with the reps or in their all hands meetings. Correct. So it's interesting dilemma, but I'm looking forward to hearing more about pipeline power. And by the way, if you go to pipeline power.com, that's about offshore drilling rigs and things like that. Love it. That's not what we're talking about. 
Helen Fanucci (20:22):
This is pipeline power ai. Thank you very much. ai. Although I don't think our website's up yet, so still working on that, but yeah, no, I saw that as well. I thought, oh, that's perfect. That means it's a completely different industry. No conflicts. I know this is pipeline power ai. By the way, Corey, your last statements there, the faster cycle time. This is why people who actually use the phone are going to win because they learn faster and leaders must work with their reps or understand how their reps are doing. You can't wait until there's a deal with multiple commas to go in and close it because it's already lost unless you're working with them earlier on because it is a team sport, and you've got to get executives engaged early on to have that trust building relationship. The company that's buying your product has to buy the trust of the company, not just the trust of the rep. 
Helen Fanucci (21:24):
So there's a lot of leading indicators on territory planning, account planning, and I don't mean plan and put on the shelf, I mean plan as an inaction. Next steps, what are you doing? What's going on? What problems are we solving? What's the compelling event, et cetera. All the questions that you would know matter along the way. But yeah, so pipeline power is really about targeting and improving and using closed loop data. So as you learn, that goes into the model to improve better and better targeting so that the company can grow and accelerate revenues and valuation and exits or whatever the end game is for the customer's companies. 
Corey Frank (22:13):
What I hear you saying is right, a page out of the book is love your team by arming your team. I think there's a recent LinkedIn post about that very thing, and so arm them the right 
Helen Fanucci (22:24):
Way. Yes, we got arm your team along the way. Absolutely. 
Corey Frank (22:27):
Well, wonderful. Well, Helen, thanks for coming, kicking and screaming to this episode of the Market Dominance guys, and glad you banished Chris to the corner of the house there where we normally get to opine and these weekly sessions. So Chris, final thoughts on love your team and on pipeline power and how it pertains to the market dominance mantra. 
Chris Beall (22:49):
Well, market dominance is always about starting with a list because markets are lists, they're not ideas and getting that list to be sufficiently relevant that you can make hay while the sun shines, you can actually make some revenue off it. And then learning from those interactions quickly and make the list better and better. Sharper and sharper, more and more precise. That's the nature of the game. I love the name that Helen's chosen pipeline power. Your pipeline is power. Jeb Blunt says the pipe is life. And that's pretty true. I mean, the pipeline is the power of your company. When you look at your balance sheet and you ask what is the number one contributor to the biggest chunk of your balance sheet, which is called Goodwill, it's your pipeline. 
Corey Frank (23:36):
That's so great and obviously valuations that we've talked about. So Helen, thank you once again for joining us. We hope to hear more and more as pipeline power learns more about this exhaust and residue that we've talked so much about in the industry. I think that no one is talking about this element of the tip of the spear as much, and I think the cycle times they're reduced, those are real compelling arguments to certainly engage with Helen and her team. So for the market dominance guys and Chris Beal, this is Corey Frank. Until next time.
 

Welcome to the continuation of a conversation with Hitesh Shah, CTO and CPO of ConnectAndSell. This episode delves into the world of sales and coaching for sales managers. Hitesh shares his experience and insights on coaching by the numbers and how to effectively manage and coach a sales team.
Corey and Chris share their thoughts on how to analyze sales data and determine the strengths and weaknesses of individual sales reps. They stress the importance of getting granular with data and looking at it with a critical eye. By understanding the patterns and details of sales interactions, sales managers can take the necessary steps to help their reps improve and drive better results.
Chris also offers his advice for new sales managers on how to stay up-to-date with fast-moving sales trends and how to effectively manage a sales team in a fast-paced environment. He suggests starting the day by looking at sales data and focusing on the critical details of sales interactions.
So whether you're a seasoned sales manager or just starting out, join us for this exciting episode as Chris, Corey and Hitesh help you take your sales management, training, and sales skills to the next level in this episode, "Get Granular to Boost Your Sales Performance".
If you missed the first half to this interview, you can listen here:
The Power of Childlike Curiosity in the Digital World of Sales
 
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: