Guest: John Orban

How do you de-risk your company? Marketing and business consultant John Orban and our Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall and Corey Frank, wind up their four-part conversation by offering our listeners a great deal of advice about how to balance potential risk. These three sales scholars delve into the potential problems of forecasting your company’s success, the possible perils of determining the market value of your sales pipeline, and the pitfalls of the practice of inflating your sales and revenue prior to a reporting period, which is known as “stuffing the channel.” “I give myself good advice, but I seldom follow it,” admits Lewis Carroll’s famous character, Alice. In this vein, Chris warns that being in love with your brilliant idea for a business can make you into your great idea’s zombie — ignoring all you’ve learned about de-risking. Save yourself from that fate by listening to this week’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Beware the Jabberwock, my son!” The complete poem by Lewis Carroll is here.  About Our Guest John Orban brings his background as a MetLife sales rep and as an administrator of computer networks to his current career as a marketing and business consultant for creative professionals. Full episode transcript below: John Orban (01:21): All the games that were played to make sales, you would not believe the stuff that went on. And quite frankly, I think it's one of the reasons why a number of insurance companies went out of business, because of all the games that their sales reps were doing. Chris Beall (01:36): Well, I think that- John Orban (01:36): Think that question compensation system is a problem. Chris Beall (01:39): It's a very interesting problem, right? We don't compensate our, our software engineers on how many lines of code they wrote this week and then have them go out and fake up some lines of code that ... you know? Okay, I'm going to do this. Then I had the smartness to delete it and add it, delete it ... Oh, I got enough code, right? I found that person who was alive and could sign that insurance policy. We don't do the at anywhere else in business. And it's a hangover. And it's a hangover, I believe, from the fundamental nature of manufacturing-driven capitalism, manufacturing core capitalism, where we came up with a trick. It sounds like the ultimate trick, which is, take raw materials, use machines and turn them into something, therefore allowing money to turn into more money in a very predictable way, but comes with a problem. Chris Beall (02:30): You got to dump the finished goods inventory somewhere. Otherwise it piles up. So, how often do we have to dump it or what's our flow rate to dump it? Well, our flow rate to dump it is determined by the flow rate of our factory and our buffer for finished its inventory. So, we do a bunch of things. Here's a gaming thing that people do at sales called stuffing the channel. So, we expand the buffer by getting channel partners to take on inventory that they may or may not be able to sell. Why do we do that? To make the number today. Why do we do that? Because the number today allows us to invest in the factory at very low interest rates, maybe even negative interest rates to borrow that money, because we don't have to borrow it, we got it from customers in advance and therefore we can make our factory bigger and it can dump our widgets up into finished goods inventory. Chris Beall (03:21): And at some point the channel, as they say, barfs it back up on us. That's a thing that the channel does. This is no longer what's interesting in the world. What's interesting in the world now is in  B2B, is helping companies acquire capabilities that let them run better or grow more cost-efficient, or capital efficient way or more smoothly or less brain damage or less unethically or whatever it is they're trying to do. That's what we're selling. And there is no finished goods inventory. There's nothing to dump. And so, we compensate salespeople as though they're dumping or as though there's stuff the channel, let's face it, as though they're stuffing the channel, and we admire them and call it President's Club if they stuff the channel enough this year, because they got a club and nobody next year it's like, oh he had a bad year. Chris Beall (04:11): No. The channel barfed up his stuffing back onto it. Right? That's what we're looking at. Corey Frank (04:18): That's right, that's right. Chris Beall (04:19): And then it's a funny thing. I don't see it changing soon because, frankly, the very best sales people get to ride on that surfboard. And it's okay for them that they get paid immense amounts of money for being really good. Even though you could pay them the same immense amount of money and they would sell just as much or more, and you could trust them. You could just go, "Hey, I'm just going to pay you this." Like we do with CEOs, right? CEOs are considered often to be the top salesperson in the company. We don't ever pay commissions to ... At least I don't get one. Maybe I should go talk to my board about a little commission work on the side. So, it's a very interest situation in which we're still, I would say, early in the evolutionary process of coming to terms with postindustrial [crosstalk 00:05:12] ... it's not even capitalism anymore. It's just postindustrial innovation economy. We're coming [crosstalk 00:05:19]. Corey Frank (05:18): We're having Matt from [inaudible 00:05:20], was it next week, I believe? He's going to be on the show, and one of his associates. And I was talking with Robert Vera, who's been on this show as well, Chris, as you know. It's a later episode, John, so as you catch up through the last couple of years, you'll eventually get to Robert Vera. And, Chris, you've said this quote too, and it's interesting to see how kindred minds here think alike. It's that, you know, to create this de-risk revenue generation machine, should be the goal of every board and every CEO and every CRO, a de-risk revenue generation machine. And as we talk about the math of sales. Again, your colleague Jerry Hill posted a great article today on the math of sales. Corey Frank (05:58): I'm a big fan of math of sales, [inaudible 00:06:00], we have a community. James Thornburg, ConnectAndSell as a weapon has enabled you to take the emotion, don't get emotional about math, and realize where you are as identifying the constraint in the system, and then focusing on that constraint in the system. But you have zero risk, right, Chris? In pursuing this math of sales, this methodology, as you speak, because if it doesn't pan out, what are you out? Chris Beall (06:29): [crosstalk 00:06:29] Right. Exactly. It actually, it's really funny. In the innovation economy, fundamentally, the only that we're risking is the time it takes to find out if anybody wants a solution to the problem that they're having, that is along the lines that we think we're capable of producing. It's so low risk and it's so fast, it can be done with one or two people in almost any size market. It can be done in less than two weeks, normally one week you in any size market and it's the step everybody skips. [crosstalk 00:07:02] And the reason they skip it is, think of the process, right? You have this idea. The idea is a brilliant idea. At least it seems that way to you. It takes over your mind. You think about it day and night, whatever that brilliant idea is, you think about it. All of us who do this kind of work, have this problem. Chris Beall (07:21): We come up with something. I got a great idea. Let's go use ConnectAndSell to call folks and help them see the wisdom of donating money to X, Y, or Z. It could be a great idea and I could think it all the way through, and I could get these kind of people to do it. The idea takes me over, it parisitizes me, it zombifies me. I am now that idea's zombie, and it controls my life for a little while. So, now, is the next natural step to go and say, huh, I wonder if anybody will buy this? I really want to be out of it within a week if they, if they won't buy it. Rationally, great idea. Emotionally, there's a kind of an ant for instance, and it gets parisitized by a microorganism. I think it's actually a fungus, perhaps. Chris Beall (08:13): And that microorganism, it's one of these real little tiny things, lives inside the ant. But it needs to be eaten by a bird in order to go through the rest of its life cycle to reproduce. So, what does it do? Well, it takes over the mind of the ant, the brain of the ant. And it says, you know what? I think, what would really feel really good right now, it'd be to climb this blade of grass. I want to go up I am an upwardly mobile ant. I just feel the urge suddenly, right? It's like, I feel the urge to take this great idea out. And then the ant gets to the top of the blade to grass. It goes, you know, being head up just doesn't work for me anymore, I want to be head down, feel the ant blood rush to my little [crosstalk 00:08:59] hanging here by my hind legs and my [crosstalk 00:09:01] legs. Chris Beall (09:02): I wonder why my abdomen turned so red and looking like ... oh, I'll ignore, that big red berry of an [crosstalk 00:09:09], that won't cause a problem. And then a bird comes down and eats the ant and the parasite gets what it wants, right? So, we have to avoid being that ant when we have been zombified by the idea that takes us as entrepreneurs. And how do we do that? Well, it's hard. This is why we should always do business with somebody else, but we need partner in business that says, "Let's take a look." Take a look, and the way we take a look is to go out into our hypothetical market, turn it into an actual list, talk to people on that list with our breakthrough script, that attempts to set meetings for our brilliant idea. Look at a simple number, which is what is our appointment setting rate for those meetings, and if it's above threshold, then we're okay. But otherwise, thank God we didn't get to the top of that blade of grass and turn our shiny berry red butt up into the sky and let a bird eat us. John Orban (10:09): That's right. That's right. Chris Beall (10:10): Because that's what happens. Corey Frank (10:11): That's exactly right. John Orban (10:12): Yeah, that's amazing stuff. Corey Frank (10:14): Yeah. So, John, you've been in sales for a while and you've sold all kinds of products and now you're in the art world. So, you're using another side of the brain a little bit more on a full-time basis, a consultant advisor to many upcoming artists and galleries, et cetera. So, if I'm selling art versus Chris and I are in the software business, the services business. But I'm selling art. A lot of these same rules apply? John Orban (10:40): It's interesting because I'm still trying to learn what's involved with that. And I happened to hear on one of your podcasts that Susan was a former gallery owner. I don't know whether she still isn't in gallery or not, I'd love to talk with her about some of the things that she's experienced but I think most people would agree that art is pretty much of an emotional purchase. You see a picture and it reminds you of vacation you took, or it reminds you of your grandfather or something, and you make that emotional connection and you get it. Over the last, I don't know, 10 or so years I've tried to analyze, why is the Mona Lisa such a amazing picture and how come we've only painted one of those in, what, 550 years or something like that? It doesn't seem to make sense. But they had something going on back in the Renaissance. John Orban (11:29): And it's not just the Renaissance. You take the 1800's, up until about 1920 when art just went south, except for people that we're still doing, well, what I consider to be real art, it's always been that emotional connection. It's the interplay of color. And sometimes it's a subject matter, but I'm still trying to figure all that out. And in the meantime, I'm trying to learn to paint myself and get better at it and see if I can crack that code, then I'll do the next Mona Lisa, that's my project for right now, but we'll see how that all works out. Corey Frank (12:05): Well, I think why this is so ... here you are, you're a master of your craft. You've been in sales for years and years. You've sold millions and millions of dollars worth of products to thousands of prospects. Chris, you have the same, taking companies public and raise money and [inaudible 00:12:21] residents and all this stuff. And I've made my share phone calls too. And I think as a science guy, Chris, you say, "Hey, what makes a law, a law is that it's a constant." Entropy or thermodynamics or math of sales. But where this is still so elusive is that, when you talk about trust, when you talk about engendering trust, you're talking about building curiosity. We know it when we see it like good art. I can't describe it, but I know it when I see it. Corey Frank (12:52): Of course, with the math of sales, I can actually know it when I see it too, you look at stats constantly of dial to connects for companies and look at their chart. But what we're talking about isn't quite a law, but it's also not a theory, correct? What would you call this kind of tweener period we are, what we're trying to build here in market dominance? Chris Beall (13:12): There is an underlying theory, but it's not and hard and fast. You can't go in and say in every single situation, this is what is happening. But in business, we don't get to do that anyway. We're not trying to make something happen every time. We always are dealing with ignorance of the future. That's the nature of complex systems, our ignorance is vast, very, very vast. The only way we know how to manage ignorance in large is through portfolio theory. That is we have more little bets. More little bets are safer than one big bet, if we can decouple the little bets. Now, it's very tricky to know that you've decoupled your bets, by the way. I thought that, for instance, my floor finishing company, that I decoupled my bets. And then I out that at midnight, on November 1st, every year, they turn on the big old furnace in every hospital in the Midwest and the humidity goes down and the airflow goes up and wow, that's interesting. Chris Beall (14:07): Those things all happen at the same time. And so, if you think your bets are decoupled and I thought mine were, you can find yourself failing everywhere at the same time. So, even that's hard. Portfolio theory is hard to apply because it's very difficult to get under the covers and say, these are truly decoupled, they're decoupled from big moves in the economy, whatever it happens to be. The way we manage risk, therefore, this is part of the theory is, we go fast. So, before bad things can happen, good things are done. So, the market dominance theory says I'm going to decouple my bets by spreading them across many individual conversations within my hypothesized market. And then I'm going to move fast enough that even if they turn out to be coupled in a disastrous way, I don't go broke because I know that's my state I'm trying to avoid is the broke state. The going bust. I used to be a professional gambler, as you know. And the number one rule as a professional gambler is you don't go bust. Chris Beall (16:09): Because then you're out of you're out of the big game. So, everything you're doing has to do with matching your bet size against your bankroll size, and running a portfolio of bets over time. And you got to do it fast before bad things happen externally. So, it's more of a system built around those two big ideas that, look, everything is risky. Big stuff that can go big is really risky. Therefore, start small, go fast and use really tight feedback loops, like Boyd, the fighter pilot John Boyd. He's the guy who revolutionized modern warfare by coming up with this notion of the OODA loop. So, the OODA loop says, you're going to orient yourself, then you're going to observe, then you're going to decide, then you're going to act. The shorter of the time cycle of your OOTA loop, the lower your risk is in making one bad decision that's going to cost your life. Chris Beall (17:06): Because you have time to do it again, to orient yourself again, observe again, deciding in and act again. So, what the market dominance theory basically says is it's not really about sales. It says in a world of uncertainty, speed to understanding of something no one else knows, that's a value. And that is this list of people will actually buy this thing. And therefore, it'll get cheaper and faster and easier to get more and more of them to buy it. The faster you can do that and get to market dominance in any size market, the safer you are, because market dominance is more predictable than individual sales, which are more predictable than market acceptance. And so you come up with proxies for the future, like, hey, let me talk to you about a meeting. Oh, if you take the meeting, that's a proxy for you buying the product because it's linearly related, mathematically in a portfolio basis, to folks buying the product. That's actually the underlying ... John, you said, this is almost like a physicist would say unified field theory. Chris Beall (18:10): It's actually the application of gambling theory, which is universal in the world of ignorance, ignorance theory, I'd call it, to the realities that we face in the world where we're trying to provide value. [crosstalk 00:18:24] John Orban (18:23): Yeah. I used to handicap horse races. So, And I only used to bet on long shots, anything that was eight to one or higher. So ... yeah. Chris Beall (18:33): Yeah, yeah. That's really funny. The guy who built the Museum Of New And Old in Hobart, Tasmania, built that fortune on two things. One is, he started out as a blackjack player. And then he did the horse racing handicapping thing all on long shots because there's an emotional reason long shots are mathematically superior. You have to endure the fact that you're generally not, it's not going to pay off, but when it does, it pays big. John Orban (19:01): And you only have to wait three minutes, about, [crosstalk 00:19:04] to find out whether it's going to pay off or not. Chris Beall (19:06): The cycle times are quick. You'll notice, by the way, that without them admitting it, a lot of people who are doing innovative work in business often have a gambling background. Sean McLaren himself has got a background in new Orleans that he can talk about, and I won't, way, way back. I'm not going to say that Sean could have done something longer ago than my life, but it's entirely possible. But I'm such a young guy that I think it's entirely possible. So, yeah, what's funny is the rest of this is, okay, what are the universals? Well, the universals are in B to B, people are afraid of buying stuff because they could lose their career. That's pretty much universal. Do I find people who will buy stuff because it's intriguing to them. Sure. And they're called tech enthusiasts. Chris Beall (19:54): Do I need to identify them and avoid thinking that they're part of the market? Yes. Is that easy or hard? It's hard because I love my product. And therefore, when they buy its idea, I feel loved and therefore I'm attracted to it. So, what do I have to do? Put up barriers to going in that direction. What kind of barriers? Well, preferably having a business partner, says, remember when we talked about tech enthusiasts? Yeah. Mary over there is one of those, let's not sell to Mary. Or we're so early, we don't know if our stuff will work. So, let's go sell to Mary, but let's not mistake Mary for the market. When do we know we're dealing with an electron and when do we know we're with a big old, heavy proton? And when do we know it's a neutron and when do we know the quirks are, you got to categorize in order to make good decisions, but that's about it. Chris Beall (20:43): That is really about it. And the reason we talk so much about trust, is trust is the hard part, because you've got to trust that you've got the goods and the staying power to not have to make this deal. So, [crosstalk 00:21:01] that somebody can trust you as a partner collaborator very early in the relationship, from the first seven seconds. And that is hard for people to come to for a lot of reasons. We talked about [Eric Honhower 00:21:17] climbing the LCAP thing. [crosstalk 00:21:21], Corey Frank (21:21): So, nine or 10, I think it was? [crosstalk 00:21:23]. John Orban (21:22): Yeah. Chris Beall (21:23): Imagine the level of trust he has to have in him self to even try that stuff, much less to make that one move. And it wasn't the slab, which is the one that freaks me out, because I have bad experiences trying to down climb slabs in Yosemite, but it was that karate kick move. Anybody wants to go back and watch Free Solo if you want to get what got me, and I know of what I speak to some degree, as a former big wall climber [crosstalk 00:21:54]- Corey Frank (21:54): Alex Honnold. [crosstalk 00:21:54] Chris Beall (21:54): [inaudible 00:21:54] Alex Honnold. So, Alex has got to make a move that's the one thing you never want to do as a climber, it's called a committed move. He has to trust an outcome that he actually knows he's not in control of. And it's the one where he decides of all the moves to be made there, that karate kick move, that just looks so bizarre when he does it is actually the one with the lowest risk of failure in the circumstances in which he anticipated finding himself with regard to how he would feel, how his body would feel, how his mind would feel at that point in the climb. And he chose that from his portfolio, just like we have to do in sales. We have to choose stuff that isn't always going to work. Now, he was going without a rope. In sales, we pretty much have a rope. It's very rare that we're betting our entire career on a deal. Chris Beall (22:46): I've I've done it a couple times myself, staying detached and just being on the the other company's side, the other person's side throughout a long deal that's fraught, and you're going to go out of business if you don't get it done. Corey Frank (23:00): But zero. [crosstalk 00:23:02] Chris Beall (23:02): That's hard. That's harder to do, that's true mastery when you can do that stuff. But most of us in sales don't have to do that. Corey Frank (23:08): No, but you mentioned ... what's your law in gambling, right? Never go to never go to zero. And you certainly it's a little tougher today because if I raise money in an A round, a B round and I'm not going in that trajectory, I don't necessarily have that concern of going to zero, do I? Because I can always get more money. I can always do it down [crosstalk 00:23:29]. Chris Beall (23:29): Yeah, yeah. Let me talk about this for, just for a moment, because this is something people ... [crosstalk 00:23:35] people think they're de-risking their company by taking venture capital. I've mentioned this before in the show. Read the docs, read the corporate text, read them in detail and ask yourself one simple question about every sentence. Is this sentence to protect them or me? Chris Beall (23:54): Just add them up. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, add them up. Put them on the scale. Do it page by page, anyway you want to do it, you'll see they're professionals at something. And if you read it in detail, you'll find out their professionals at salvaging value from businesses that are being thrown away. That's what their professionals at. So, you have decided in order to de-risk your company, to go and go into business with somebody whose primary outcome is salvaging your business. If you think about it that way you might have a different point of view about risk. Another way you can get your venture capital is, find the smallest possible market you can imagine that's a true market and go take it, and let that be your venture capital. That will de-risk your company. Corey Frank (24:41): That's right. I think we talk about the gambling, right? One of the books ... it's on my list I think I sent you a few weeks ago, John, is against the odds or it's against all odds. I think it's Against The Gods. Chris Beall (24:53): Against The Gods, I love that. [crosstalk 00:24:56] Corey Frank (24:55): Against the Gods, by Peter Bernstein. Yes. And he talks about that in the 12th, 13th century, right around there, the concept ... you're mathematician Chris, you probably know this better is, the Hindu Arabic numbering system finally came and replaced letters as a symbol of value, right? And then this consequential concept of zero was finally established. And then this concept of zero was established, so the tools and mindset were finally in place for algebra and accounting and math of market domination, et cetera. But that concept of zero seems to be lost a little bit in folks that raise a little bit too much VC. Sometimes I think- Chris Beall (25:40): They think they're climbing with a rope. Corey Frank (25:42): They think they're climbing with a rope. And the other one that I was reminded the other day, I was just talking about with Robert Vera about this was, there's a weather forecaster in charge of weather forecasting for the United States Air Force in World War II, right? A lot of weather patterns, hey, they just came across Normandy and they've got to figure out how we can get to Berlin as quickly as possible and we need air cover. And so, this particular gentleman was in charge of making predictions for the weather over the following few months. And this weather forecaster quickly realized that these long-range forecasts that he was putting together were effectively useless. No better than pulling numbers out of a hat. Corey Frank (26:22): And when he argued, like the dutiful, loyal soldier he was, up the chain of command, when he argued that they should be discontinued, the reply came back, "The commanding general is well aware that the forecasts are no good. However, he needs them for planning purposes." And I think when we have folks again, like our colleague Gerry Hill put out his LinkedIn post today that, hey, we're in the season of kickoffs this year, right? There's all kinds of company corporate kickoffs and raise the bar race for revenue, swing for the fences, whatever cliche vapid kickoff they're going to have as a theme, there's going to be forecasts. And if there's no forecast without math, the math of sales, the concept of zero, you're living off a little bit of hopium there, it seems. Chris Beall (27:14): It's a funny world. It's a funny world in the sense that when you take somebody else's money, you're taking it in exchange for a story. So, when you're raising money ... and by the way, anybody who listens to this and thinks, oh Chris, doesn't like VCs or whatever. That's not true. I actually think investors provide all sorts of wonderful services [crosstalk 00:27:35]- Corey Frank (27:34): Absolutely. Chris Beall (27:35): ... I'm just saying, keep your, keep your damned eyes open for certain things that are universal out there. When you're raising money, investors want to see story of how it could be if everything works. If they need an answer to this question, which is, is this worth investing in? Because if it's not worth investing in, if it works, it's certainly not worth investing in if it doesn't work. So, they would just want to know not whether it's going to work or not, but if it works, will it have turned out to be a good investment? Chris Beall (28:07): That's actually the first order question. Most things, the answer is no, even if they worked, they wouldn't have been worth investing in. My mother used to have this phrase, if something's not worth doing, it's certainly not worth doing well. So, most mothers didn't tell the kids this, but my mother had a special way with words, shall we say, some of which involved the desert where you could bury a child. So, now that's something that gets confusing to folks because then when they raise the money and now here, what was put on paper was, is it going to be worth doing if it works? Now the question isn't that anymore, now the question is, really, how do we want to balance financial risk and potential return? That's a completely different question. And you need forecasts that are a little shorter term, because now you have questions like, are we going to run out of money? Do we want to run out of money? Chris Beall (29:04): All sorts of questions like that come into play. And so, you switch. It's like switching from that hard flat voice where you throw yourself under the bus, I know I'm an interruption. Now you have a new purpose. Come along with me, right? Corey Frank (29:18): Yes, yeah. Chris Beall (29:18): It's, can I have 27 seconds tell you why I called? Those are different conversations for different purposes. And I think folks get confused by it. The weather forecast has a similar role. The weather forecast needs to ... not, like, are we going to decide to fly or not based on this, whatever it happens to be, it's in general, how are we going to allocate and stage our resources in case things turn out a certain way so we can react at lower cost and shorter cycle time? I think people really, really overplay proactivity in business. Chris Beall (29:54): They just wildly overplay it. The primary thing you have in business is your ability to react. Could you proact your way through COVID in December of 2019? Corey Frank (30:06): Yeah. Chris Beall (30:09): Right? You can't. Who made it well through COVID? Those who had buffers that were against some bad things, they didn't put all their chips on the same table, so to speak. And then those who reacted really, really fast and reacted fast in ways that were not overreactions, Cause overreacting is a bad idea too. Reaction is undervalued, I believe, in the world of business. It is the number one thing you've got to be able to do is take your forecast, take your plans, take your whatever, and go, okay, that was nice. Now what? How quickly can we think through the current situation and what is the one thing that we should do today in order to stay alive? Or in order to take advantage of an opportunity, or in order to snap the mouse trap. One or the other. John Orban (31:03): Yeah. I love [crosstalk 00:31:04]- Corey Frank (31:04): Religion, right? As a Catholic, we have it in The Lord's prayer, "Give us this day our daily bread," not give us our Q4's bread. John Orban (31:12): That's right. Corey Frank (31:13): 401(k) or ... even God, the son of m said, "Listen, today is what I want you to focus on." Right? John Orban (31:20): Right, Chris Beall (31:21): Right. Right. John Orban (31:22): Well, I also love that concept you talk about how the SDRs and BDRs should be on the balance sheet. Because that gives you that extra hedge to be able to react as well. Because that's a powerful concept, it seems to me. And how you want to value that, I don't know. But that is definitely an asset that's underappreciated, I think. Chris Beall (31:44): Yeah. And I think your pipeline should be on your balance sheet too and it's not. It is, but it's in a subtle way. If you actually ask a financial expert, where's the pipeline? It's like, what pipeline? Well, where is it? Is it an asset? Oh, I don't know. Well, let me do this thought experiment. I'll take your pipeline away and make it mine, it'll now be my pipeline. I get all those relationships, I get to sell to them, I get your products to sell to them, won't this be great? What are you going to charge me for that? Are you going to give it to me for free, your whole pipeline? Oh no. Okay, so what's the price. Well, whatever that price is, that should be on the balance sheet? Because that is the market value of your pipeline. You only have maybe one buyer yourself and maybe you don't have any sellers, you don't feel like selling your pipeline, but when you sell your company, it's right in there. We call it good will. Chris Beall (32:40): [crosstalk 00:32:43 ] But actually, good will is a hodgepodge. Good will can include brand equity. It can include IP that's that's hiding at the edges, knowhow, all that stuff that's in there. But your pipeline, you can measure that sucker. We have an attribution report in ConnectAndSell. We can actually measure the growth of your pipeline due to conversations that you're having at the very top of your funnel every single day. You do a test drive with us, if you'll let us have access to your opportunity set, just throw them all at us. What's the name of the company and what's the anticipated close date? What's the amount? And if you want us to get really fancy, what's your imputed probability of close, which is bullshit. Chris Beall (33:28): But if you'll give it to us, we'll tell you how much money you are making that you can now discount, how much money's going into the pipeline every single day. You can watch it every day, one day at a time. To me, if you don't have control over and visibility into that asset, what are you doing? You're just dreaming, right? You're just like, oh, what are we doing? Well, we're doing some stuff today and according to this plan, it will yield fruit next year. Really? If you were to fertilize a field, would you then just leave it for a year and come back and see how it went? Doesn't make sense. We don't do it in other areas, but we do it in business because we're accustomed to not seeing what's going on. We're accustomed to having what are called reports. A report means somebody tells me something. It's hilarious to me that we call them reports when they come right out of the data. Nobody told you anything. Corey Frank (34:23): That's right. Well, we certainly told a lot of stuff to a lot of people in the last two hours here. So, we're going to leave it there. So, John, thank you for being, sincerely, one of our seven listeners, seven subscribers. We got the fetching Ms. [Fenucci 00:34:41] here once in a while, we got his sister, Chris's sister, Shelly, we got my mom, we got you. And I think we got a couple other folks out there, Chris, but- Chris Beall (34:49): Two of my four kids occasionally listen. Corey Frank (34:51): Well, there you go. There you go. [crosstalk 00:34:53] John Orban (34:53): This is a groundbreaking show, what you're doing is just fantastic. It's an honor to have been on the program. [crosstalk 00:34:59] Corey Frank (34:58): Absolutely. I don't think it's going to be the last time too, john. We really like to dive into, again, the craft of face to face sales really is something, Chris, that's a nuance, a field that we really haven't explored as much. And it'd be interesting, certainly talking with John further about an expert who does that, and I really love, again, the left brain and the right brain that clearly has made you a success in sales, John. So, any final thoughts, Chris? Chris Beall (35:24): Well, I tell you what, we brought in art for the first time. That's heck of a thing we brought in books, but we didn't go deep on the books. I think I've been very lazy about my recommended reading list, but I think we should put them up and make a little bookstore. The Market Dominance bookstore would be a fun thing to have. I have listed over here. What about GoldRat? Right? What about Deming? What about Taleb's? [crosstalk 00:35:49] Jesus, anti fragile. [crosstalk 00:35:51] I love rants, by the way. I love rants like out of the crisis, Demings rant. Grouchy old man saying, yeah, but when you read it, you go ... by the way, it's assigned reading for all my kids. My mom had her cruelty and I have mine. Chris Beall (36:09): And when you realize, wait a minute, what makes people do things at work? Pride of workmanship. Just knowing that will change everything about how you approach business. That one sentence. What is the first sentence in that book? Drive out fear. Drive out fear, why would you want to drive out fear if you want to control people? Why would you want to do that? It's a big, thick boo written by a grouchy guy who gave you a little Japanese memorabilia behind you? Who, frankly, gifted Japan the postwar economy because the US wasn't interested, because we had too much pride. We just, we know what we're doing. Look, our industrial machine just conquered the world. We must know what we're doing. Well, it turns out one thing that's really not obvious, drive out fear. And people work for pride of workmanship, not money. That's weird. Chris Beall (36:59): But those are the essences, that's the stuff where all this is hiding. And I want to get to the [crosstalk 00:37:06]. That's where it's at, [inaudible 00:37:09] book. I go back to flip the script, I don't even have to open it. My whole team does something in every discovery call that we call a flash roll, and we have to keep reminding ourselves what it's for, is to establish ourselves as experts, not to teach them anything about our product. Corey Frank (37:27): That's right. Chris Beall (37:27): And it's practiced. I'm very proud of my flash roll. I think mine is the best because [crosstalk 00:37:34] proud of, right? But it's interesting what's in these books. It's interesting when you go into books like Temple Grandins, an anthropologist on Mars, and you realize there's a whole different way of seeing the world and you probably don't see it that way. But people you're interacting with might have some of that in them. And if you're going to deal with technologists, probably really good to read an anthropologist on Mars. Corey Frank (38:02): Oh, yeah. Chris Beall (38:03): If you're going to understand what it's like when we forget stuff or misapprehend something, read [inaudible 00:38:12] No Shadows in the Brain or Mind, whichever it is. I can never remember the title, because I've got one of those same problems that he's talking about in the book. It's about deficits, neurological deficits and how they manifest themselves in experience and behavior, that stuff will teach you tons. Read Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. You're going to learn some stuff about yourself [crosstalk 00:38:35]. So, I will do the book thing one of these days, you guys have great reading lists. I have this little, trashy one that I had come up with. But this is the stuff that ... and then one more thing that you said, John, I'm going to leave everybody with, if you're in business and especially in sales and you don't read in the sciences, real science, not stuff that's politicized, but real science, find something that you can do to read in the sciences. Chris Beall (39:03): And my recommendation is just get a subscription in New Scientist's and read two or three articles out of it each week. It's a weekly, so it'll keep you on your toes. They're always coming up with so something like why blue whales don't actually choke to death on all that sea water. I just read that yesterday in New Scientist's, but reading in the sciences grounds you not to the reality, that's not like learn those facts, but to our ignorance, our mutual- John Orban (39:32): Yeah. Right, right, right. Chris Beall (39:34): It makes it help us embrace our ignorance, which is the key to being in a position to help our prospects move forward with us. John Orban (39:43): Yeah, yeah. I agree. I agree. Corey Frank (39:45): Well, that's just great. Helps us embrace our ignorance.

Do you believe that the cold calls you make are an interruption in your prospect’s day? Well, they definitely are! But to what purpose? Marketing and business consultant John Orban and our Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall and Corey Frank, use part three of a four-part conversation to take this inherent problem in sales and look at it from a different angle. Chris cites the podcast he did with ConnectAndSell’s Matt Forbes, whose epiphany about how belief in the opportunity he offers his prospects changed everything about the way he conducts cold calls. John cites the epiphany he experienced reading Betty Edwards’ book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, when he discovered how a book can change your awareness of ordinary things and lead you to look at your world differently. Chris touts Geoffrey Moore’s book, Crossing the Chasm, for opening his eyes and engendering a new belief in empathy and how employing that essential quality can help you build trust with a prospect. And, with another of his insightful summations, Corey ties all these ideas together with the advice to “major in minor things.” Be prepared to garner insights of your own as our three dedicated students of sales and of life share with you their practice — just like Alice’s — of believing “Six impossible things before breakfast” on this episode of the Market Dominance Guys. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain - Betty Edwards Crossing the Chasm - Geoffrey A. Moore   About Our Guest John Orban brings his background as a MetLife sales rep and as an administrator of computer networks to his current career as a marketing and business consultant for creative professionals.   Full episode transcript below: Corey Frank (01:38): Was that something that you were taught? Was that your natural state as an introvert? Could you teach that to your other reps that were on your team over the years? You're selling a different dynamic than Chris and I sometimes are used to in that mostly it was face-to-face sets. Correct? John Orban (02:00): Yeah. Yeah. Corey Frank (02:00): So what are those dynamics that broke down to elicit that level of trust that people would go to the confessional with you? John Orban (02:10): This is how I feel about it. That technology is so powerful when I realize what was happening I tore all that stuff up. It scared me. It was way too much power for any one person to have. I'm serious about that. I'll never forget it. I was sitting in the guy's office and I was leading him down this track. "Well, why is that important to you? Why is that important?" And going deeper, and deeper, and deeper. And I got down to a level that if I had gone one more, I don't know what would've happened. And I said, "I can't handle this. I'm certainly not going to be teaching this to somebody else." Now, there are people out there who have learned it and you see them a lot in the personal development field. And they are very close to pure manipulation. That's how powerful that technology is. And it's like I told you on the phone. I don't know why we're torturing people because if you understand how to use this technology, they'll spill their guts. And I know that in some cases- Corey Frank (03:11): You talked about Neuro-linguistic programming, NLP. John Orban (03:12): Yeah. Yeah. And that in itself sort of raises a lot of red flags to people because NLP, the way it was originally developed and the way it's being used now, has basically been bastardized over the last 50 years since it's been out. So as part of the process of learning about that, I got involved with propaganda because I felt that basically that's all sales and marketing is, is propaganda. And who got at that started? Well, it was this guy by the name of Edward Bernays, who was the nephew of Sigmund Freud, who was exploring all this stuff about the human mind and that kind of thing. And he wrote a very small book called Propaganda. And I also read Goebbels' book on propaganda, which is, it's a short book. It's like 60 pages. So everything you need to know about propaganda, you can learn in a pretty short period of time. John Orban (04:04): Bernays, his book... I hate listening to C-SPAN's Booknotes because every time I listen to that stupid program I end up buying a book. So I'm listening to this guy. This goes back to 1998; I found it on YouTube. And he's talking about this book he wrote about, Edward Bernays, and it's in my Kindle library now because I want to start reading it tonight, but it's just fascinating. But all that stuff is related. And so, one of the notes I had written down was the idea of the power of words and Bernays understood that very early on. It's one thing if you call something a gene therapy treatment. It's another thing if you call it a vaccine. And the power of words is just something that people who know how to use it, use it very effectively, and it's just too much power to be in one person's hand. You know? That's just how I feel about it. And... Corey Frank (04:58): So Chris, let's springboard off of that to John. And since we originally talked to this episode of Market Dominance Guys, I think you and John met each other through a love of collaboration of different books that you were influenced. John Orban (05:10): Yeah. Corey Frank (05:10): When I say a book, that I'm a 21-year-old recently minted communications, finance business, econ, Elizabethan poetry grad. And Chris, I want to find the elixer, the matrix plug that can engender me as much trust, as much success as possible, as many conversations. Is there a particular book that you and the fetching Mrs. Fanucci perhaps talk about with all your younger, new-minted sales folks that come on board your respective companies that, "Hey, you've got to read this."? What should be in their arsenal as they set forth? Chris Beall (05:51): It's kind of funny. I don't have such a book that I tell sales folks to read. My view is actually consonant with John's view, which is if you learn how to use words and how to do your job sincerely, if you go through the first step, which is to make sure you're on their side for real, make sure you really believe. We had a whole podcast episode on this, which is the one that I've actually they've been sending around recently with big Matt Forbes. And that conversation that I had with him that helped him to go inside and ask himself- John Orban (06:27): About belief. Right? Chris Beall (06:29): [crosstalk 00:06:29] Do I believe? It's the one titled- John Orban (06:30): Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I heard that. It's a great one. Chris Beall (06:34): It would've been comical for anybody to listen to that conversation. It was a two-hour conversation. I was out for a barefoot run down in Green Valley, Arizona and I thought I'd be out for half an hour. And an hour and a half later, I'm still talking to Forbes about this question because he's good. And when you're good, you're dangerous. And when you're dangerous, it's just like being big. Right? He's a big guy. So he's learned how to handle when you're 6'8" and you've been big your whole life; you learn that you have responsibility for what your body might do to other people who are smaller than you. And when you have the ability to use your voice, and it's really the voice more than the language, then you're like a big person. It's not right to go bump into, smash, knock over smaller people. It's just not right. Chris Beall (07:24): And this isn't about like who's better than somebody else. It's sort of a fact of the world. If you know how to use your voice already, then your number one thing to do in sales is make sure that you really believe in the potential value with the thing that you have on offer. It doesn't have to be certain value, but the worthiness of exploration of that value for this other human being, not for their company or anything else because you're talking to a person, and that value is potentially there even if they never are going to avail themselves of it or work with you in the future. That belief beats all books when it comes to salespeople who have any ability whatsoever to [crosstalk 00:08:04]- Corey Frank (08:04): How about... Let's talk about that raw skills. John, you can chime in this too. I have the belief I bought into this company. I want to work for MetLife. I want to work for SAP. I want to work for Microsoft. I believe in it, but my voice is... Maybe you have a slight accent. Maybe you have a slight lisp. Maybe I don't know... I'm not conscious enough of my voice as a tool, as much as Matt is conscious enough of his size when he is walking through an airport. How do you teach that? How do you make somebody self-aware? You're a singer Chris, right? And you're an artist, John. So how do you develop that awareness, that, "Wow, this instrument here can be used, manipulated in ways that transcends what my script says and that I have to be responsible for that."? John Orban (08:50): It's interesting because one of the other books that I read that really had a profound impact on me was a book called Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards. And in the introduction, she made this comment that artists see the world different than other people. I could not wrap my head around that for the next 40 years. And it wasn't until I took up oil painting. And I'll never forget. I walked out of my studio one day and it was like in the movie Wizard of Oz when Dorothy walks out of that house and opens up the door and she goes from black and white to color. I saw stuff that I had never seen in my life before. I saw sun shining on leaves and going down the side of a tree and sparkling grass and things like that. John Orban (09:37): And when I mentioned that at a, I don't know, I'll call it a mastermind group that I was in for a while, one of the people that was there, who became a friend, was a copywriter for a company. And he had this group that he worked with, which he called his Copy Cubs and he was teaching him how to do copywriting. And he said, after that, he made every one of them take some kind of art course before they started his program so that they could reach this higher level of understanding. And I think that's part of the process. You can teach somebody some of this stuff, but until they experience it... I was a teacher for a while. I taught kids in a computer class. And one of the things that was most rewarding to me was when you see that understanding come across the student's face and they get what you're talking about and they didn't get it before. It's amazing. I mean, you basically have transformed their lives and that's what we're trying to do in sales. John Orban (10:38): See? That's the other thing that really got me about you guys, is that you seem to have a level of ethics in your businesses that remind me a lot of Zig Ziglar because when I think of Zig, I think of ethical business practices and he was very much into that. And it's like I see you as trying to take that to the next step. It's not just for the prospects that you're dealing with, but also the sales rep and your employees. I mean, you don't treat them like dirt. I mean you treat them like human beings and you're trying to empower them as much as they're trying to empower the people that you're working with. And if you can't empower them, how in the world are they going to empower the prospect or the potential client? Chris Beall (11:21): Holy moly. So two things. One is Drawing on the Right Side of your Brain transformed me in an instant also. I was actually afraid of drawing. I would draw by myself and drawing anything that was supposed to be realistic was an embarrassment to me. And in my 30s, early 30s, that book fell into my hands. And I decided not to read it but just to do the exercises. So the only thing I read was the introduction. And then I simply did the first exercise. Terrible. Did the second exercise. Terrible. Did the third one. Terrible. I think it was the fourth or the fifth exercise, you look at your off hand. In my case, my left hand; I'm right-handed. And without looking at the [crosstalk 00:12:11] you take the paper down, you look at your left hand, you block your view with like a little divider. I remember standing a three-ring binder up so that it was really blocking the view, so I couldn't cheat and glance over there. And then you draw what you see. Chris Beall (12:27): And it turns out when you can't see what you're drawing, you can only draw what you see, which is... I didn't know that because I was this ignorant person. So, finished it. It took forever. Took probably an hour and a half. Oh, you're not allowed to lift the pencil. Pencil stays on the paper the whole time. So an hour and a half later, here I come out of this interesting meditative, weird ass state that I'm in, and I take the notebook and put it down. And I look over at the page and it is truly bizarre looking. Like, lines that would represent the edges of my fingers are crossed and stuff like that in ways that are impossible. And it's the best thing I'd ever drawn in my life. It was completely realistic without having any realism in it, if that makes any sense at all. To artists, I think that means something, right? Chris Beall (13:18): And suddenly, instantaneously, with no further training, I could realistically draw anything. Corey Frank (13:26): Really? Chris Beall (13:26): And I spent the next year and a half or two years, in my spare time, always with a pad, always with pencils ready to go. And wherever I was stuck, much the same way that you might; you were a Sudoku freak, you might pull out the Sudoku thing and do that; I would pull out the pad and I would draw what's in front of me. And yet, it came down to that one thing. No, no, no breakthrough. And what's funny about- Chris Beall (14:35): If I apply this to sales, this is why we take people through flight school. The reason we do it is that there's a moment in there suddenly where being trustworthy and letting your voice express your true belief, that this is good for the other person. That it is truly ethical. It's not a moral question. It's an ethical question. You've gotten to the bottom of the time. It's an ethical question. What is right here? And if you don't believe it's right for them to take the meeting, why are you selling the meeting? You're a thief. You know? Being a thief kind of comes out in your voice. I mean, unless you're a psychopath by the way. If you're a psychopath, pay no attention to all this. Just ignore it and go be a psychopath and do bad things or do good things. Chris Beall (15:21): If you're a psychopath, by the way, you have a real burden to be ethical. Ethical psychopaths are some of the most useful people in the world, right? Because they're psychopaths, they can manipulate people right and left, but they're ethical, so they do it for other people. Right? If you are a psychopath, which is a nature of things, kind of thing. There's introverts, extroverts, and psychopaths. Those are the three categories of people, right? So if you're going to be a psychopath, because you're one today, therefore you'll probably be one tomorrow, don't fight it. Just go adopt some really deep ethics because that's the only safe place to be because you're a very, very, very, very dangerous person. And it's good to recognize that. And it's like going around, not like Matt Forbes, but like Matt Forbes covered with dynamite, with little fuses all over the place. Like, don't do that. Don't blow people up. But if you're a regular person and you want to succeed in business, not in sales, but in business, there's a hump you have to get over. The sincerity hump. John Orban (16:18): Yeah. Yeah. Chris Beall (16:18): You've got to decide that you're only going to do for others what you truly believe has potential. You don't have to know. You can be ignorant. Ignorance is fine. You can be uncertain. Express your uncertainty. All of that is just ducky, but you got to get there. And as soon as you're there, it's great. But how do you get there? What's the equivalent of looking at your left hand and drawing with your right? Do the breakthrough script. And all you have to do is be coached over and over on getting your voice to be the same voice you use to tell a genesis story, a story about yourself from when you were younger because that's the voice, the voice that you use to tell a story about how you came to be like you are; a story, not exposition. The story of how you came to be like you are. That event in your life. That voice is the full voice you need to go find. Chris Beall (17:15): And you can have somebody help you find that voice by just telling them your genesis story. We actually did this exercise last night, interestingly enough, right here. Helen Fanucci, who's been a guest on our show here, who I'm marrying, she's right over there in the other room, she has some podcast work that she's doing, shall we say, working with our favorite podcast publisher, Susan. And we were listening to a podcast episode. And her question was, "How's the voice?" And well, it's a little bit, maybe a little more factual. And then she told me her genesis story of how she came to expressing action what she believes in the book, that she did it herself at the age of 23, did it to herself. And I'll let her tell the story. And that voice is the voice, the voice that she tells that story in is the voice. Chris Beall (18:07): So if you want to find your authentic voice that you can use to share with folks, if you want to do that exercise, but that the one that works for you, my recommendation is the voice comes out of the genesis story, the practice comes out of the first two sentences, the breakthrough script. And the reason is it's really, really a deep thing to throw yourself under the bus within tenth of a second of meeting. So that's a deep thing to do. Most people can't do it. When you say... And the two sentences are, "I know I'm an interruption." When you say that and you mean it, that you mean you're a bad thing, you get it, you have agreed with yourself to be the invisible stranger, the scary invisible stranger. You know that's going to engender fear in that other person. Chris Beall (18:53): And yet you did it anyway. Why'd you do it? You have to be doing it for them and for you mutually, but for them first in that order. For them and for you. And then, you have to do something really hard, really hard with your voice, which is let go and say, "We're going to go on adventure together if you're willing to." And you switch to that playful, curious voice. That's what Chris Voss told me when I said, "What do you think of this?" He says, "It's perfect." He says, "When you switch from that hard flat self-indictment to playful curious in a fraction of a second, that is the thing that makes those two sentences work." And you're not faking it. You're finding it. That's the key. You got to find it in yourself. Chris Beall (19:35): As to books to read about sales, I'm not a big sales book guy. I think that Market Dominance Guys is actually built around different books. It's not a sales show. It's a market dominance show. And it's built around Geoffrey Moore, which is, again, it's about people's emotions. When people are buying new stuff, they're afraid of it. Not just you. Now they're afraid of it. At least life insurance, they might have thought, "Well, some people buy that stuff and maybe it's not bad. I don't know. I've heard people been bamboozled, wasted their money." But when you're buying innovations... In the innovation economy, you're buying innovations. And when you're buying innovations, they make you sick to your stomach. They're scary because you fundamentally don't know what's in that thing. You don't know what's in it. And you don't like the feeling. And you're the first buyer in a category and you don't like that feeling because you can't look around on anybody else and say, "Well, Joe, Mary, they already bought it." It's like you're going first because you need it really, really bad. Chris Beall (20:33): That book by Geoffrey Moore stands, in my opinion, alone in the innovation economy. Crossing the Chasm. And it stands alone for a simple reason. It tells us what we need to be empathetic about when we're bringing something new to someone else. And otherwise, we don't know what to be empathetic about. In fact, otherwise we're pissed off that they're scared of this thing. And we think, "Why don't they treat me better?" Well, I don't know. You walked into their house with a rattlesnake and it's in a jar and you're threatening to take the top off the jar and turn it loose. And their dog's on the floor. Why should they be scared of you? You know it's just a snake. Everybody knows that this one is more or less defanged. Right? John Orban (21:17): Yeah. Yeah. Chris Beall (21:17): So that book speaks to me about the world we live in now. He was 25 years ahead of his time. He was right on, but he's 25 years ahead of his time with regard to the universality of the problems we facing. I'll call them interesting businesses. And interesting businesses, by the way, come up with innovations. HUB International, Scott Webb and that team over there, they invented a new product so that they can engage with these CFOs using the telephone. It turns out that commercial insurance is fine, but it's kind of a difficult product to sell in a displacement mode because everybody's already got it. So what do you sell them? The opportunity to learn something. Actually, the same thing I used to sell in [inaudible 00:22:05]. Their's a little more complex. They do a big multi-point analysis of your business and share it with you and it's worth a ton of money. I had it done for us and it was fabulous, but it's the same thing, which is, what can I always offer in service? I can always offer my expertise. Always. John Orban (22:19): Mm-hmm (affirmative). Right. Right. Right. Chris Beall (22:21): Always. Always. I can go to work for you, right? That's my first thing I can do; in service. But to get there in your own emotions, you need to know what's going on in the other person. And the other person is repulsed, scared of, sickened by your innovation, not because of its characteristics, but because it's new. And read Crossing the Chasm five times if you have to. And if you're a tech entrepreneur and you like your own stuff, you're in deep, deep trouble because you're in love with your baby. And it's not that your baby's ugly. It's that your baby has fangs, bites, and has poison packed in its jaws. And they know it. And there you are coming and going, "Want to hold the baby?" Get the baby away from me. That sucker bites. You know? My neighbor over there got bit by your baby. He's been dead for three days. Come on. John Orban (23:20): That's good. That's good. Corey Frank (23:22): Love that. I love that. John Orban (23:22): Yeah. Corey Frank (23:23): I never pictured... I suppose it all come full circle now seeing the deconstruction mindset that you have, Chris, as a scientist. Right? Breaking it down to the core, to the atomic level, and how you can apply that to drawing, which is why I think why you were probably attracted to Ms. Edwards' book and how to replicate it. Right? How to break down helping my son with fractions the other day; take these large fractions, break it down to the simplest form. Right? Two-thirds versus four-sixths versus eight-sixteenths. That's in essence what I hear you both doing from an artist perspective as well as a science perspective and certainly a sales perspective, but simplicity doesn't mean ineffective. It doesn't mean a watered down, non-creative. Corey Frank (24:12): I think it is so creative because it is so simple. And we're trying to complicate things too much, as you had said, John, certainly with NLP. And did the eyes move up into the right? How's the mirroring? Am I being defensive? Now, its like I'm really majoring in minor things in a sales presentation where I just try to engender that trust, Chris, as you say. And man, and then just be curious. And holy cow, the floodgates will open. Chris Beall (24:37): Yeah. John Orban (24:38): And like you kind of intimate, it's a switch that gets flipped. I mean, it's like you go from one state to the other almost immediately once you have that realization. Corey Frank (24:48): Yeah. Chris Beall (24:49): Yeah. It's funny. I think there are two things that we're talking about here that are quite complementary, but I think it is tough for people to see how they go together. One is there's stuff you need to learn about the world to be an expert who's worthy of talking to of helping somebody else. It is true. You all only need to be one chapter ahead in the book to teach it. Right? John, you taught- Corey Frank (25:09): Right. Right. Chris Beall (25:10): I used to teach physics. I was often three-quarters of a chapter ahead or one equation ahead. Right? I go back to the Maxwell's equations. Maxwell's equations. Oh my God. Right? What is that thing with the curl again? And then, I'd be all distracted. But I was just a little ahead. So one is the what stuff. You got to be an expert. You got to be worthy. You have to have access to resources. You have to have something to offer. That's fine. But the second is you got to find that thing inside of you that allows you to be yourself when you're in the uncertain situation where you don't know what the outcome is. Chris Beall (25:43): And sales management, we talked about that, and that's why I said, "Holy moly." You know? Helen's over there writing a book right now and it's going to be a major, major book in my opinion. And the book is called, Love Your Team. And it's exactly about what you said, John, which is, if you don't empower your salespeople, how are they going to transfer any power to the prospect? Right? And so I think sales compensation is actually one of these. The way we do it, it's locked. It's locked. Work in the office used to be locked, and then it got blown up by the pandemic. And now we've gotten over it, right? It's the same way that John was locked on one side of the phone until he actually started calling, and then curiosity would call into the next call. Everything is locked somewhere. Chris Beall (26:30): I think we're actually locked as an economy in a what I can only call a funny way of compensating sales people. We compensate them for the short term. We're asking them to build our business for the long term. John Orban (26:44): And that hasn't changed in 50 years. I mean, at least the 50 years I was involved in it. And the thing about that, one of the other podcasts I was listening to, the guy was talking about how you game the system. Yeah. He was sand bagging his calls for the blitz that they had on Thursday or something like that. But I saw that when I was in business. I mean...

Would you expect introverts to be good at cold calling? Oddly enough, they aren’t just good —they’re great! Today, we delve into why introverts make great salespeople in this second part of a four-part conversation between marketing and business consultant John Orban and our Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall and Corey Frank. It turns out that introverts’ reluctance to push themselves forward makes them less likely to take over a cold-call conversation, and this allows prospects to talk. And when prospects talk — shazam! — we learn things about them that help us become partners on their sales journey. This insight sparked John to ask Chris the question, “What role do you think curiosity plays in the process of making a cold call?” Listen in to learn the whys and wherefores of this valuable cold-calling asset on this Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “ ‘Curiouser and Curiouser.’ ”   About Our Guest John Orban brings his background as a MetLife sales rep and as an administrator of computer networks to his current career as a marketing and business consultant for creative professionals.   Full episode transcript below: Corey Frank (01:18): Formula we use for screenplay scripting, Chris uses the same one of iteration that creates millions of phone calls and tens of thousands of successful conversations a year has to do with that simplicity. When you have two competing theories, right? Chris. That makes exactly the same predictions, the simpler one is always the better one and until more evidence comes along. John Orban (01:43): But you've taken A/B tests to it to a completely different level. Your whole idea of taking an idea, get on the phone for a week and whether it's going to work or not. That's game-changing. I don't know why you're beating people away from the door, maybe you are. But seriously it, I could go on all day about that, but anyhow. Chris Beall (02:02): We've politely ask them to stand six feet away. Cause here, we live in splendid isolation in the pandemic and we [inaudible 00:02:16] Six feet away. John Orban (02:16): So I want to go one more step on this thing about the communication and what's inside the sales rep. It's not just the sales rep because he's got a sales manager, he's got a sales VP, a marketing VP. God knows how many steps to get to the CEO and every one of those have got problems. When I say problems, I don't mean like they're psychotic or anything of that sort. Although there may be one or two that are in there, but they're all dealing with this stuff. And you're trying to create this smooth path through all this thing. And there's got to be a simpler way to do it. And I think you're on the right track, you really are. You're thinking the right way to go on this. And it amazes me because I was in sales 50 years ago and they basically pointed at a telephone. John Orban (03:02): In fact, when I started, I started in the insurance business. I was one of the first group of sales reps that came through that was going to use this new marketing thing called the telephone. Up to that point, everything was door to door. Now I've done my share of door-to-door stuff too. And I know Chris has because you talk about it. I love listening to your stories by the way. And they basically pointed the phone. They gave me a piece of paper, which was a script and said, "Go get them tiger." And I learned everything on my own. And talk about fear, you talk about fear on the phone. I was so petrified. I would stare at that thing and just shake. But I made a couple of changes in my head. Finally, as I went through this process, it pulled me out of my introversion. John Orban (03:48): I was forced to get out of it. I ended up going to Dale Carnegie courses, both in New York and also when I came back home after I left the city. I actually worked for, well, I worked for a bunch of different insurance companies, but the first one I did, I was a group and pension specialist in New York City. And so I went to the Dale Carnegie sales course first. And that's where they taught you about the "Sales Burger". If you know anything about that, the hamburger is the benefit and the role is the features. And then you stick this toothpick through it and that's something else, I can't remember what that was supposed to be. John Orban (04:22): But anyhow, I did that and then I came back and I went through the Dale Carnegie sales course when I got into the insurance business again. I had a skin as a professional photographer in the interim, but I was terribly introverted. I had a lot of difficulty with it, but making those calls just forced me out of it. I had no choice it was either that, or I don't know. Go [crosstalk 00:04:41]. Corey Frank (04:40): So you were an introvert by nature, John? John Orban (04:42): Oh yeah. (affirmative) And my brother's the same way. In fact, my brother still is, but I was that way. I'm not anymore. Corey Frank (04:49): Not anymore. No, you're not. But that's interesting. Chris, what do you make of that? You've hired thousands of sales folks, thousands of team members over the years in your companies. As John's experience a typical one that introverts turn into some of the best sales and what happens. Where's that Rubicon that they cross? What is it internally that sparks, "Hey, listen, I can actually do this. I'm actually safe here." John Orban (05:12): That's right. Chris Beall (05:14): I think introversion has to do mostly, according to researchers, I don't know if I believe them or not. With kind of where do you get your energy. Do you get when you're hanging out by yourself? Do you feel better later? Do you get out when you're hanging out with a bunch of people? My definition of an introvert is somebody who goes to a party and has one deep conversation with one person they meet there and then they go home, right? That's me, by the way. People are shocked when they find out that I'm fundamentally introverted because I can also be an entertainer. I can entertain at a party with no problem whatsoever, but then it's a completely different game because those people aren't people, they're an audience. So they turn into something else for me and basically it's a toy that I play with. Chris Beall (05:57): And it's not a nice thing to say, but it is what happens, right? Introverts have a huge advantage in sales. And it's really simple advantage, which is they've spent a lot of time with themselves, not recovering from whatever it is that was going on. But actually going inside themselves naturally and thinking through stuff about themselves and about situations, about what they've just encountered. They have that alone time and knowing yourself is the key to being able to be empathetic. It's impossible to be empathetic unless you know what it is to be yourself. You have to have some sense of what the pieces and parts are in there and which ones are in play. What bothers you and what doesn't? I think you come out of that into sales, by doing what John just said, which is you get in a catapult and you get flung or you fling yourself. Chris Beall (06:49): It's like bungee jumping. You go to where you were so uncomfortable going and then you realize you didn't die. I have a personal example of this just from my life. I used to be a very afraid of heights and not unnaturally so, but like a normal person. Normal people are afraid of heights. It makes sense by the way. And then I took a fall and it was a big fall, not a little fall. It was about 800 feet. And 800 foot fall that takes a long time. There's plenty that goes on during an 800 foot fall inside yourself. It's not like you think it would be actually. It's one of those, "Really? I didn't know that would be like that." And of course, if you survive, then you get to think those thoughts, otherwise you kind of forgot. [crosstalk 00:07:29] John Orban (07:29): Was it in slow motion? Did you experience that? Chris Beall (07:31): You bet. I got to do things like watch a piece of ice rip a chunk out of my arm and I got to watch in [crosstalk 00:07:39] slow motion. The little drops of blood going out and sparkling in the sun. John Orban (07:45): I was riding my bike one day and a dog ran out in front of me. And I went over the top of the handle bars and I had my helmet on, thank goodness, and everything was in slow motion. I came down, I felt my head hit the ground and bounced back up and it was amazing. Chris Beall (08:06): It's a remarkable experience. But for me, what it did was it offered me a bridge to a world where I embraced doing things that involved heights. And I became a very serious mountaineer rock climber. In fact, I climbed that very mountain that I fell down later that day because the guys I was with foolishly left me unattended and went fishing. Thinking that any sane person would just hang out and camp with his concussion and his hand that was opened up with the bone exposed and his leg that was rather blue and yellow. But I looked at it a different way. And this is, I think an introvert, its way of looking at things, which is I know myself well enough. I was only 14, but I knew myself well enough by then to know that if I didn't actually attempt to climb that mountain again right now that I would end up as the person who was stuck on the other side of that fear. I had the same fear of the telephone by the way. Chris Beall (08:59): So when I got my first job in industry at NCR, I'd done a fair amount of stuff by then. I was pretty old, like 26 years old. And there was this phone and I'm supporting this 10 state area. And I've got to talk to all these different people about the problems they're having with their computers, which by the way, all I had was a manual. I didn't even have a copy of the computer. So I had to walk people through stuff by reading it and then asking them what they saw on the screen because back then you couldn't screen share. Try that by the way, with somebody in the Navajo Nation. Where the cultural issues around just speaking up spontaneously when you're being supported on a computer are really, really interesting. I learned a lot about that. But I had to learn to pick up that phone to do my job. Chris Beall (09:43): And it felt like that fall. That is, "Hey, I survived." And I think when you get to the other side of it and you realize, "Oh, there was really, there's something there to be afraid of, but it's not bad. It's something completely different." And you know yourself well enough than to actually be able to use all those, that self-knowledge in slowing down the conversations. And I think introverts naturally when they get going in a conversation, their inner monologue, so to speak, their inner responses tend to be a little slower. They're not looking for the next thing to say quite so fast. And in sales that desire to say the next thing in order to push your agenda is ironically what destroys sales conversations. Sales conversations among people who are going to do business together over time, they're most effective. Chris Beall (10:35): If you're actually going to be together down the road, because you're going to stay together. The idea is to form a relationship. And I don't mean a relationship like buddies. I mean like in the modern world, there's nothing interesting that we sell that we don't end up partnering with our customer. Those things don't exist anymore. Everything's got so much software in it. Everything has so much interoperability that's required. Everything has so much adaptation and learning that needs to be done. That you're really partnering. Whereas, sales itself was invented at the crossroads. Sales is a byproduct of one set of strangers going one way, "Hi, we're on the silk road and we're headed off on an adventure. We're going to get some silk, some salt." Whatever it is, right? And then somebody else who's got some stuff that came from some other direction, right? Some supply chain as they call it nowadays. Chris Beall (11:25): So they've got that and they've assembled it in the inventory and they know it's in their inventory and you don't. They know the quality and you don't. They know that there's some that's showing up tomorrow and you don't. Or that there's none that's showing up tomorrow and you don't, because you got to get going. So one party's under time pressure, that's the buyer and the other is it's got superior knowledge. And so sales was always about the extrovert pushing their agenda, which is, "Buy the crappiest stuff I have at the highest possible prices. Sayonara, Sonny Lee, get out of here. I will never see you again because they're going to kill you out there." And if you come back anyway, who else you going to buy from? A dude over here is no better than me. Corey Frank (12:10): Well, Chris, you talked about that. I think in one of our earlier episodes about, even with the advent of the internet, is that as a salesperson, I used to have this idea that I am the single sole purveyor of information of market intelligence of product features. And so you have to deal with me. Now, the internet, and so more often from an Oren Klaff cold cognition world. I, as a salesperson, would spew these set facts in these set features in the hope that would engender some sort of trust. John, you come from the insurance business for what, 25, 35 years. Financial sector. So man, you are as sage and I'm looking to you to take my little 401k and go from here to here or make sure that my family is taken care here to here. Corey Frank (13:01): How do you kind of square that circle then, John and Chris, where I'm an introvert and I'm in sales today, but now right. "Hey, do you really kind of need me because I have all this inform available." So what's a guy to do? I can buy insurance online now. I can buy a Salesforce license online now. If I have 300 reps inside, I can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year with the Salesforce, a CRM, never talk with the Salesforce cause I don't have to. Where is our role then? Does that mean that a lot of the extroverts are here to stay? The introverts are here to stay? How does it kind of change the landscape a little bit of sales and how will it continue? Do you guys think? John Orban (13:43): I had a thought about that actually this morning when I was walking the dog and it came from out of our conversation. When I realized you could do a hell of a lot better job than me. But my friend doesn't know about you, but I do. All I got to do is hook the two of you together, I've done my job. I don't even have to know anything. All I got to know is the right people to hook them up with. And to me that would address that. John Orban (14:50): Address that. But I wanted to go back to something that Chris was talking about with sales reps and introversion, that kind of stuff. What role do you think curiosity plays in that whole process, about the person being curious? Chris Beall (15:02): That's funny. That's what I was thinking about this morning is that a curiosity is the ultimate vulnerability. When you're curious, you are being vulnerable in a dimension that people are really reluctant to be vulnerable in, especially in sales. You're saying, "I don't know." Or as Tom [inaudible 00:15:23] says to me many, many times a day, he's my data concierge. He was on Market Dominance Guys. Guy's incredible. He says, "Let's take a look." It's let's take a look. I love the way he says it, by the way he always says it the same. I say, "Tom, what about this?" And it's some crazy question to ask us. "Let's take a look." And what he's saying is, I don't know and you don't know. "Let's go find out together." And it's that the thing curiosity gives us in sales is. Chris Beall (15:49): First, it allows us to be vulnerable without weak. We're universally vulnerable because we're universally ignorant and that's a wonderful thing. Second, it allows us to legitimately go on an adventure of exploration with the other person. Where now what we know and what they know in the circumstances we're facing and what we're trying to learn are shared, we're peers. We get to go to each other, we're two outriggers on the same boat and the reality is the boat. And so we're going to keep the boat from tipping over. Boats without riggers are easy compared to those cruise ships. We don't know if they're tipping over or not. But are pretty confident that each one of us has got something that we know. And now we can go forward together confidently because we have shared ignorance and shared ignorance is expressed as curiosity. Salespeople, like all people, are curious, but you have to agree when you're being curious that you don't know what's going to happen. Chris Beall (16:45): You don't know the outcome. This is the great irony of sales to me. And that's actually the great irony of entrepreneurship, but of sales in particular, as a class of entrepreneurial activity. The key to success is admitting you don't know what you're doing. And that allows you to partner early with somebody. And given that other person is concerned about who's going to bamboozle them. They're concerned about who is competent, but not on their side. So as a buyer, my worst case is the competent expert who is not on my side. The second worst case is the incompetent idiot who is on my side. An okay case is the incompetent idiot, who's not on anybody's side except their own because I get to dismiss them and walk away. And the only good case is the competent person who is on my side. So the common case is the salesperson presents themselves as competent. Chris Beall (17:39): Whether they borrowed the competence or they actually have it. Collateral is borrowed competence. I'm going to act like I know what these pieces of paper say, because I can reach over and hand them to you and act like that's a form of knowledge exchange. So I can fake the competence or I can be competent. Who knows? But your nightmare case is the buyer, is that I'm not on your side. And that's what you need to get beyond as a buyer at some point. So by being curious, by being genuinely curious and admitting we don't know how this is going to turn out. We don't know, we're going to explore together. You form immediate partnership. And that's why the breakthrough script that we teach people, which we stumbled across through curiosity, is a script that people emphasize trust. They go, "Well trust the cool thing, right?" Trust is actually just a little platform in that script. Chris Beall (18:33): It happens to be durable. It's the one durable asset in a relationship. Once you get somebody's trust that Chris once told me, you get to keep it until you blow it. Now you're your number one job in sales is don't blow it. Don't blow the trust. You just got it in seven seconds. Don't blow it. "So now I know what not to do, but what do I do?" Well, let's see if we can get curious together. Let's see. And so there's the elements of the breakthrough script that are about curiosity are this: I believe that's the only part that's not about curiosity. That's an assertion, but it's an assertion about something I can be sure, my belief. I can confidently assert that I believe something. And you can confidently feel like this guy sounds like he actually believes it. Therefore the tone of voice is really important. Chris Beall (19:22): I believe not like I believe it's going to rain today, that's an expression of uncertainty. I believe and then we go all curious all the time. "I believe we've discovered a breakthrough." The "we've discovered" is very light. The voice is very, very gentle. It's basically saying we're done with the assertions. Now let's be curious. So what can we be curious about? We, because people are curious about people. I say this all the time. I'll say it again. There are Americans. You may not believe this. Anybody in the audience may not believe this, but there are Americans who have a deep and abiding interest in the British Royal family. Now, last time I checked the British Royal family became an relevancy to Americans in significant ways, either in 1776 or just after the war of 1812, kind of depending on how you look at it. Chris Beall (20:21): So there they are completely irrelevant yet fascination. Fascination abounds, even in the heartland, I knew people in Des Moines, Iowa, who were fascinated by the British Royal family. Now they were also fascinated by corn and pigs and all sorts of other cool stuff. But they were fascinated by the British Royal family. I was like, "Why?" Well, because it's built into people. We're curious about people. There's a magazine that you can hardly believe exists called People magazine. It has no content whatsoever, other than stuff that's about people who are doing things that you're supposed to be curious about and you get interested, right? There's a whole industry about celebrities. There are these people called paparazzi. We ask them to stand six feet away. So we've discovered, discover, that's curiosity. We didn't make it. We didn't grow it. We're not inventors of it. We're not big and strong. Chris Beall (21:13): We're innocent. We discovered it. That means we can partner a breakthrough. Who wouldn't be curious about a breakthrough. But all that saying is a breakthrough might be on your side. So now I'm emphasizing, this could be on your side. It could be of utility to you. So we're curious about things that we could use. If somebody brings you a pointy stick and you're an eight-year-old boy, you're curious as to whether the pointy stick will make the dog jump. So you poke the dog with the pointy stick and there you go, right? So curiosity is the number one thing that we can bring to bear. And it's the number one thing that salespeople can't bring themselves to use because they feel like they're out of control. They want to be [crosstalk 00:22:01] Corey Frank (22:00): Is that an ego thing, Chris? Is that a humility and ego thing where it's difficult for me to say those words probably more so if I'm an extrovert, because I had this illusion that I'm uncomfortable in large places, I'm on stage and I always have the answers. Chris Beall (22:14): And I think it's, I don't know about ego per se. I think it's a protection thing. I think people protect themselves quite rationally by exuding certainty. Extroverts tend to exude certainty about lots of things. Most of which, if you get them in a private conversation, get a couple drinks at them they'll admit, "You know, actually I'm not a hundred percent sure of that." Some of them take a lot of drinks. Some of them, they get a little rowdy at that point. They tell you they're really sure and they hit you with a bottle, but there is a protection to be had for yourself by simply asserting that you know stuff that you're great. And this is what we teach people in sales to do. We teach them to say, "We've helped companies alike." Then you start naming these companies. "We're great." Chris Beall (23:02): "I'm great." "I'm great," might work if you're selling to somebody heading out in the silk road and they're trying to get one great thing that they got to take with them and they're really afraid of their future circumstance. But if you're going to go with them, that assertion of greatness, they're going to kind of want to check it out. What does this mean exactly? What's this guy going to do to me? That is I'll call it the extrovert's dilemma in sales. The extrovert finds it easy to pick up the phone, relatively speaking. The extrovert finds it easy to walk up to somebody and shake their hand. They find it easy to turn to that person they're sitting next to on the airplane. They find that easy. What they find hard is being curious, because being curious means you got to let go of what feels like control. It turns out you, here's how you do it. Chris Beall (23:48): If you're an expert, any extrovert's watching this, this is how you do it. It's an act of faith. The act of faith is, "If this is good, it's good. It's not, it's not. So let's find out, right. Let's find out because I want my time back." So when sales experts tell you, your time is super precious, what they're telling extroverts is go ahead and get it over with. Get it over with, let it run its natural course and you'll get your time back. And the best way to do that is just to be curious. But you know, it's hard. Corey Frank (24:19): You know, Chris and John, I wrote an article recently about disfluencies, in a screenplay, a sales screenplay that we're producing for prospect. Chris has performed his thousands of times in their ConnectAndSell Flight School. They teach it and to the right frequency and tonality and pregnant pause, it is ran into them and works. And it works because the math says that it works on the dial to connect, connect, conversation rate, et cetera. But I was curious, we had a guest on a while ago, Jason Bay. And I remember one of the things that he talked about was he had such a great tone. He does have a great tone. Like butter, just certain folks are just bestowed by the gods themselves to just have the right vocal chord toneage and it's just. I could listen to Jason read the phone book as I told him. Corey Frank (25:16): It's a beautiful thing. Naturally, tonality and pacing and cadences are attractive or sway folks from listening to certain people. Think of the attorney in My Cousin Vinny. Who gets up and he stamers through the first cross examination. Think of somebody on a talk show who can't quite get the words out and stammer. Think of the Bob Newharts of the world. For those going back, who had the natural stammer that was part of the comedic timing. So I wrote this article about disfluencies and that certain ahs and ums and ers helped build trust. And I got a couple of academics that responded to this, talking about articles in academia. That when you use these disfluencies, that it actually projects engenders more trust. In the example I gave is one of my mentors always told me, "Never trust a man who doesn't walk around with a little bit of a limp." No one is that fluid. No one is that much of a silver tongue devil. And that ties in a little bit, Chris, with those words that you used, right? Let's take a look. Chris Beall (26:36): Just like this, "Let's take a look." Corey Frank (26:38): That's so beautiful. Chris Beall (26:40): Playful curious. Corey Frank (26:41): So John, insurance, life insurance, you've had a lot of reps who work for you over the years and life insurance. Man, that must be a tough thing to engender trust in. "I'm a 21 year old, newly minted life insurance agent. And you're going to sit down with an old guy like me and my wife and tell me about my future?" How do you build that trust? I'm in your living room, right? I'm over the kitchen table. How does that dynamic work? How did you teach and what did you learn over the years of the nuances that some of your reps use to leverage, expedite that trust? John Orban (27:20): Well, there's a lot going through my head thinking about what you just said, because one of the things about curiosity that pops into my head is when you're doing that, you're really in a collaborative relationship with that person. You're not trying to sell them, they're not trying to resist a sales close or something like that. I remember one case that I walked into with my sales manager, right at the very beginning when I got started. And I wasn't sure we were going to get out of that house alive. Because he was so mad at us because of something the company had done to him or a former rep had done. I mean, he greeted us at the door and was yelling at us. As soon as we walked in. When we walked out, we had sold him something. And basically what we did was we just allowed him to talk and we just sat there and listened to what he had to say. John Orban (28:08): We agreed with him when he was right. We corrected him when he wasn't exactly right. And that really made an impression on me in the way that I was going to deal with people going forward. Now, as you found out, Chris, because you keep talking about it on the podcast, for some reason, people don't want to accept that. They still keep going back to the magic bullet. It was like, again, on, on another one of your podcasts you were talking about, or you were talking about the speech that you gave. And it said, "Never give that speech again, because what they want are tips and tricks." So I thought when I go out with my granddaughters on next Halloween, I'm going to go to the door and say, "Tip or tricks." John Orban (28:50): But that's what they want. Everybody wants silver bullet. There are very few people that can pull that off. You really have to develop a relationship with that. You have to listen to what they say. If you just let people talk, you will find out everything you want to know. You may have to prompt them with a couple of questions along the way. But Chris, when you started talking about the sales process is not by the quarter or whatever, you're looking to develop a long term relationship. There was a lot of lip service to that when I first got started, but it was Thursday night. What are you going to report tomorrow? Friday? I mean, every week we didn't have a quota after quarter, we had a quota every week. And so Thursday night was when you wrote the Thursday night special, you went out and found somebody if they were breathing and they could write you put their name. Now I never did that. John Orban (29:36): But a lot of people in the office did because that's just the way it was. So I think listening is such a key thing that has to be done. And going back to the curiosity thing, I developed after a while on the phone, I got really curious about what the next call was going to be like, because I had had so many interesting phone calls up to that point. Some were sales, some were appointments, some weren't anything. But it was always fascinating to talk to people and I could talk to them because by then I'd read a hell of a lot of books. And I really felt comfortable with knowing what I was going to be talking to these people about. And I could talk on a wide variety of subjects, which I think is something that a lot of sales reps, if all you're going to read is sales closes. John Orban (30:22): You're not going to get the kind of depth that you need when you're sitting down in front of that executive and trying to get them to move along or to learn more about what they've got to say. I remember when they'd talk about rapport. And I remember when I first heard the term rapport, I'd walk into an office and I'd look around, is there a photo of them playing golf? Or is there a trophy on the wall or that kind of just anything that I could grab a hold of. And then it dawned on me that the whole point of rapport is so that you can ask questions and they'll respond. And if you've got good rapport, you can ask much deeper questions. And like I told you, Corey, I got people to the point where they were telling me things I didn't want to know. It wasn't like it didn't have anything to do with the sale process. It was like, I was a priest in a confessional and they were confessing to me and that really freaked me out.  

“The time has come,” the Walrus said, “to talk of many things.” Our podcast guest, John Orban, is currently a marketing and business consultant who spent 24 years honing his sales skills as a rep for MetLife. Today, John joins our Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall and Corey Frank, to talk of many sales- and life-related things. In this first episode of a four-part conversation, John, Chris, and Corey touch on the trickiness of successfully communicating an idea, on the importance of thinking but not over-thinking, on resisting the temptation to make things complex, and finally, on the math employed in sales and, thus, market domination. There’s even a bit about the stability of cruise ships. Seriously. Many things! And these three sales guys are just getting started, so don’t miss the fun in this Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Of Cabbages and Kings — and Blue Whales.” About Our Guest John Orban brings his background as a MetLife sales rep and as an administrator of computer networks to his current career as a marketing and business consultant for creative professionals. Full episode transcript below: Corey Frank (01:18): Welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys. Here we are in late January, or whenever this is going to air, Chris, 2022. I'm here with Chris Beall, the sage of sales, the prophet of profit. And here we are talking all things market dominance, math. And today, we have a very special guest. We may delve into other topics, such as art, maybe blue whales, Chris, as you said before the show, and of course, all of our fun things to talk about with regards to how to dominate your market in today's business world. So Chris, how about just a few minutes on our special guest, John, and how you guys met, and then we'll dive right into the topics? Chris Beall (01:57): Well, John reached out to me on LinkedIn, and said something that made me cry. I can't remember exactly what it was, but it was basically, hey, your podcast doesn't suck too bad. I got kind of hooked on it. And it just touched my heart, quite frankly. And then, as we went back and forth a little bit, I realized that John brings a kind of depth and precision of thought honed over very many years. I'm not saying, John, that you're older than me, although it's possible, I'm- John Orban (02:30): Yeah, I am. Chris Beall (02:31): ... [inaudible 00:02:31] old, but it was one of these situations where we just went back and forth a little bit, and I thought, good god, we have not had this guy on Market Dominance Guys, and we should. It was just like that. He reads books, we were doing a little book thing. He respects thought and reality. He's multidimensional. And he's out there in eastern Maryland, one of my favorite places in the world, so why not get a little geographic diversity here? Love it. Love it. John Orban (03:01): There you go, there you go. Corey Frank (03:02): But we all need a little serendipity in our life, and John, if you came across the podcast when you were looking for Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson, or any of the greats, sorry to disappoint you upon first listening, but we're still glad that you're one of our seven listeners. So let's jump right into it. Chris Beall (03:17): Anyway, how are you doing? John Orban (03:19): I'm doing pretty good. Chris Beall (03:20): Fantastic. This is going to be a fun episode, books, books, books, so- John Orban (03:23): I don't have a fancy background like you guys. Chris Beall (03:25): I have a story with my background. It's a funny story. John Orban (03:28): Oh, yeah? Chris Beall (03:29): The story of the boat there is that Helen and I spent a month in Australia, first month of 2020. And the last day of the trip. I went out for a nice long barefoot run, because she was hanging in the hotel having some business meeting or other. I mean, the girl carries a $1.2 billion quota. And even though she was between jobs at that point, I think quota chases you somehow, even if you're not working. So she's doing business stuff, so I go out for this long barefoot run. Come around this corner in Sydney Harbor, and here's this giant boat with this blue bottom, and it's got a Panda, like a four-story high Panda coming down off the top of it, like King Kong coming down it. Chris Beall (04:12): Yes. And I thought, wow, that's really weird, but interesting. And it's just huge, like, it's a city block or more long. So I looked at it, and I noted its name, and I don't really care about cruise ships, and that was it. And then, boom, cruise industry is gone about a week or two later. It was its last voyage before COVID. And we're not thinking about any of this kind of stuff, and then, here we are a year and a half later, having dinner, looking out over at Seattle, and suddenly, the ship shows up. The [inaudible 00:04:45] followed me from Sydney like a faithful dog ... John Orban (04:47): Wow. Chris Beall (04:48): ... to show itself off. So I took a picture of it. And so, when people ask me, where are you on the surface of this blue rolling planet, I can say, well, I'm about half a mile from where this picture was taken, looking over at Seattle. And they go, oh, okay. There you go. Corey Frank (05:01): Our dear friend, Oren Klaff, has a response for why are things the way they are, and why don't cruise ships tip over? Why are tides the way they are? Why do people buy the way they do? And I'm going to butcher it, but he uses what's called, the blue whale close. When a prospect asks you something that is, well, why is it the way that it is? How come your product does X and Y and Z? Something obscure. And as a sales rep, right, sometimes you want to delve into the detail, and go to the cool cognitions, and sometimes you want to dance. And sometimes you want to just forget that the question existed altogether and change the topic. Corey Frank (05:33): But he has this blue whale close that he uses. And the blue whale is the most magnificent creature on earth. It is the largest mammal in the world. Cruise ships and tankers of the aircraft carriers, when they see a flock, a fleet, of blue whales swimming towards them, they move, not the blue whales. And this blue whale, right, can eat thousands of tons of plankton every single day to sustain itself. Plankton, the most minuscule, microscopic piece of ... as you know, John, in the universe. This blue whale, the most majestic creature that there is, can choke on a common grilled cheese sandwich. Why is that? Because it just is, that's why. Because it is. John Orban (06:16): Good. Chris Beall (06:21): That's so funny. John Orban (06:22): That's good. Chris Beall (06:23): By the way, Corey, that's not only funny, but I just read an article in New Scientist yesterday, in which they were reporting the discovery of why blue whales and other baleen whale don't choke when they ingest as much sea water as would fill their whole body. It'd be like us drinking one human body's worth full of water, right? If you hollowed a person out and you made them into a bottle, and you filled them up with water and you drank the whole thing at once, in about two seconds, that's how they eat. And they finally discovered just a few months ago, why they don't choke. And you know why they don't choke? Because there's no cheeseburgers out there at sea. Corey Frank (07:07): That's right. Chris Beall (07:08): No, they actually found a big plug in the back of their throat that works in a funny way, and they don't choke. Which is hardly surprising, because if they all choked to death on the water that they're using to eat all the plankton, well, the number of blue whales would be very small. It'd be slow, and sitting on the bottom of the ocean. Chris Beall (08:10): Exactly, so, John. John Orban (08:11): I talked to Corey some last week, and I mentioned to him that I could never have imagined me listening to a podcast about market dominance. I mean, I'm not a CEO, I'm not an entrepreneur. At best, I'm a reluctant employee. In fact, what got me was a podcast you did, Chris, where you were talking about the seven seconds to get trust built up, that kind of thing. And I was hooked. And then when you started talking about your spreadsheet porn, and stuff like that, I was just all over that. I mean I love spreadsheets, and I got three different spreadsheet programs on my computer, trying to figure out which one I like. Since I started hearing your podcast, I'm done listening to any other podcast for the time being, because as I'm walking the dog, these ideas are popping into my head that go back to books that I've read in the past. John Orban (09:06): And I'm just literally freaking out. I mean, sometimes I'll walk around the circle and pick up pieces of my brain that had just blown out my ears while I'm listening to you guys. And it's like, you are redefining the way business is done. I mean, you're basically redefining sales. And I told you, or wrote in prior correspondence, Corey, I think you've basically obsoleted every sales book that's out there. Well, except for one, and that's the [inaudible 00:09:35] Book, In- Corey Frank (09:36): Oh, [inaudible 00:09:37]. John Orban (09:39): ... [inaudible 00:09:39]. But that's different, he's got a different approach to it. But I mean, I've read an awful lot of sales books in my life. And it was funny, I was listening to a podcast today, and you were interviewing the Jefferson guy. Corey Frank (09:54): Oh, Roger. Chris Beall (09:55): Roger. John Orban (09:55): Roger. Roger. Chris Beall (09:56): Yeah, sales enablement. John Orban (09:57): And as I'm thinking about these ideas that are popping in here, I'm thinking, I've never heard anything like this before. But what I have heard is little pieces in books I've read over the last 50 years. And I had this flash the other day when you were talking with Valerie [inaudible 00:10:18]. And I said, it sounds to me like you guys are close to discovering the theory of everything. And since you've got a physicist on board, I'm thinking, well, maybe that's where it's coming from. So I mean, I could go on all day about this, but it's just like, I don't see any reason to listen to any other podcast about business or sales than what you guys are doing. So I don't know, that's the end of my ranting and raving about that. John Orban (10:44): And like we were talking about before, Corey, where you were saying the client that I'm working with, would this idea work with him? Man, I think it could work with virtually anything. I mean, you're already selling air compressors, German air compressors, right? With the thing? I mean, I think it's a universal application, and that's what I'm thinking about the theory of everything thing. Because what you're doing is, you're simplifying stuff, and that's what needs to be done. I mean, we have overcomplicated so much in the world. That's the reason why we're having all these problems. John Orban (11:18): But the thing that really hit me was when, Chris, you started talking about these bits of information things. And I watched this, I don't know whether you'd call it a movie or a documentary, or whatever, but it was called, What the Bleep Do We Know!?. And its basically gets into quantum physics and that kind of thing, and they said that we are bombarded with four billion bits of information every single second. I mean, I can't even wrap my head around that and I tried to verify that independently. And as I told Corey, I couldn't come up with a four billion number, but basically, the only thing I could come up with was scientists that were saying, it's a heck of a lot of information we're getting hit with. John Orban (12:00): Well, that took me back to one of the very first books that I read that literally changed my life. I mean ... well, let me put it this way, it started me on a 30-year path, if you will, of reading everything I could get my hands on, on why people do what they do. What is human behavior, and that kind of thing. And the book was called, and I told Corey, and it's called, Structure of Magic. And it was written back in 1975. And the idea is, we are by bombarded with so much information that we have developed this strategy to deal with all that. John Orban (12:40): So we basically do one of three things. We either delete the information. Have you ever had this situation where you're trying to find your car keys? Because I'm all the time losing my car keys. And you're looking around the kitchen counter, and of course there's all kinds of crap on there, but the keys aren't there. That's where they should be, but they're not there. Well, I do, let me not project this on you, but I go ranting and raving around the house. My wife goes crazy, the dog runs and hides somewhere. And then, I come back to the counter, and there they are. The keys are right on the counter, right where I left them. Now, why didn't I see them? They were there, I looked at it, I didn't see them. So that's kind of like what the deletion thing is. John Orban (13:17): The second thing we do is, we tend to distort information. And this is for, I think ... well, considering that sort of applied to me a lot, it was very difficult for me to say thank you when people would compliment me. I would always think in my mind, well, you don't really mean that, I really didn't do that great a job, that sort of thing. So you get into that. And I remember reading a book where the author said, all you have to do is say, thank you. And that was pretty significant, right? One of the things that you said, and I say recently. Recently, for me listening to, for you guys, it was probably like a year ago. But you started talking about this idea of, you were going to hire psychologists, and put them on as a sales rep. John Orban (14:03): And I said, that's incredible. I mean, that is an incredible idea. Because, when you start to think about this communication thing that we go through, you have an idea in your head. Now, your idea just doesn't pop into the other person's head. You've got to verbalize that somehow inside your head, you then have to say it, the other person hears it, it goes into their head. They have to think about what it is, and then it gets to the thought that they come up with. Now, what do you think are the chances of the thought that's inside your head and the thought that's inside their head at the end of this process is exactly the same? John Orban (14:43): It's pretty rare, especially as you think about the fact that while this is all going on, as a human being, you're dealing with your experiences that you've lived in your life, the perceptions that you've formed from those experiences, and then the language that you've learned to try to communicate or express your feelings. And a lot of people are ... a lot of difficulties about that. So in that whole chain of process, from idea to thought to verbalization, listening and all that kind of stuff, you've got all those things that you're dealing with. Now, that's in your sales rep. One of your podcasts, you were talking about how to hire sales reps, and things like that. But to have a sales rep that could understand themselves, for example- Corey Frank (15:29): Well, let me take something, John, when we look at ... and Chris knows this, he's heard the story, right? He's been a mentor and a sensei and a Sherpa of mine for 20 years ... gosh, 15 years, maybe. It feels like longer. Chris Beall (15:43): [inaudible 00:15:43]. Corey Frank (15:43): But a lot of things that you're saying, John, right, you're talking about hiring psychologists. Chris talks a lot about, and kind of won me over years ago, two companies over, to look for introverts, as they make the best sales folks. And you take that psychological strategy, right, and he'll talk about that in a second. And then you talk about using the proper tools. Jerry Hill today ... Chris, you saw your boy, Jerry, right, who's one of your top folks over at ConnectAndSell, posted an incredible iteration, deconstruction of the math of sales. Loved it, right? And Chris and I, and other folks live in the math of sales, John, how we deconstruct complex entities to the simple. Corey Frank (16:28): And you talked about your car keys. The reason you need to find your car keys, right, is something that we talk about on the show a lot, which is Occam's razor, right? Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily. Chris's company, ConnectAndSell, is in the business of not multiplying unnecessary things unnecessarily. Don't overthink things. Sometimes the simplest solution is the easiest solution. So when you take what Chris advocates from a personality perspective, the introverts and the introverted mind, and you take that and put the math around how to dominate your market, you have what should be something that is common sense. But sometimes, we in sales, especially CROs, investors, like to make things more complex, wouldn't you say, Chris? Chris Beall (17:16): Yeah, I think the temptation to make things complex comes from two places. One is, it's hard to make things simple, right? It requires a lot of thinking, actually. Henry Ford said something that I repeat to myself every day. Thinking is the hardest work of all, that's why hardly anybody ever does it. He was being funny, but he was also being very, very serious, which is, when we think it's psychologically and physically very challenging, and it's a lot of work. And the easy thing to do is to think additively, just to come up with one more thing, one more thing, one more thing, one more thing. And the hardest thing to do is to think synthetically, which is to say, this thing and this thing, actually, in some important way in this circumstance, or actually, this other thing when they're together, and I'm going to take that thing and rely on it, even though I can't see it. Corey Frank (18:12): You're talking about simple. Again, you're the physicist here, so just to be sure, John, right? I'm [inaudible 00:18:18] to be the poetry guy. I should be driving a cab or tending bar. Chris is the guy that should be running Los Alamos laps, okay? So we got to [inaudible 00:18:25]. John Orban (18:25): Listen, listen, don't cut yourself short on this. Because when we were talking on the phone and I was telling you stuff about my friend, and you were coming back with a sales script on me, I was freaking out. I could not believe that anybody could take that information and flip it around that quick, and come back with what I thought was powerful stuff. Corey Frank (18:44): Well, thank you. John Orban (18:44): And I'll tell you what I told him right after I got off the phone with you. I said, listen, these guys can do in 30 days what it would take me over a year to do for you. And I said, if it doesn't work, you'll find out in less than a week. But I said, let me tell you something. If you go through with this, your life is going to change. And he's not the first one I've told that to, because marketing, done right, will change a person's life. I mean, he's going to be on the road, he's going to be touring, he's going to be doing all kinds of crazy stuff. Corey Frank (19:16): Well, simple is better. And the formula we use for screenplays, scripting, Chris uses the same one, the [inaudible 00:19:25], that creates millions of phone calls, and tens of thousands of successful conversations a year has to do with that simplicity. When you have two competing theories, right, Chris, that make exactly the same predictions, the simpler one is always the better one.