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.