Season 2

In this follow-up to last week’s Market Dominance Guys’ podcast, “Your Sales People Are Brain Surgeons,” Chris and Corey have another conversation with ConnectAndSell’s customer success manager, Donny Crawford, about using the telephone plus your beliefs to gain market dominance.
First things first, they discuss how to get prospects on the phone who are the most likely to set a meeting with you. It sounds like a numbers game — more dialing equals more people picking up the phone, which equals more meetings set, right? But as every sales rep knows, you can lead a prospect to a conversation, but you can’t make them link you to their calendar. That rate of success is fairly low. In his experience calling on prospects, though, Donny discovered an amazing way to increase the dial-to-meeting conversion rate: make more calls to people on your follow-up list. He found out that if at first you don’t succeed, call, call, call again. Wait till you hear what his success rate is — and then listen to the story Chris tells about follow-up calls, which corroborates Donny’s experience.

What do you do if you have a group of 25 or so folks on your sales team, and you want to really make a splash in the first quarter of the new year? Due to the on-going pandemic, we all  know that connecting with customers face to face at trade shows is no longer an option. No doubt, your reps are still working from home, most of them researching their prospects and trying a little social media marketing, but all of them eventually doing the traditional dialing, dialing, dialing, and praying, praying, praying that someone will pick up the phone. How, in the name of all that’s financially holy, are your reps going to help your company dominate its market if they simply continue to use the same old methods during this brave new year we are entering?
Our two Market Dominance Guys, Chris and Corey, along with this week’s guest, ConnectAndSell Customer Success Manager Donny Crawford, diagnose the problem of what’s keeping companies from the market domination they desire. These three cold-calling practitioners offer their insights into what works best to get the greatest number of conversations with decision makers — despite cold call outcomes like “Not me,” “Not now,” “Not interested,” “Call back later,” or even the dreaded hang-up. Wait till you hear Donny’s proven method for how to turn repeated hang-ups from a prospect into the appointment you’re after.
Chris compares the work of a salesperson to that of a brain surgeon, first cracking open a company’s “skull” by getting that first appointment, and then exploring what’s wrong inside the “brains” of a company by having a discovery conversation. Join Chris, Corey, and Donny as they guide you through that operation during this episode of Market Dominance guys, "Your Sales People are Brain Surgeons."

In this episode of Market Dominance Guys, we’ll dissect that sales process called the “discovery call” and diagnose the problem that is keeping sales reps from making a successful one. Chris, Corey, and Oren Klaff, managing director of Intersection Capital, share their opinions on the subject, and lament the unfortunate fact that most sales reps have no set method for conducting a discovery call that includes true discovery.
As Oren describes it, “Selling is a bit icky, and [salespeople] want to retreat quickly back to the relative calm of their normal lives. Once a salesperson hears one thing [from the prospect] that’s an indicator of interest, they want to hit the buzzer” and immediately jump to the sales pitch so they can end their own discomfort. As Oren sees it, this cut-to-the-chase method is the primary reason many discovery calls fail. Instead of truly finding out what problems the prospect or his company might have, which the product being offered might solve, reps skip right over the creation of a relationship that might help them eventually make that sale. Chris is convinced that salespeople can actually be coached on where they went wrong during a discovery call and how to do it in a way that works. In this podcast, you can listen to the two questions that Chris begins his own discovery calls with — and then find out what the heck “the dog, the meat, and the chain-link fence” have to do with this subject. Who knew that a discussion about discovery calls could be so insightful and entertaining?
If you missed the first half of this conversation, you can get it here:
https://marketdominanceguys.com/e/getting-prospects-from-fear-to-commitment/

You’re about to make a cold call, hoping to get a commitment out of your prospect. What are you feeling? A little trepidation, perhaps? As all salespeople know, that’s the fear of rejection. But have you ever considered that your prospect is feeling some fear too? It’s true: most prospective customers feel the fear of having to talk to an invisible stranger. That’s a lousy way to start a conversation with someone you’re wanting a commitment from. So, how do you, an invisible stranger, get your prospect, an unknown person, to go quickly from fear to trust, then from trust to curiosity, and, finally, from curiosity to commitment — all in about a half of a minute? And how do you do it so the call doesn’t end with a disappointing outcome? Chris, Corey, and today’s Market Dominance Guys’ guest, Oren Klaff, managing director of Intersection Capital, tackle this challenge with a discussion about trust and how to manufacture it, especially at the speed and scale necessary for startup founders to glean success — before their new venture runs out of money.
Listen to the continuation of this passionate conversation:
https://marketdominanceguys.com/e/why-cutting-to-the-chase-in-discovery-calls-fails/

Every single thing that happens in sales is about learning — on both parties’ parts — and this includes presenting and discussing value metrics with prospects and with customers who are up for renewal. What works best? Adopting an attitude of rampant optimism or one of friendly skepticism? Should the value metrics you present be the same, or should they vary when you’re talking with inbound prospects versus outbound prospects? Is it most effective to emphasize only one appealing value, or is it better to trot out several beneficial metrics?
 
In this third Market Dominance Guys’ conversation between Chris, Corey, and Mike Genstil, co-founder and CEO of VisualizeROI, this trio of experts discusses how to price your company’s offering, how to handle discount requests, and what to do about a prospect’s fixed-budget limitations. Most importantly, they delve into the reality of what happens when you have successfully convinced a prospect of the value of your offering — to the extent that he is now a champion of your product or service — but when he carries your banner back to his company, he is faced with a bunch of skeptics who haven’t had the benefit of hearing your pitch. Since 98.3% of all sales decisions are fought internally, you’ll want to hear the strategy Chris, Corey, and Mike suggest for arming your prospect with the value metrics that will help him win that battle.

As a follow-up to the recent Market Dominance Guys’ podcast, “Vanity, Vanity, Thy Name Is Value Metrics,” Chris and Corey continue here with part two of their conversation with Mike Genstil, co-founder and CEO of VisualizeROI. Mike and Chris share their insights into value metrics and how to construct and present statements about value propositions and returns on investment. These market dominance experts explain that it’s all dependent upon the job title of the customer rep being addressed, as well as where in the sales cycle you are with that company. Is risk mitigation the most appropriate metric? Is it perhaps better to talk about productivity gains? Or would a statement regarding cost savings be more enticing as a promised ROI? And, as Corey asks, whose job is it to craft the appropriate statement for the value prop or ROI?

Change is the obvious hallmark of the current pandemic. And, as most of us know, change rewards innovation and punishes those who stand pat on tradition. This is especially true in the winner-takes-all world of sales. Most people believe that true innovation springs from the use of technology. But is innovation mostly about taking a technological product or service and then marketing and promoting it to the stage called “user adoption” — or even to the more desirable stage that we’ll call “user embrace”? Or should innovation be more cultural than technical?
Join Chris as he makes the case for pursuing innovation during the pandemic and talks about the difference between strategy and tactics during this pursuit. Chris is joined by his friend, Gerhard Gschwandtner, founder and CEO of Selling Power, Inc., as they discuss the role of empathy in sales and its importance as a leadership tool.

In the modern SaaS economy, adoption metrics abound. Sure – they measure something that VC investors care about, and sometimes something that product recommenders and even decision-makers want to track. But does adoption speak to business impact?
One thing for sure: when it comes to business impact, adoption metrics are pure vanity. A business doesn’t measure return on investment by asking how much time its employees are spending as “users.” Horror stories abound of products that suck up time due to their own internal inefficiencies, sending employees on wild goose chases to figure out what to put in that so-called “required field,” or how to coax a shiny new SaaS product into spitting out a coherent report on what it did for you — or, more likely, what you did for it. At its worst, a focus on adoption invites corruption, as the SaaS vendor needs to make a claim that their goodness is spreading throughout your organization and the buying committee needs to justify, and feel good about, their purchase.

In the last two podcasts, When Operational Excellence Hits a 9-Foot Wall and Myths and Misconceptions of the Cold-Calling World, Chris, Corey, and Valerie Schlitt, CEO and founder of VSA, have been discussing various aspects of striving for operational excellence. In this third and final podcast on the subject, these three sales experts turn to the topic of coaching. Listen to what they have to say about how coaching works best — and the challenge of doing it in today’s work-from-home world.
Valerie explains that what she misses is the way coaching worked before COVID, when she and her team were in the same office, with many of them calling on the same program. And they would sit next to each other, and listen to each other, and hear what went well on each other’s calls, and then copy it. This passive coaching among co-workers isn’t available now. And though active coaching by management isn’t impossible right now, it has to be done in a different way.

Chris and Corey continue their discussion with Valerie Schlitt, CEO and founder of VSA, which began with the Market Dominance Guys’ podcast, When Operational Excellence Meets a 9-Foot Wall. Making another observation about operational excellence, Chris begins this session with the statement, “A big part of operational excellence is recognizing that you don’t always have the resources that you need to get the job done perfectly — or even well.” Valerie thrives on solving problems just like this one and is adept at addressing problems in unique ways. Together these three sales experts tackle the issues of maintaining operational excellence while running a business — either before or during a pandemic.

Operational excellence is achieved when every member of an organization can see the flow of value to the customer and fix that flow before it breaks down. But as a manager of people, you know that this isn’t an easy goal to achieve — especially if your team members are now working from home instead of working together in one building. As Chris explains in a story about his experience mountain climbing and running up against a 9-foot tall stretch of wall, “We make a great plan — and then we run into that blank wall. The COVID pandemic is an example of that wall.”
In this podcast, Chris and Corey have a conversation with Valerie Schlitt, founder and CEO of VSA, about what to do with the problems this wall has created for her team members and those of her clients. Valerie holds a Wharton MBA and has 19 years of experience directing a great team of her own who use their skills to help VSA’s customers develop their businesses. “Collaborating with people is one of the biggest sources of ways to solve problems,” Valerie explains. But with the work-from-home movement, how can you maintain that same group problem-solving?

When we’re performing in the presence of someone we know to be more expert than we are, our performance usually suffers. In the world of sales, managers often put this pressure on salespeople, although often unwittingly. They may approach their sales rep with every intention of being a helpful coach, but too often they slip into the role of a critical evaluator instead. And as soon as a salesperson thinks they’re being evaluated, fear sets in — their stomach sinks, their voice tightens up, their intended flow of words gets backed up — and there goes their normal, relaxed performance.
In this podcast, Chris talks with Susan Finch, president of Funnel Radio, on this topic and then segues into the benefits of how a mutually beneficial relationship between members of the company’s team (sales, research, engineering/manufacturing, customer support) creates the best possible means of serving customers. Chris and Susan then discuss how showing appreciation and respect for the behind-the-scenes team members keeps those people from feeling invisible, motivates them to perform better, and to willingly offer support to the people on the front line.
Join Chris and Susan for another relaxed, entertaining, and informative Market Dominance Guys podcast as they explore what works and what doesn’t when managing salespeople and dominating your market.
 

The pandemic has certainly shown the general public that scarcity or abundance of products can have an effect on people’s emotions. Scarcity increases desire — whether you desperately need the product or not. Abundance decreases desire, because there’s plenty of what you might need in the future. This is true for the sales process too. When you know that you’re going to have another conversation with a prospect, then you can relax during the initial conversation. The tension will disappear from your voice, because you’re not pushing for the sale: you know you have another chance at a future date, and you can relax while you gather information and begin establishing trust with your prospect. There’s no need to hang on and desperately keep the call going; you set up an appointment for the next conversation, and then you end the call. In other words, you “make yourself scarce.” And right there, you’ve introduced the element of scarcity to your prospect’s emotions and, in doing so, increased their desire for more information about what your company offers.

Can your prospects smell your “commission breath”? Is your eagerness to set the appointment or reach for the deal keeping you from gleaning the information you need from your conversations with prospects?
There is a danger that comes with expertise. When you are a true beginner, your mind is empty and open. You are willing to learn and consider all pieces of information. As you develop expertise, however, your mind naturally becomes more closed. As a salesperson, you might have a preconceived notion that you know where a cold call is heading. Rejectionville again! And this makes you less open to discovering new information, less likely to hear your prospect’s confession about his business or job or a problem you might solve. Your expectations are not immediately met, and you get that sense of doom that this call is a waste of your time. What can save you from that out-on-a-ledge, sales-related fear of impending doom? Shoshin, a Zen Buddhism concept that means “beginner’s mind.” Chris, Corey, and Jake Housdon discuss how employing the curiosity mindset of Shoshin (“I know nothing. Tell me about your experience.”) allows you to take ahold of your emotions, lead your prospect back into having a conversation, and put you back on the road to discovery.

The theory of constraints dominates the world of business, and yet it tends to be ignored by almost everybody in business for a pretty simple reason: it's politically unpalatable. The theory of constraints says your business is a system, and every system has one and only one constraint.
And that's the only thing you should be working on right now: understanding that constraint, characterizing it, coming up with an investment thesis, making the investment, or observing the results of the investment. The investment is something like better cycle time, increased throughput, more units that are doing the work, or better quality. Those who employ this practice will dominate markets.

How long will it take to get the meeting? You have three steps first:
1. Make the list. And review that list and eliminate the dumb titles. Chris is a fan of Zoominfo.
2. Write the messaging. Remember, one turn of phrase can kill the meeting. Marketing language kills a sales call. Subtle nuances make or break the call.
3. Talk to people in that market, those that are intrigued enough to hear what we have to say. Who does the talking? Find and hire the ASKERS.
Tune in for this short episode of Market Dominance Guys: Change the Message or Change the List

The sales lead discernment process is similar to search results. The ones that come up on the first page are the ones you interact with. It's like a discovery call.  A discovery call's purpose isn't to say, "I'm going to buy." One of the biggest mistakes sales trainers make is relying on role-playing as the method to gain confidence. Role-playing is not designed to get you calm and confident. It's a "gotcha" setup. Rehearsal and practice are a better training method to allow the salespeople to get comfortable enough they don't have to think about how they might fail. You need to have it be a reflex to get to the underlying emotion. The underlying emotion that needs to come through is curiosity.

CEOs are allowed to have weird thoughts and consider odd possibilities. You need input from the market you don't have yet. This is why a CEO needs to be selling to understand what is actually happening. Their job is to feel the ice rather than just sending your reps to drive the road.
Put yourself in there as CEO, don't absorb the friction, find the root cause. The marketplace is always changing. CEOs love to harpoon a whale, but they need to experience every aspect of a sale. They need to be in the mix and feel what is behind the numbers. Listen to this episode of Market Dominance Guys, It's the CEO's Job to Feel the Ice Rather than Harpoon the Whale.

Marketing can step in and help sales overcome it.
1. Beginning: listen to discovery conversations.
2. Middle: look at support tickets to see the unvarnished truth.
3. End: work on getting the pipeline to be seen as an asset, it belongs on the balance sheet. Ask to be measured on the value we are contributing to help steer my efforts based on results that are being produced.
1. I want to know upfront what's going on - attribution
2. in the middle - discovery
3. at the end - support tickets and we should want to know this first hand.
BONUS SEGMENT: Introverts tend to make the best salespeople.
Why? They have time to THINK before they act and put deep thought into their approach to securing the meeting. Listen to the second half of this episode to confirm why you want more of them on your sales team.

Only 9% of all MQ's (marketing qualified leads) every result in a conversation. Worse than that, you have now stimulated your target audience to explore and investigate your competition. 91% of all marketing dollars are a waste. This is because Sales only contacts a prospect two times, rather than the 6 times requested or required.  That leaves 91% for your competitors to speak to. But the good news is, everyone else is doing the same thing. It may all work out.

 
Part 2 of the interview with SADA CEO, Tony Safoian. Questions answered include How is Google going to support my enterprise business better than its competitors. Needs have changed, demand for "bat phone" support is now part of any proposal. Every customer is different in their behavior than they were four months ago. If you're an organization that doesn't know how to meet your customer where they are now, your organization is dead. 

 
The rate of growth SADA has experienced gives them credibility when their CEO, Tony Safoian explains that in order to scale you have to manufacture trust at pace. 
SADA does one thing exceptionally well, they transform companies into a cloud solution partnering with Google. Yes, that's paraphrasing, but as a Google Cloud Premier Partner, SADA Systems has gained global accolades as an exceptional service provider with proven expertise in enterprise consulting, cloud platform migration, custom application development, managed services, user adoption, and change management. They do what they do REALLY well. They do it so well that ConnectAndSell turned to them to move from AWS to a better solution on the Google platform.
 
Learn from Tony in this episode of Market Dominance Guys, then join us for the next episode where Corey and Chris continue the conversation.
 

This episode of Market Dominance Guys starts with Chris recapping the numbers from the previous episode on the tremendous infusion of savings Work From Home creates as knowledge workers are no longer required to go into an office to be productive. Quite the opposite. The data supports they are as much as 47% more productive working from home - ending the commute economy.

 
 
There's a whole bunch of commuters that are used to driving to cities. And I think it would be good and very timely talk a little bit about some of the things that we've learned and this massive economy that is forming from the non-commuter economy, the non-commuter economic forces. Chris will perhaps give us a little bit of hope, as far as what the trends are with this new stay at home economy.

 
(aka: The Problem Is Making Your Numbers)
Running your sales program with a conversation-first approach delivers needed information to you. Naturally, this is important to your sales department. After all, utilizing a conversation at the beginning of the sales process tells your sales team almost automatically if it’s worthwhile to have another conversation.
 
So, why should a CEO be selling when he has salespeople to do that job? Because there’s important information a savvy CEO can glean from having conversations with prospects. Information about how things are changing for prospective companies due to competition or demand for their products, about new leadership within their companies, and about the adjustments prospective buyers have had to make to meet the challenges of impactful events — like this pandemic. In these preliminary conversations, a CEO can truly keep his finger on the pulse of prospective buyers and detect how his own company’s product, service, or even sales message might need to be changed to better meet buyers’ needs.
 
In this podcast, Chris will also explain his take on a different result that has surfaced due to the pandemic. He begins with, “There’s a bad, bad disease in our economy, and it’s called commuting.” Listen while Chris expounds on his conclusion that the massive collapse of the commute economy is real — and that the effects of it have huge economic value.

The problem in sales is that the desire for the transaction puts most salespeople already behind the eightball. When he was growing up, Chris' family put up a chain-link fence originally for the goats, but a few years later it helped with the dogs and inspired an experiment.
Chris opened the gate 30-40 feet away from where he put a dog bone over the fence. His dog tried to go over, under, and through the fence, but couldn't get to the bone. But it also didn't back up enough to see the open gate. This is what most salespeople do.

In this episode, Corey and Chris continue their conversation with a high Beta Market Dominance Practitioner MaxSold CEO, Sushee Perumal. aka "the skinny kid from India," MaxSold CEO, Sushee Perumal starting with why he felt he could successfully start an airline and his escape route when that failed. We open with Chris tying together his tapping of the bells analogy and plunging into Sushee's story which ultimately leads to MaxSold's growing success through a path of science, rather than simply tossing out millions of marketing dollars hoping it will work.
Chris reminds us, and Sushee agreed strongly that sometimes we have to wait before we can celebrate a win, funding, goals achieved.

Chris and Corey's guest, Sushee Perumal, CEO of MaxSold tell us to take cautious steps when the tank is full of funding. Some of the highlights in this episode include:
Driving the concept of MaxSold's tagline, "From the sponge under the sink to the Ferrari in the driveway, we sell everything in two weeks." concept is the fact that live auctions were not and are not meeting the market needs. Sushee is the perfect example of Market Dominance, as well as a very likable person to know and work with. Hear this first of a two-part interview about the shortest path to market dominance.
From owning an airline because he wanted to cut his teeth in entrepreneurship, to dominating the market in relocation and downsizing services. Chris noted, "This is the end of the commute economy." This is because the relocation option we have completely turned this upside down in the recent months of COVID-19 - work from home forever.
Sushee explains how he chose to maximize the opportunity by minimizing the risk. Just because you have magic technology, doesn't mean you can execute new business.
Chris asked him, "Does this assessment process take 10 years before you put gas in the tank?" You'll have to listen to the surprising answer. How did he make the transition? He learned that you don't dominate by hiring a bunch of C-Suite staff. He also learned from his failed and struggling competition that you don't throw expensive parties as part of your ROI plan.
Be incremental. Be resourceful. Ask for advice - humbly. It helps that he embodies the value of being humble and likable.

In this episode Corey asks Chris, "The other leaders that you've observed from being an investor or executive or being you know board member CEO, do you want to surround the issue and debate for the sake of maximizing all the different off-ramps that you could take or is it genuinely from a science level scientific level that you have your flag?"
This leads to Chris talking about the three stages of your business or career, he says, "I'd like to think of myself as the guy who insists that we go science first. And if you're going to go science first. That means you have to be ready to do experiments and experiments are very well understood. We know how to do experiments been doing a lot of science for a long time. That means you've got to be math first because doing experiments that don't have a shot mathematically is ridiculous and you shouldn't do that.

Businesses are not evolutionary endpoints. Businesses can be endlessly inventive. Why is it that putting a bookstore on the internet would lead to the world's richest man? If price isn't your differentiator, you'll work really hard to find one and fail. A business plan tells you if it's worth doing. Will this have been worth doing?
What's the smallest thing I can do in the shortest amount of time that will give me evidence to confirm or disconfirm my core thesis? Root in your own experience, not in somebody else's business book. Your experiences are your core differentiator. That's what you're bringing to the party.
The person screwed on price wins on convenience or timing.I want a startup because all the cool kids have a startup. Really? Every new business is a start-up.

Most sales professionals are familiar with the journey of a cold call.It starts with fear. From fear we move to trust. From trust we move to curiosity. From curiosity we move to commitment, and from commitment to action.In this episode, Corey and Chris remind us that there is only one discovery call or meeting. And a true discovery call or meeting doesn't have a destination in mind. Welcome to this episode of Market Dominance Guys, "Sales Professionals - stop worrying about the deal."

This is the continuation of the conversation with Donny Crawford about sales follow up, overcoming rejection, and likening sales to Google search results. Thank people for the conversation no matter how it went. This helps keep your emotions in check and allows you to move forward to the next call, even if you were rejected in the previous one. Get some very applicable and practical techniques in this episode of Market Dominance Guys - The Power of the Anti Curse to Overcome Rejection.

 
This is a continuation of the conversation we started the last episode with Mandy Farmer, CEO, Accent Inns. Chris asks Mandy the question of what's next after you have firmly decided that fun is the core of building a great business, and nothing will push me off this. How do you attract and retain the right people who hold these same values? Corey likened the tone of the company to something like the people who make Cards Against Humanity. Even their company contact info on the game sets the tone for their irreverence. They are the same all the way through from the product they make to the people who support it and lead the company. There is a box of awesomeness that is given to each new hire at Accent Inns. They know in a short period of time who is embracing their values and who is faking it. She does the fakers a favor and cuts them loose quickly, out of kindness to them and to her team. She says, "Fire fast, hire slow." Learn more about her success ideas in this episode of Market Dominance Guys, "How to retain the people who want to save men's souls."
If you missed the first part of this interview, please listen here >

Corey Frank and Chris Beall just had the fun privilege of recording a Market Dominance Guys podcast with Mandy Farmer, CEO of Accent Inns on the most important value in her business (and ours also, it turns out) - fun. This is part one of this interview with Mandy. Take a break and enjoy some lightness, as well as considering a new approach to help secure employee retention while growing your bottom line and see why she and her team are thriving in the hospitality industry while her competition is going through massive layoffs.
As soon as the border opens up and we can cross the border, our team will take the ferry north to have fun learning more about the crucial role of fun in business - the best way, by direct experience! Thanks, Mandy, for being our second guest ever, and for sharing the business power of fun with us today. And thanks, Ryan Reisert for introducing me to Natalie Corbett yesterday.
I'm so glad we took the opportunity to have these conversations. Conversations Matter. Fun conversations matter even more! Join us for this episode of Market Dominance Guys.

Corey and Chris talk about when to hire the right people, how to hire the right people, and horror stories. It starts with the tension between talent and alignment. There are three scenarios you don't want to end up with a new hire. You always want people that are talented and aligned, or else you either don't hire them in the first place, or accept this and fire them now. You may have a candidate that is talented and capable. You think talent will take over and they will become alignment. Never happens. Lack of alignment may be due to a fundamental insincerity and sucking out of the company what they can. Yes, I can do that, hey can I have that corner office?
Next, you may run into the candidate that has no talent and no alignment. First, why would you EVER hire that person? If you did - time to fire them. The final is the tougher one. They have alignment, but why only have some of the talents you need, but not enough so they lack performance. They just aren't catching on. Join Chris and Corey for this episode of the Market Dominance Guys: Construct Your Company So It Is Unappealing To Parasites.

In this episode, Chris Beall and Corey Frank continue their conversation with the co-author of Outbound Sales, No Fluff, Ryan Reisert. Chris shares a view that is a bit unpopular but rings true. He states that "This pandemic will civilize our society. This is part of the civilization of our society by which matching the need to the capability of a solution it will be done without lying, tricking, and pushing. It's a big honesty bath that will cleanse a lot of us off." Corey dives into the concept of a repeatable process and leadership vs. luck and leadership. The latter option scales well. For a guide on how to come out of this restructured sales environment with everyone working from home, join Chris, Corey, and Ryan for your tips of the week. This Market Dominance Guys episode is called The Culling of the Non-Professionals.

In this episode, Chris Beall and Corey Frank welcome co-author of Outbound Sales, No Fluff, and Sales Director, Ryan Reisert. In these uncertain times, sales pros are faced with waiting for the dust to settle, then try to regain their market or take this time to learn new skills and technologies.
There is a third option and that is to reframe conversations compassionately, patiently and gain control of your market. For a guide on how to come out of this restructured sales environment with everyone working from home, join Chris, Corey, and Ryan for your tips of the week. This episode is called #WFH Sales Pros - Wait, Learn, or Dominate Your Market.
 

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?”