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

By any measure, you can confidently claim that the New Zealand All Blacks rugby team is the world’s most successful team in the world. Famed for starting any game with their intimidating black jerseys and dramatic and culturally symbolic Haka – which is a traditional, Maori warrior challenge to the playing opposition, they have amassed a track record that is truly unequaled by any other sporting team. In more than a century of playing – they started in 1903 - the All Blacks have won almost 75% of their 580 plus matches in history. It is often said that the All Blacks remember their defeats more than their victories!
They accomplish this domination despite New Zealand having a population of only about 4 1/2 million people with their financial and player resources being dwarfed by the likes of other nations who compete at a high level like England, France, Australia, and South Africa. 
They truly punch above their weight class and make every match, every player, and every training session count.  
And just to show you that domination in your market does not have to equate to inflated egos or the proverbial “spiking of the football,” the All Blacks continue to enjoy enormous global success with their grounded sense of humility and character. And one of the most dramatic illustrations of this was at the end of the 2015 rugby world cup when New Zealand soundly beat Australia. At the end of the match Sonny Bill Williams, one of the All Blacks best players, gave his winning gold medal to a young boy named Charlie Line. Charlie had snuck onto the field at the end of the match to celebrate and was soon swarmed by security guards. Feeling sympathy young fan, Sonny stepped in and promptly gave his hard-earned medal to young Charlie - a kid he had never met before. He later said, 'Rather than have the medal hanging up and collecting dust at home, it’s going to be hanging around that young fella’s neck and he can tell that story for a long time to come!” The players on his market-dominant team are driven not to become merely a good All Black but a GREAT All Black. 

Federer, Nadal, Serena, Martina, McEnroe, Borg, Court, Navratilova…a roster of some of the best tennis players the world has ever known. 
But add one more name…Esther Vergeer to that list. Because she may actually be the most dominant and successful tennis player that you have never heard of. She won 148 career titles, 48 Grand Slam titles in singles and doubles, 23 year-end championships and seven gold medals. 
And she did it from a wheelchair. 
Esther Vergeer has used a wheelchair since she was 8, when an operation to correct hemorrhaging around her spinal cord left her paraplegic. So she took up tennis and shortly began to string together a list of titles that would be the envy of the tennis and sports world. 
From 2003 till retiring in 2013, Esther didn’t lose a single game. Not even one bad day. In these ten years, she had won 120 consecutive tournaments that amounted to 470 consecutive matches. And over the course of all these matches, she lost only 18 sets and was pushed to a match point only once.

The earliest civilizations on earth developed between 4000 and 3000 BC when the rise of agriculture and trade allowed people to have surplus food and economic stability. Many people no longer had to practice farming which allowed for a diverse array of professions and interests to flourish in a relatively confined geographic area. The use of fire, the advent of the wheel, learning to domesticate animals, and come up with this cool thing to record progress called writing, all of these became milestones as we climbed the “civilization tree. 
Later, in the colonial rush in the mid 16th century, the Western Europeans brought even newer technologies, ideas, plants, and animals that were new to the Americas and would transform peoples' lives – some not necessarily for the better: Things such as guns, iron tools, and weapons; But also Christianity and Roman law; sugarcane and wheat; horses and cattle all became hallmarks of a “civilized” society. 

The United States may stake its claim as the first country to land on the moon but Russia can boast that it is the first country to drill the 2nd deepest man-made hole ever recorded here on Earth.
Since the early 1960s, scientists have attempted to drill down to the Earth's mantle. Why the mantle? Because we’re told that scientists only have a "reasonable" understanding of what it's made from, and how it works. 
In 1970, Russia entered the race to dig. But unlike the Moon landing, Russia achieved more than the US. Over the next 20 years, a Russian team of scientists drilled down 40,230 feet into the Earth… That's 7.6 miles. The hole, known as the "Kola superdeep borehole," is only nine inches in diameter. Nearby residents around the dig have said they could hear souls screaming in hell coming from the depths as the team dug deeper and deeper. Take advice from the Market Dominance Guys, if you find yourself in a sales hole, stop digging.

Seth Godin, of Purple Cow fame, writes, “Trust and attention – these are the scarce items in a post-scarcity world.” 
I’m obviously fairly partisan on this issue but would certainly add “Fear” to his list as well. Or, specifically, how do you embrace and leverage “fear” in your systematic effort towards Market Dominance?
No one said Market Dominance would be easy. It’s diligent and deliberate…it’s a three-year marathon where one of your end goals is that you end up having discovery meetings with 60% of your market. It’s both ambitious and arduous to set a course for market dominance. But the results are irrefutable…IF your inputs are consistent. For instance, understanding that the constraint of your sales system is not headcount, sales methodology, or even price point.
It’s the flow rate of conversations with relevant people that you have at the top of your funnel that is so commonly the real constraint to success. 

A lot goes into building a surfboard. In fact, depending on the expertise and the quality of the board, there can be upwards of 39 steps from start to finish. It’s not a fast process and takes a skilled surfer on the shaper to know what a particular board size or shape will do in the water. Take Dick Brewer, the undisputed 83-year-old grandmaster surfboard shaper from Hawaii. Dick has designed boards surfing legends all over the world…the big guys like Laird Hamilton and Garrett McNamara. He says he has made more than 50,000 boards in his lifetime. McNamara says, "He makes the boards that I can trust my life on." Dick doesn’t take that trust lightly since Garrett regularly hunts waves of 100-feet plus to ride. Today, Dick hand-makes about 200 boards a year, putting his crisp, neat signature on each of them with a pencil and some of his custom wood boards sell for as much as $12,000.
Dick’s fundamental innovation was to shape the nose and tail of the board into a teardrop rather than an oval, allowing the board to cut into the water more precisely and help surfers ride inside the tube of the wave…this was revolutionary at the time and is credited with helping explode the skills and confidence of the big wave riders and also help newer folks try their hand at the sport. Tune in for this episode of Market Dominance Guys, "The Best Surfer Out There is the One Having the Most Fun."

You can learn a lot about market dominance by sitting in the sand…and watching surfers on the beaches of Southern California as they hone their craft. As a land-locked kid from the mean streets of Milwaukee, I would visit the beaches of Venice, California every summer and attempt to ride the relatively modest waves of the warm Santa Monica waters. 
Time and again I would bite it and tumble into the surf…learning a little bit each ride about balance…about the feel and the connection to the board beneath you…about timing. 
And later committing to a career in sales revealed many of the same techniques that I tried to master as Midwest kid first learning to surf. Certainly meeting with the Sales version of Point Break’s surf-master Bohdi, Chris Beall, over 15 years ago, has helped guide me in search of both riding the perfect wave and executing the perfect sales call. 
In this episode of the Market Dominance Guys, Chris argues that it’s the quality of the voice of the sales professional…and the obvious ability to emote sincerity of the human being who is conducting the first seven-second conversation with the prospect, which is really the key to market dominance. You are the surfer. And the scripts you ride – its purpose – with its first bits of information - is to be like a surfboard. Working with both a high-quality tandem is the only way to achieve dominance. 
But let’s remember that the job of the surfboard is not to ride the wave; that’s the surfer’s job. As I found out after many a spill, it simply can not ride the wave without a competent surfer. Having a Martin Scorsese-written script alone doesn’t guarantee success in your cold calling. 

The United States of the mid 19th century is ripe with stories of its timeless legends and colorful characters who helped weave the historical events that defined the Great American West. The stories and movies about the adventures of lonesome cowboys, men with black hats, or brave lawmen of the Old West who clashed frequently in conflicts such as the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, the duals in the dusty streets of Virginia City, and tales of quick justice in Dodge City, continue to capture our imagination. 
When we talk of cowboys and other figures of the Wild West, we immediately picture a man on horseback. But no cowboy would roam the West or walk the streets without a gun…and such a gritty figure would most likely wield a very distinctive long-barreled revolver called the Colt 45. In fact, no gun in the Old West was as important or left such an indelible mark as the Colt Single Action Army Revolver, or more widely known simply as the Colt Peacemaker. 
It was said that "God made man, but Sam Colt made them equal."
And why it was called the Peacemaker and the “Great Equalizer” is as related to business and market dominance today as a cowboy is related to his boots. 
The Colt 45 leveled the competitive playing field because it equalized the relationship among fighting males…especially in the strong honor culture of the Old West, where discipline was enforced through one on one combat and duals deriving from even the faintest slight. So much so that the reason people used to be more polite back then could be argued that it was not because they were nicer people, it's because you might get killed otherwise. And that, as my fellow co-host Chris Beall would say, was considered to be a great inconvenience. join us for this episode of Market Dominance Guys.

Almost 400 years ago, in the early 17th century in Europe, tulip bulbs were considered hard currency. 200 years ago, many islanders of the South Pacific used bleached seashells to flaunt their wealth. 100 years ago, many Texans measured their success by how many heads of cattle they ran. And today, my 8-year-old measures his wealth by the rare skins and VBucks he accumulates through his Fortnite gaming efforts. But today, if you’re a CEO or senior business leader in B2B tech markets, you may also have an alternative form of capital that should be leveraged in every way that the currency in your bank account is currently deployed: If you have created the function of an SDR team – regardless of the size - they are indeed a source of capital that operates in many ways like traditional capital and is also liquid.
Since our focus at the Market Dominance Guys is lending a hand to companies and offering techniques and insight to market penetration, transitioning to NEW and additional markets may be something that isn’t at the top of the list. But, Geoffrey Moore argues – as we discussed in an earlier episode about his book, “Crossing the Chasm” - that breaking into any market is an aggressive act. And as such, Moore proposes a specific and consistent and testable strategy for moving from one market to the next with success. And testing and entering a new market is often a much more simple exercise than many realize…especially if you have the alternative capital – SDRs – to invest in it. It is through your SDR team, after all, that is the means by which you're going to identify the ripeness and opportunity that exists in a new market. 
With their number one job to be an instrument of market exploration and their number two job to be an instrument of market expansion.
That’s why, in essence, the mighty cold call is the essence of this entire market domination thing. Namely, can you hire and train and coach your SDRs to speak empathetically enough to get the prospect to trust them enough in 30 seconds and be curious enough that this curiosity can be transformed into commitment, and that this commitment will turn into the action of actually showing for the meeting.
In this episode, we explore the power of deploying SDRs…how, how many, and when…and why the more markets our SDRs can validate, the less our chances are of going out of business. This is the Market Dominance Guys and this week’s episode, “How Many SDRs does it take to Change a Lightbulb?”

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

If you want to dominate your market, here’s an inexpensive tip: Head down to your local Goodwill and buy a used version of the classic board game Risk… It seems that you don’t need AI, Machine Learning sims, or dozens of third-party load-tested and validated forecast models to predict how your business will perform in the next 24 months. Sometimes you just need to remember how you played a game that many of you probably haven’t picked up since you were 12. 
Risk was a board game that taught many of us about basic market dominance…each player sits and views a map of the world where each player has a finite number of armies placed randomly in a territory. The goal is to budget – and risk – your armies to conquer your neighbor’s landmass – while also leaving some troops to defend the territories you already have won from attacks that soon come on other fronts. The player who conquers all the armies on the map is the winner. 
No less of a result than we’ve talked about on these episodes. 
Consider that at the outset of every turn you simply ask yourself, “What am I going to risk in order to boot somebody out of a territory, so that I can dominate it from which I can launch another campaign when I'm strong enough to dominate and adjacent territory?” 
It’s the same theory in business – except deploying real dollars and resources vs placing your surplus of plastic pieces in Greenland (never a good idea). 
If you and your leadership team just played Risk all day long, I guarantee you will see traits and ideas and lessons to be applied to your current business. 
Because this math and exercise in risk and reward – and you’ve really got to do that kind of fundamental math if you haven’t already done so – is kind of like the game theory of business that must be done before we can figure out the real role of sales.
So let’s jump right into this episode of the Market Dominance Guys entitled – Parker Brothers gave me my MBA. 

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

Today, when you examine the toolbox of the modern sales professional, many of us immediately see the abundance of options in the marketing and sales stacks that decorate most of our desktops…I have tools that can disguise my phone number, I know when someone opens an email, I can do a virtual face to face meeting…AI and machine learning tools even tell me what to say and who I should say it to…a scale of portable technology and advancement and capital on any ordinary rep desktop that would leave an Apollo-era NASA slide-ruled engineer in your dust.
But what about the techniques, behaviors, and go to market strategies of that same modern sales professional?
Sadly, for most of us, we’re still stranded in mid-century America. But not the mid 20th Century,  rather, I’m speaking of the mid 19th Century America of 33 states. The mid-century of America where the new hot book on the scene was not Good To Great or The Lean Startup, but instead a fresh little nautical fiction text entitled Moby Dick.
In this episode, Chris takes us through a virtual time warp of strategy, territories, and compensation as a salesperson.
Some things have indeed changed, But some remain firmly entrenched in a midcentury President Franklin Pierce’s America. This is the Market Dominance Guys and today’s episode “Get the DeLorean; My Profession is Stuck in 1855!”

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

What do you need to believe when you ask someone for 15 minutes of their time? What’s the underlying emotional and rational DNA of true belief that is pulsing through your brain?
And even beyond this, it would be helpful to remind our listeners about our mission here at the Market Dominance Guys…what’s the real reason these nuances and steps and tactics of market dominance even matter? Because, after all, if we don't get past the discovery step consistently we can never dominate our market.
So all of these steps are not necessarily put in place for the salesperson themselves to be successful, although that is great byproduct; The real underlying purpose of all of this is to provide an alternative or an adjunct to the traditional funding, mergers, and acquisitions as a way of executing corporate strategy …That’s actually the purpose of all this…as my esteemed and candid co-host is very fond of saying, “You can go sell any damn way you want…if you DON’T want to dominate markets. Why? No one will care.”  
In this episode, I poke Chris into a controlled burn on the mathematics, the reasoning, and the basic economics of how to dominate your market…and why it matters even more in today’s booming economy.  This is “No Tourists Allowed: Are You Serious about Reaching the top of your Market.” 

 
Ask 50 bartenders how to make the best Tom Collins and 48 out 50 will tell you: Pour 1 oz Freshly squeezed lemon juice, 1 1/2 oz Gin, 2 oz Carbonated water and 1/2 oz Sugar syrup and shake. Now ask 50 sales professionals how to “make” the best Discovery call and you’ll get 50 different answers. Have an agenda. Build rapport. Establish time frames. Set a power frame. Identify a budget upfront or don’t do the call at all. Do a question stack. Talk a lot. Talk a little. It seems that everyone has their own recipe, and yet they are still calling it by the same name. Now sales discovery calls have been around at least as long as the vaunted and debonair Tom Collins. So why do they differ so broadly, and what ARE the necessary ingredients for creating a great Discovery session? In this session of the Market Dominance Guys, I ask Chris – a master mixologist in his own right – for the best additives – including trust, tone, and pace to earn a true confession in a Discovery. This is “The Confessional is Now Open – How to Harvest Authentic Trust in your Discovery Calls”

Alex Honnold, one of the most talented mountain climbers in the world – who is the only man to ever successfully summit El Capitan free solo – and that means no ropes - by the way – had a strategy. And his strategy did not reach the top of the mountain. That was his ultimate destination. His strategy was to map the 30 sections – or “pitches” as they are called in climbing parlance - and practice the necessary and wide variety of different skills needed to manage each of these 30 precarious steps. Now as a sales professional, I find it fascinating that climbers call each section of a mountain a pitch…especially because, in this episode of the market dominance guys, Chris talks about strategy in much the same way Alex attacks a mountain…as simply a list of necessary and intermediate destinations leading to the summit or close. And each of these strategies needs to employ the proper tactic – or in this case – the proper pitch. This episode of Market Dominance Guys is “How to Free Solo your Pitch”.

Growing up, your mom probably told you to never talk to strangers. She also said never ask anyone for money. So…fast forward 20 years and find yourself at your desk, a newly minted college grad and a fresh-faced and newly hired sales professional at a great company. And what does your boss tell you to do on your first day? “Um…Josh, I need you to take this list of leads and I need you to call them (i.e. talk to strangers)…oh and then, if they’re really friendly, I need you to ask them to buy something (i.e. ask them for money…or even tougher, ask them for time).  Um...ok?”
So how do you step up and actually tackle these taboos and address the social baggage that we all have been taught? How do you reduce fear and build trust…especially since you are even worse than a typical stranger…you are an invisible stranger! In this episode, Chris and I have a little fun in this episode of Market Dominance Guys and discuss “Stranger” Things. 

Explaining the decision to employ the newly developed and yet far-from-perfect radar system used to protect England from the stifling Nazi blitz in World War II, the esteemed scientist Robert Alexander Watson-Watt said, “Always strive to  give the military the third-best because the best is impossible and second best is always too late.” This attitude of being good enough, and not perfect, has been dubbed ‘the cult of the imperfect.’ The French philosopher Voltaire summed this attitude nearly two hundred years earlier when he wrote, “The best is the enemy of the good.”
Certainly, when creating a call campaign or lead list, trying for perfection in our initial query is also very much our enemy. In this episode of Market Dominance Guys, Chris explains why what you are doing when you create a list is already wrong! This is Market List Creation…Know your enemy!

Startups that begin their journey without a primary mission and focus on getting to true market dominance causes many teams to instead lead their new company into conditions that are ripe with extreme uncertainty and essentially abandoning all process. They often jump head-on into the product development cycle in order to execute on their “idea” and get to “market” as quickly as possible…so they can start selling and bringing in revenue. Understandable for sure. But this is not the only option…nor is it even close to the ideal one. Eric Ries’ fantastic work, The Lean Startup, demonstrates that companies CAN create order and reduce chaos by providing tools and processes to test their vision not once, but continuously. That’s the key here…continuously. In this Market Dominance Guys episode, entitled “Messaging Eats Product for Breakfast” Chris and I also discuss when is sales really sales, and when a product pivot should really simply be a messaging pivot.  

I know many veteran entrepreneurs would agree that “Raising venture capital is the easiest thing that a startup founder is probably ever going to do.”
Marc Andreessen said that the venture capital business is a 100% game of outliers- it’s all about extreme exceptions.”
“…think about it…there are on the order of 4-5000 ‘fundable’ companies a year, that want to raise venture capital.”
“…and about 300 of those will get funded by what’s considered a ’top tier VC’; about 25 of those will someday get to a 100M in revenue…”
“…and those 25 from that year, will generate something on the order of 97% of all the returns for the entire category of VC in that year.”
In this episode of Market Dominance Guys, Corey asked Chris to tackle the mindset around this Venture Capital seduction process and break it down with eyes fully open to its true purpose and function. Who should you have on your team to really give you the brutally honest feedback you need…before the VC enters the picture? And most importantly, how can you ensure that your VCs goals and YOUR goals are properly in alignment?
This is the Market Dominance Guys: “The Hard Truths about Taking VC Funding”        

In our journey to Market Dominance, Hope springs eternal…it does in sales forecasts…in product rollouts…and especially in venture fundraising. 
“But Hope is not a strategy. And Luck is not a factor. And fear is not an option.”
In this episode, I ask Chris about the key features and strategies every startup must-have. I brought extra paper expecting a long list…but to Chris, things are simplified…there are only three. 
So arm yourself! Tune in to this episode of Market Dominance Guys to hear Corey and Chris and let’s now dive into the 3 Features & 3 Strategies Every Startup Must Have. 

Welcome to Market Dominance Guys. There’s a common storyline for newly minted entrepreneurs…it goes like this: I have a product… a widget…a service. It works…I think it works pretty well. And so now I'm going to hire a bunch of sales folks…probably a VP of Sales and he’s going to do the hiring…and then we're going to launch and then we’re going to get working and execute on that hockey stick picture I have in my investment deck. Oh, and we're also going to do the market launch, some PR about our funding, and spend a few bucks updating the website. 
Now every superhero has their origin story…and in this episode, I’m going to ask Chris to dive in and talk about Startup Origin Stories: Is Sales the villain if something goes awry? Is sales the hero? Where’s the kryptonite in today’s VC funded startups and businesses?
Tune in to this episode of Market Dominance Guys to hear Corey and Chris explain sales isn't to blame.