Are you motivated to help the prospects you’re cold-calling? Jennifer Standish, Founder of Prospecting Works, joins our Market Dominance Guys, Corey Frank and Chris Beall, in this third of a three-part conversation to talk about different approaches to this process we call “sales.” Thinking of a sale as a “win,” implies that sales is a contest between you and your prospect — and your prospect is the loser. Does this sound like cause for a happy dance? Jennifer says it makes her crazy to hear salespeople say that they’re “killing” their numbers. Corey and Chris agree that this aggressive attitude could also kill the chance of developing a trusting relationship with a buyer, a relationship that would serve both parties now and in the future. Oh, these three savvy sales folks know what’s what when it comes to making magic happen between a salesperson and a prospect. You’re going to want to take notes while you’re listening to this week’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “The Magical Type of Cold Call.” Catch the previous two episodes in this conversation here: EP122: Learning to Manage Your Voice Under Pressure EP123: Hire Yourself a Grandma About Our GuestJennifer Standish is Founder of Prospecting Works, an organization that assists salespeople in overcoming cold-call reluctance. She combines her 25-year cold-calling career with her skills as an intuitive healer, offering a “warm and fuzzy” approach that attracts introverts as well as people who don’t want to be considered salespeople. Full episode transcript below: Corey Frank (01:24): Let's switch gears for a second and just talk about the exhaust, the results, the outcome of the cold call. The meeting. Whether it shows or it doesn't show. What's your philosophy around that? Folks at ConnectAndSell have a very interesting philosophy around no-shows, which a lot of folks have adopted, including us. But invariably, you're going to get folks that fires happen or maybe the interest didn't lock in or life gets in the way. What do you do about no-shows? What's the attitude about no-shows and how do you approach them? Jennifer Standish (01:51): I've experienced very few no-shows, so I don't know that I have a philosophy on them, just because my people show up. Corey Frank (01:59): How come? When you listen to an average cold call versus, I think Steve Richard from ExecVision always gave the stat that, I think you may know the most recent one, maybe from Trish [Pertuzzi 00:02:09], Chris. Was it 52% is the standard show rate for B2B calls, I think it is. Something like that. So then, what is that chasm that your team and you are doing that maybe gets them to lock in a little bit more than the average? Jennifer Standish (02:23): Well, I'll tell them, I'll say, "So I'm going to send you an invitation and if I don't see that you've accepted it, I'm going to call you back to make sure that you've received it. Because I want to make sure that you get it." And they're like, "Oh, okay, that's fine." And then I'll send it. And then if they don't accept it, I will call them back and I'll be like, "Did I get the email wrong? [crosstalk 00:02:45] going on?" And so they'll say, "Yeah, no, I don't see it. I don't see it." And I'm like, "Well, let me send it again." And then inevitably it gets to them. Corey Frank (02:54): So you will call them back. Jennifer Standish (02:55): I will call them back. And then if they still don't, then I call them the day before and I'll be like, "I'm just calling because ..." And he's like, "No, no, no, I got it. I just didn't accept it. It's here on my calendar." So I will follow up on people and I will nudge them. And then they show up. But that's just me. They can't get out of it with me. Corey Frank (03:16): I believe you. I believe you. Chris talks about the moral authority frame being broken when you don't show for a meeting and you use that, ethically, of course, to secure the second meeting. Couple episodes with Cheryl with, I think it's called I Heart No-shows, it's a very, very ... part of our popular episode. But certainly, if you can secure the meeting now the first time by a couple of nuances, like you're saying, calling them, "Hey, 10 minutes ago, we just got off the phone. You didn't accept it yet. Make sure I got it correctly." That's a simple tip, I love that. Chris Beall (03:48): Especially telling them you're going to do that. I mean, the big point over Cheryl's episode, the what I call uber point beyond I heart no-shows, is subtle. It's really subtle. And it's a different point, which is, when somebody agrees to meet with you, you actually now have a relationship within which you can turn, if there's going to be a meeting, into when. And I call it the operational regime. You're no longer in the sales regime anymore at all. In the sales regime, you're only ever answering the question if. If it makes sense for us to take a mixed step. That's all we do in sales. We exchange information and we make a single decision. That's an if. If we should move forward together. Once we make that decision, we must immediately exit the sales regime and go into the operational regime, which is around the question when. Chris Beall (04:46): Obviously if you didn't receive the invitation, then the when is not being handled. So I'm taking it on myself to help make the when happen. I'm not selling to you, I'm just helping. And I think that's the key to what Jen just said, it's like you say, this doesn't always work because everybody knows stuff doesn't always work, right? No matter what you try, you can't open a damn door and have that work every time. In fact, I had one bite me the other day when I tried to open it. So it doesn't always work. So I'm going to give you the heads up. Here's how I handle that. And it's also, there's a funny way that you said it, Jen, that I really like. It shows what I call persistent vulnerability. You are saying that it's not going to be perfect and you are going to persist in the face of that imperfection, that potential imperfection, on behalf of the team, that is you and them. You're going to persist. You're going to do the work. And that's service. I mean you're in service to them right at that point. Jennifer Standish (05:45): That is key. I believe that from the minute that they pick up the phone, I'm demonstrating client service. I'm demonstrating client service. When I call them, if I were to say, "I'm going to call you the day before to confirm, and if we need to reschedule, we can reschedule." I'm demonstrating client service. [crosstalk 00:06:03]. Chris Beall (06:03): That's it. And I think sales people, in general, might have this problem. I think all the ones that I've ever worked with have this problem. That they don't get when they've left the world of if and they're now just a service person. And by just I mean, they're now exalted as the service person. So they've gone from being the second least trusted profession in the world, a salesperson, and they've crossed through this boundary, this membrane that separates the world of people you got to be careful of, to the world of people that are trying to help you. So the second most trusted profession is nurses. Why? Chris Beall (06:41): Because we're pretty sure nurses are trying ... No. The first, most trusted is nurses. The second most trusted is teachers. We figure they're trying to help somebody also, right? So in sales, if we can go from being a salesperson to being a helper and we can demonstrate our helpfulness while also increasing the odds that we'll be able to execute on what we decided to do, which is to have a meeting with each other, then I think there's magic in there and it's unappreciated magic. And the rough, tough, got to win salesperson has a really, really hard time at that. If see sales as a contest between yourself and the prospect, it's incredibly hard to turn off the if and become a when servant. Corey Frank (07:28): And that's endemic, it seems, of a lot of the hustle [inaudible 00:07:31] culture, must do today, crush your number that you [inaudible 00:07:36]. It kind of anonymizes all these relationships down to whatever number is on the board, as opposed to, the empathy is just wreaking from Jen's comments coming through my speakers. I mean, it's like, yeah, sign me up for an appointment. Whatever it is you have. And the antithesis of that is this, kill it at all costs. And that's the world of if versus the world of when. And they don't know when they've crossed that chasm. Jennifer Standish (08:03): I'm an empath. This is probably another reason why I'm really good at this. But it makes me crazy when I see LinkedIn and I see all the men who are kill the numbers, crush, crush, be the top 1%. All this stuff. And then I see people, the advertisements of, somebody's on a jet. Live this lifestyle, live this lifestyle. And I'm like, no, it's not about that. Why does it have to be that? I hate it. I hate it. I find it disgusting. I'm not motivated by money. I'm not motivated by commission. I'm motivated to help people. I want people to live better lives. Jennifer Standish (08:43): I wish that there were more women who were teaching cold calling, who were doing it ... I'm warm and fuzzy. I'm warm and fuzzy. I do it a very feminine way. Why a lot of women are attracted to my process, a lot of introverts are attracted to my process. I wish more women were out there teaching it because I think that the community would be better for it because that stuff is what is hurting. It's hurting us as a community of cold callers because it produces the thing that works against us. It's got to stop, but I don't know how, because these people sell programs. Chris, help me.   Corey Frank (10:06): If you listen, Jen, to our first, I think, two or three episodes, we went in and talked about, we're not anti VC. We're not anti private act. We're not anti-capital. But certainly that capital, in some of the hands where they have this pressure, this need to hit a number, there's certain behaviors that certainly are justified or more rabid than others. Chris Beall (10:28): There's always been an issue with sales, since the beginning, and we haven't gotten over it yet. So we talked about this in one episode, sales evolved at the crossroads. You didn't sell the people in your village, that's a ridiculous concept. You have to live with them. You collaborate with them. So the classic stuff in sales where, I got you. I got the great deal and now you're going to find out that that sack of rice that I sold you actually was bottomed with sand. That doesn't happen in the village because they exile you and it's really, really bad to be exiled. It's worth the death. But when people started traveling near and far, like on the Silk Road, and they had to buy their supplies from somebody at a crossroads, well then the salesperson is trying to get the best of this stranger who's going to go off and die in the desert anyway. Chris Beall (11:18): So I think sales got locked in to a transactional model where it's, I win. We call them wins. Think about that. Wins against whom? It's an odd concept, when you think about it. And so now, here we are in this modern world where there's not much of value to sell that you don't go with. You're part of the product. It's very rare, now, that you get to leave behind some, whatever it is, and say, "Best of luck. Do your best with it." I mean, you can't use a piece of cloud software also as a door stop if it doesn't work out. It just isn't like that. You pretty much have to make it work with everything in your business. And in B2B, everything has to work with everything. There's almost nothing that I would call a legitimate product in B2B. Even our product, as simple, stupid as it is, push a button. I mean, that's the training, right Jen? Jen, push the button. How hard is that? And then wait. Well you have no choice but to wait. Chris Beall (12:23): I mean, that's kind of like life, it goes on if you just sit there. And then when it goes, bloop, talk to somebody. Who are you going to talk to? The person that's on the screen. Okay, good, that's it. But it doesn't live in that isolation. It has to be integrated into workflows and how they hire people, how they onboard people. It has to be integrated into some scripting notion that can be reused so that if you talk to this many people, you can hopefully get something done. It turns out you need a school to learn how to talk to people. On and on and on it goes. There is no such thing as a product anymore that is left behind after a transaction. And that used to be the standard. And I think that's changed the practical qualities with sales. That sales is a step along the way to an integrated relationship now. And in the innovation economy, it's all it is. It is all it is. And yet, the old habit of, I got to win. A win against whom? When we call it closed one, who lost? Corey Frank (13:27): Yeah, great stuff. That's great stuff. Well, that obviously contributes to, certainly the mindset that, am I learning call by call versus a binary outcome? Either I got the appointment or I didn't. Versus the exhaust and the residue of, which element of the call did I do well and which ones maybe I fell a little flat in that coaching piece? So how do you deal with that, Jen? Jennifer Standish (13:53): I'm going to answer that question next, but this is the question I'm going to answer is, as a cold caller, when I cold call for clients, and I haven't in a long time, except for now. What I tell my clients is that you're really hiring me to have intelligent conversations with your prospects. Because what I am doing is, in addition to scheduling appointments, I'm also having really smart conversations and I'm learning about your competitors. I'm learning about your prospects, an industry as a whole. I'm also keeping your data up to date because your list then becomes a real asset to you. And it may not always be appointments that you get from me. I worked for an early stage company and learned a tremendous amount about their primary competitor and the features that they weren't offering their clients. And I was able to go back and go, "Guys, they do not like the fact that big, big, big company over here doesn't offer this." Jennifer Standish (14:50): And they were able to integrate it into their services. And so it was like, you can inform product development. So it's not just appointments. Let's concentrate on something bigger. Yes, appointments lead to things, but you can inform product development. You can get industry intelligence, competitive intelligence. You may not be able to get an appointment now, but maybe in six months you do. Maybe in a year you do. I learned when people were going to be let go and a new person was going to be coming, before the person was going to be let go knew. So I knew to call back in a year because that person was going to be let go and then somebody else was going to be hired and I could with that person. So there's all of this information that, okay, immediately it didn't result in an appointment, but my goodness, it was incredibly helpful for the long road. And so, that's what cold calling really means to me is, intelligent conversations. Chris Beall (15:49): Wow. So I just came up with the phrase, Corey, and I want to throw it your way. The cold conversation is a short interaction as part of a long game. Jennifer Standish (15:59): I play the long game. I play the long game. And, I will tell you that, the clients that I brought in through cold calling ended up being the easiest clients to work with. They were the most forgiving. They paid their bills on time. They never quibbled with my fee. And they became friends long after I left the agency and so did they. And I know this to be true, that there's something that happens when you cold call somebody and they agree to an appointment. That there's a bond that happens because, on LinkedIn, I posted this and other sales people said the exact same thing. That there's something that happens with a client that you get through cold calling, that they become really, really, really great friends. Jennifer Standish (16:40): And, in my agency, a client that came in any other way, like through another person, they were miserable. They were awful. Especially if they were brought in by somebody who was miserable themselves. So they was just something about who you resonate with. Which leads me to then say, be careful who sets appointments for you. Because I may resonate with somebody, and if I hand them off to somebody vastly different than myself, there's going to be a disconnect. So be careful. Because I've set appointments for people where there was a big difference and there was a big disconnect. And I was not the right caller for them, because they weren't able to do anything with them, and they would've been better off calling for themselves. And they would've resonated with other people. Chris Beall (17:27): Which is a very interesting point too. We've been working with a number of CEOs to help them do their own calling for the purpose of being both the offerer and the offer. That is, they are the bait in the bucket. They are that person. And they can learn how not to have the meeting on the spot and allow the psychology of the meeting to be more practical, shall we say, because it's an agreement to come together. And it does start with a true agreement between two people to do the riskiest thing that we do in life, which is to open ourselves up to another person. Chris Beall (18:03): So I think that's where that deep bond comes from. These CEOs that we've working with recently, and Cheryl does most of this work, they are truly, I think, kind of transformed when they start to have their own calling sessions. And it's quite interesting. I mean, we've had one of them on the show who, he was already a pretty good caller, he now converts at about 30% and he said he makes magic happen out there. But he talks about how it's changed him. Jennifer Standish (18:34): Yes, yes. Chris Beall (18:34): It's changed him to be the person who's reaching out for himself. No chance of a disconnect. But I also think that it's very correct that, if you are the caller, you need to believe in the product. And the product is the person that you're setting the meeting for. That's the product. And if you don't believe in them, don't set a meeting with them. Corey Frank (18:55): Well maybe, Chris, you should mention that to Bob Perkins, is the next CEO Round Table session is, you conduct a session, live, where the CEOs, they bring a list. And they set up with ConnectAndSell and it's under the purpose, certainly, of teaching them a little bit of a mini Flight School. But you had said yourself many times on this program, every CEO should be spending a significant amount of time, or a fair amount of time every week, cold calling some of their customers to understand exactly what their frontline team members are doing. And I think for the next Round Table session, I could see maybe something like that. Chris Beall (19:31): Yeah, that'd be pretty fun. Yeah, CEOs only Flight School would be pretty wild. Corey Frank (19:36): There you go. Chris Beall (19:36): And yeah, that'd be something. I bet only half of them would push the button. Jennifer Standish (19:41): There is something that, when you learn how to cold call, and you face your fears, the stuff that's holding you back from cold calling are stuff that's holding you back in life. And what I have found is that, when people learn how to cold call, their life trajectory completely changes. And I've witnessed it where people have come to me and said, "I just came to you to learn how to cold call, but my life has completely changed." And many of my clients stay with me for transformational coaching. And they came for cold calling coaching, but it turned into transformational coaching.

Would you hang up on your grandmother? Of course not! Jennifer Standish, Founder of Prospecting Works, joins our Market Dominance Guys, Corey Frank and Chris Beall, in this second of a three-part conversation to talk about the perfect voice for cold-calling success.  Certain voices cause people to react in a positive way, and it turns out that a female over the age of 60 has the perfect voice to get that positive reaction needed to be a successful cold-caller. Who knew?! Well, researchers like Jennifer did. She has discovered that with a little training, middle-aged women without an identifiable accent are phenomenal appointment-setters. Corey and Chris enthusiastically agree with her that “grandmas are the untapped labor market we need in sales.” If this sounds bizarre to you, tune in to hear how the nuances of voice affect the trust you need to establish in the first critical moments of a cold call. It’s all on today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Hire Yourself a Grandma.” Listen to the first part of this conversation: EP122: Learning to Manage Your Voice Under Pressure and the next segment after this one: EP124: The Magical Type of Cold Call   About Our GuestJennifer Standish is Founder of Prospecting Works, an organization that assists salespeople in overcoming cold-call reluctance. She combines her 25-year cold-calling career with her skills as an intuitive healer, offering a “warm and fuzzy” approach that attracts introverts as well as people who don’t want to be considered salespeople. Full episode transcript below: Chris Beall (01:24): Scott, by the way, his thing is commercial insurance. And I know he believes he's potentially saving these companies lives. I mean... Jennifer Standish (01:38): Yeah. Chris Beall (01:38): Saving those jobs. Jennifer Standish (01:40): Yeah. Chris Beall (01:40): I look at ConnectAndSell. Somebody asked me, "What do you guys do?", we are determined to pull the cork out of the bottle that keeps the value of the innovation economy on the inside. When it could be poured freely on the outside, where people could make use of it. We all rely on innovations. They're stuck inside of companies and they need to get out for all of us, and that's what we do. Corey Frank (02:04): That's a beautiful thing. We go back, because again, I keep seeing it on a t-shirt here. Jennifer's [inaudible 00:02:11] the Chick-fil-A, "Eat more chicken.", right? But you say, "Take more cold-calls, take the meat.". Jennifer Standish (02:16): Take the call, take the call! Corey Frank (02:21): Take the call. But, a lot of the trust is that I don't have a relevant list. If I'm talking to someone who I feel there's some relevancy, there's some linkage there. Some familiarity, some status tip off as our friend Oren Klaff talks about on the call. Then I have some credibility. But if I have, for instance, I get these alerts from Glassdoor. Glassdoor is a reputable organization, been around for a long time and rates socially how organizations are doing, how happy team members are. But, they also have these alerts that somehow I got on that says, "Hey, you're a good fit for X and Y and Z position.", right? Maybe we've all received some of those. Well, I got one the other day and I shared it with the team that evidently I'm a pretty good fit for short order cook at the Village Inn, down the street. Chris Beall (03:14): Yeah. Corey Frank (03:14): So there's no relevance there. Now, I don't think I have anything in my LinkedIn file that says that I've gone, now to me that's my ideal position is someday to retire and be a short order cook. But between now and then, so if I got a call from someone at Glassdoor immediately I would say, you don't know what you're talking about. Your list is garbage. You haven't put that human element attached to say, wait a minute, somehow I got a little disconnect here. So how important is that? When you create a list, we've talked about it on the Market Dominance Guy's level. When you create a list for a client, if there's no relevancy there, it seems like what you're saying is right. The whole house of cards kind of falls apart a little bit. Jennifer Standish (03:56): Yes. But, I would never talk to somebody that way. If I got a phone call, a cold-call, about a job as a cook, I don't think I would respond that way. I would say, oh my goodness. Wow. I think you've... Corey Frank (04:09): Of course. Jennifer Standish (04:12): Yeah, I wouldn't say it that way. I would say... Corey Frank (04:15): I think internally, how'd you... Jennifer Standish (04:17): You need to talk a little bit because seems the algorithm that you're using somehow is misplaced or because I am not at all your target. Corey Frank (04:28): Yeah. Jennifer Standish (04:28): And I'm afraid that maybe your list is filled with people who are not yours as well. Corey Frank (04:33): Sure, sure. Jennifer Standish (04:33): But algorithms, they make mistakes. I mean, they're... Corey Frank (04:37): If you're a rep, and over and over and over again I've been instilled with this belief system from Jennifer and Chris and the battle cry. You're going back and forth like Braveheart, before we hit the phones in the morning at 7:59. Okay. Release. Okay. You guys are released to the world and third phone call, fifth phone call, 20th phone call, "No, that's not me. No, that's not my role.". Are we committing a little mal practice as sales leaders sometimes by not spending the time we need on the relevancy of the list? Jennifer Standish (05:08): Yes. Yes. Because I will tell you that, if you give me a bad list, I'm going to have bad results. I will have horrible results. So the list is actually critical to cold-calling, so you better spend your time. And what I tell people is, you need to have multiple, highly targeted lists, and don't be lazy, come up with multiple scripts. And, I don't like writing scripts all the time. I don't want to write 10 scripts in a row, but I do it because I want highly targeted lists. And I want the scripts to speak to each segment. Otherwise, I'm going to be calling a whole bunch of people and it's going to be irrelevant to them and nothing is going to resonate with them. And then they're going to get angry. So yes, it's got to be highly targeted. Really spend the time, don't call thousands of people and say something generic, because then you're just going to piss people off. I don't want to be that person. So on our side, yes, we need to behave better. We need to behave a lot better. Chris Beall (06:15): I agree. Lists are so fascinating to me because we make lists primarily, at first, cold list. Right? We make them based on publicly available information, which we know is limited and flawed. And we know it's limited in flawed in a bunch of different ways. Some of it is out of date. I was with my data concierge, Tom. We were looking at some calling data the other day and we were identifying individual human beings using some techniques that we have. And we found that there had been 476 calls to a guy named John T. I won't say his last name because it wouldn't be polite. And he died in 2013 and the reason that all these calls were going there was that his son, James T was still running the company, had the same email address. Why not J.T. at company name. Chris Beall (07:17): And it had fooled the various algorithms out there in zoom info and so forth into putting his late father into these lists. And so it was easy to tell from the data, by the way, there wasn't much to it really. One of the funny things is you get a lot of good information back from calling, but you have to do a lot of calling. So in our case, we do 60 million dials a year. So we have a lot of information and we use some of that information to help folks avoid these faux pas that one could make and at least avoid them a little bit, right. Avoid them. But you can't avoid them perfectly in much the same way you can't really be sure in any sales situation that you're not going to be obliged to say what you found out is that there's not a good reason to move forward. Chris Beall (08:09): I mean, if that were not the case, wouldn't the funnel just be a pipe. I mean, it would be odd, right? It's like everybody that we talked to, with whom we will do business with. That doesn't really make any sense. It's an exploration of the world in much the same way that if you go Google something, you can't just blindly take a research result that comes back and goes, oh, I'm going to get that one. Right? Corey Frank (08:34): Yeah. Chris Beall (08:34): Whatever it is. I mean, go look up Chris and Helen's wedding. Well, you'll find one in Italy that's going on on the same date as our wedding will happen in Washington. But don't buy plane tickets for Italy. If you want to come and hang with us and have been invited to our wedding. Check it out a little bit more and be ready to go back and forth. And I think this comes down to the essence of sales. Chris Beall (09:02): Sales has a lot to do with information exchange. We exchange information first to decide if we trust each other enough to exchange more information. That's actually what a cold-call is, cold-call is an exchange of information with the purpose of deciding if we trust each other sufficiently that it's worth exchanging more information. I mean, that's a cold conversation. A cold call by the way, is an attempt to get a cold conversation. Cold calls are kind of irrelevant, because most of them don't go anywhere, but you got to do them anyway. I mean, what can you do? You're going to try to talk to people who are busy right now. Great. Okay. So you found out they were busy, but a cold conversation has a very, very specific purpose, which is to exchange enough information to determine mutually that we trust each other enough to move forward, to exchange more information, right? Chris Beall (09:55): So some of has to be in charge of how much information that is and what the cost is. If the cost is about 30 seconds and the amount of information is something roughly on the order of say six or 700,000 bits, we're good. 20,000 bits, a second with the human voice, 30 seconds, 600,000 bits, it's about what it takes to get sufficient trust to decide to move forward. That's why cold conversations are so valuable because as human conversations with the human voice, because the human voice carries those 20,000 bits a second right into their midbrain. And theirs goes into yours too. And so you got a shot. Chris Beall (10:36): How many emails? I don't know. Somebody in the audience can do this math divide 600,000 by 5,000. What do you get? 600 divided by five. That's a hundred and something 120 emails. Can you get somebody, without losing their attention, to read 120 emails and respond to you intelligently to each one so you can adjust your next email. That's the equivalent of a 30 second phone call. You can't do it. It's the only practical medium to get sufficient trust between two people, if they're not sitting in the same room. Corey Frank (11:15): And the building trust, curious Jennifer, this is a staple of Market Dominance Guys, that Chris is just mentioning here. But from your perspective on modulation or inflection, I want to say tonality, because we always talk about tonality here. I'm thinking for maybe a little bit, even more nuanced, maybe rate of speech. What goes into your mindset? Forget about your team, talking to you as the expert, as the black belt, right? Making the call one shot one kill. I give you four leads. That's it. And we need two meetings of these four leads. Chris Beall (11:50): Oh, that's yesterday. She did that. Corey Frank (11:51): That's yesterday. That's good. Great. Jennifer Standish (11:53): Yeah. I didn't do it today though. Boy, I had one call and really screwed that up. Well, first of all, I say professional, confident, friendly, and a little bit enthusiastic, and that's where women excel. We can do the enthusiastic part very easily and still remain professional. It's where men really struggle because men come to business from a very different place. They come to business in a, I want to be the smartest person in the room, the most successful person in the room and it can be almost aggressive. And so they have a hard time with being enthusiastic. You want me to be in enthusiastic? I don't want to be enthusiastic. But over a telephone line, that enthusiasm really helps otherwise they sound disinterested. So, and it's like, if you want somebody to be excited about meeting with you kind of have to be excited about you and what you're calling about. Jennifer Standish (12:52): And that's my formula. And everybody executes that a little differently, but I look at professionalism, you have to sound professional, confident, friendly, and a little bit enthusiastic. And so when I'm working with people, I'll say, "Okay, well try this out.", and then it's very flat and they'll try it out again. And it's very flat. And then I'll say, well, let's pretend you're the leader of a three-ring circus and you're going to go so over the top, it's going to be absolutely ridiculous. And I'm like really go over the top and they'll try and it will be perfect. And I'll say, "There it is.". Chris Beall (14:10): That's so interesting. Jennifer Standish (14:11): And it was really uncomfortable for you, right? Chris Beall (14:15): Yes. Jennifer Standish (14:15): And they're like, "Oh my God.", and I'll be like, "it was perfect.". Chris Beall (14:19): That's so fascinating. Wow. I went through this with radio ads. Working with Rich Kagan. Corey Frank (14:26): Oh yeah, sure. Right. Chris Beall (14:27): So we're up there in Tucson and we met at this very, very fancy studio. Well, okay. So I triple-locked the car and I, standing there in the sound booth in the studio, and he is telling me he says, "You are a naturally big voice, big range, you project. You will sound dead on radio. You must take it over the top. You've got to go to the point where it feels ridiculous to you.". And sure enough, when it played back the ads I'm like, "Geez, Chris, can't you bring a little something.". Corey Frank (15:04): Yeah. Well the impact of the camera is supposed to add 10 pounds right? Chris Beall (15:08): Yeah. Corey Frank (15:08): So some of the earlier videos, when my wife watches these, I say, remember the camera adds 10 pounds. She says, well, how many cameras did you use? But look at the Nixon and the Kennedy debates, right? Early on with makeup, if you have makeup on, right, and to the naked eye, if you were in front of me of like, "wow, you're very orange today.". Chris Beall (15:30): Right. Corey Frank (15:30): But on camera, you don't see it. So that's interesting though, Jennifer, I like the nuances between men and women and the enthusiasm. Jennifer Standish (15:38): Yes. Corey Frank (15:38): Projection, because we predominantly call IT and we find that the gals on our squad, they do better on average than the gents do. Jennifer Standish (15:50): Yes. And I will tell you that if you're going to hire are an appointment setter, middle-aged women, without an identifiable accent are phenomenal appointment setters. Because we just are confident, if you sound like a little girl, you're going to have problems. Corey Frank (16:07): Yeah. Jennifer Standish (16:07): But I worked for an agency once and we were scheduling appointments for VP of sales and banks. And we had no message. It was basically senior vice president, so and so, so and so, would like to meet with you. And the very first meeting where all of the callers were on the top 10 cold-callers, they were all women and they all sounded like grandmothers. And I thought to myself, this is absolutely brilliant because nobody is going to say no to a grandmother. And they were consistent. And I was in the top 10 and I was younger, but they sounded like grandmothers. And I thought, does this company know what its just done? Or is this just happened to be that these women who were in their sixties needed a second job and they, day in and day out, we're the best of everybody. So I'm not saying go out and hire grandmothers, but middle-aged women without an identifiable accent are the people I try to hire all the time. Chris Beall (17:05): I am saying, go hire grandmothers. I read an article about this 10 years ago, and I still stand behind it. The biggest untapped resource in the economy is post-retirement women, in particular. Although the men start to become, I'll call it usable at that point also, maybe because their testosterone levels go down. Maybe because they're no longer bossing people around or maybe because now they're living with somebody's bossing them around and it helps them understand their place in society a little bit better. But it is very, very interesting that we make, I think, a huge mistake. And I think it's one of the biggest economic mistakes that's been made in the last 20 years of believing that the cold-calling job, which is a highly specialized job, it's like being an anesthesiologist. No, you don't cut the patient open and do all that stuff. Chris Beall (18:01): But if you don't do your job, right, somebody dies, right. It's really, really important to get this right. And it looks really routine like, oh yeah, you give them this amount of gas. You do this, you do this. But really it's very subtle. And that job has been now relegated, I'll say, to the world of the 24 to 26-year-old, who wants to become a salesperson. And yet if you take it seriously as a hiring manager or as a strategist putting together a company, you would say, well, wait a minute. Why am I overpaying for 24 to 26-year-olds... Jennifer Standish (18:36): Right. Chris Beall (18:36): Who don't want this job and want to go get another job when I could go to the other end of the economy and hire people in their fifties and sixties and seventies. And I have a great example, Israeli cybersecurity company selling to hospitals. Chris Beall (18:50): And they were using as their cold-callers, three people out of the Northeast who were living in a rural place, didn't have much accent. Youngest was 58, the eldest was, I think, 77, the leader was in 77. So yeah, something like that. And they created 32.788 million dollars of pipeline in seven months. And this company got sold for 400 million dollars with significantly less than that have been invested. Now they cheated, they used ConnectAndSell, and they were really good at it. And so they talk to lots of people, because it's considered an inaccessible market. Hospital IT, you can't get there, not with the telephone. Right? Corey Frank (19:39): Yeah. Chris Beall (19:40): And I have those numbers. And every once in a while, I'll publish the chart that shows the pipeline that was built, not a hundred percent from meetings, by the way, this is another really important factor. Chris Beall (19:51): Certain voices cause people to act in a positive way, even if they don't take the meeting. So you're actually conditioning the market for all your future communications that, "thank you", that comes after every conversation. "Thank you for our conversation today.", the only email in the world of B2B that always gets opened. The only subject line that works, everybody talks subject lines all day long. There is only one subject line that works in B2B. "Thank you for our conversation today.", now the only way that it's honest is if you just had a conversation. Now you're down to, how do they feel about it? And that feeling determines what happens to four out of every five of the pipeline dollars that will come out of calling because four out of five of the pipeline dollars that come out of calling do not come from the meeting that was set in the cold-call. They come in the communication that happened afterwards, that's been conditioned. By the trust that was built in the cold-call. Jennifer Standish (20:51): I trained a grandmother last year and she was phenomenal. To the point where the owner had to give her a week vacation because he couldn't keep up with all the appointments she was sending. It blew everybody away except for me. And I was like, "This woman going to be phenomenal.". So maybe we really, really, need to change how we're hiring. And these women love it, they feel useful, they're proud of what they're doing. They have a really thick skin, because they've lived a long life and they've seen things. There's just something about their energy and you just trust them immediately. So I don't know, Chris, we should come up with something on to use this talent. Chris Beall (21:40): Well, we should, I'm down here right now in Quail Creek, Arizona. And this community, I think, we have 3000 houses or so. And I would say of those 3000 houses, 2,937 of them have somebody of grandmotherly age of the female persuasion who's living there. And they arrange everything here, they make everything happen. I'm not retired, of course, and Helen's not retired, so we call ourselves the working stiffs and there are a handful of us around here. But I actually think every once in a while, that it's just the company that needs to be started. No one has ever made an appointment setting company that operates reliably at pace and scale. And the reason is that the inverted S-curve around hiring eventually kills them. So it's hard to find the marginal talent to add to that group. And then, Corey, you've done it within the companies and you know how hard it is, right? Chris Beall (22:36): That thrash at the edge, I call it, the thrash at the margin that occurs where the in and the outer happening at about the same rate. Corey Frank (22:44): Absolutely. Chris Beall (22:45): It's like your drop of water can only get so big before it's boiling as fast as you're adding to it. And then all of your time is going there, and then the quality deteriorates at the center. It's just the way these things happen, right? And you're taking on customers that are less sincere and less interesting and less worthwhile and blah, blah, blah. Corey Frank (23:02): Sure, sure. Chris Beall (23:02): But I do believe, that it could be that grandmas hold the key to make in the world's first scalable appointment setting company that can grow without bound, without losing quality. Corey Frank (23:18): See that should have been your patent. Not the other thing. Chris Beall (23:22): Well, she didn't say what it is. We're not convinced yet. Corey Frank (23:24): Oh, okay. All right. Chris Beall (23:25): Well, it's not all about grandma's. Corey Frank (23:26): Just checking. Grandmas are the untapped labor pool market that this country needs right now today. Chris Beall (23:36): Yeah. The innovation economy... Corey Frank (23:37): Innovation economy. Chris Beall (23:39): Will not fulfill its potential for humanity, unless grandma step up. Corey Frank (23:44): You cannot move forward without looking back. That's what I hear you saying. Jennifer Standish (23:48): They're hard workers, they're really hard workers. Corey Frank (23:52): Yeah, absolutely. Chris Beall (23:53): And they're self-managing. Jennifer Standish (23:55): Yeah. Chris Beall (23:56): They've been managing themselves for quite a while and managing someone else too most sure, sure.