The triumphs, rewards, and prosperity of the customers he serves is at the heart of everything today’s Market Dominance Guys’ guest does. Meet James Townsend, Vice President of Customer Success and Growth at ConnectAndSell, as he discusses with our host, ConnectAndSell CEO Chris Beall, the different ways that sales has changed in the 10 years since James joined the company. They compare acquiring data on prospects, targeting the right insertion points (aka company insiders), the importance of cold call training, and selling vs. serving customers’ needs. You’ll want to stay tuned to the very end when they talk about what they see as “the next frontier,” on today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Getting to the Right Insider.” About Our Guest James Townsend is Vice President of Customer Success and Growth at ConnectAndSell, a company that pioneered the service of getting prospects on the phone for its customers’ cold callers to talk to. As one of his LinkedIn followers states, “James is a consummate professional with a deep desire to see his clients succeed.” Full episode transcript below: Chris Beall (01:09): Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys. I am not Corey Frank, and I apologize for that. Corey is not available today. But gosh, I think we got something even better. I mean, Corey, you know a thing or two, but we're here with James Townsend. James is ConnectAndSell's Vice President Of Customer Success, master of intensive test drives, guy who makes a bunch of weird stuff work with a bunch of other weird stuff, including human beings. And he's been around this company and this whole business of talking to people in order to move business forward. Really the original market dominance play longer than I have. So welcome James to Market Dominance Guys. James Townsend (01:52): Thank you, Chris. Hi everybody. Chris Beall (01:54): Wow. You sound good, James. So where are you on the face of our blue whirling planet? James Townsend (02:01): I'm in snowy Ottawa, Ontario, Canada right now. Chris Beall (02:06): [inaudible 00:02:06]. That doesn't sound very good. This is April 19th. Is April truly the cruelest month? James Townsend (02:12): It is. It was this morning, I'll tell you that much. Chris Beall (02:14): Wow. Wow. Well, James, you've been around the world of conversation first everything in a bunch of different ways. Could you give us a little background, first of all, just overall career-wise? And then how did you get your leg caught in the bear trap that we call ConnectAndSell? What have you learned along the way that's just kind of obvious to you now that wasn't so obvious back when you first touched this thing? The bear trap we call ConnectAndSell. Well, I got my upbringing in the BPO world, a call-center company called Cytel, which was then bought by Client Logic. And so the boot camp of running massive amounts of inbound sales and customer calls for Dell, our client back in the day. Made the jump to BPL Consulting and then ran into a guy at a grocery store and said, "Hey, we're hiring for an outbound telemarketing manager."Before it was cool to run a sales development team that used to call it outbound telemarketing, back in the day. I jumped on board at Halogen. About a year into my tenure at Halogen, I was lucky enough to cross paths with this sales trainer out of Long Island, who, as we were going through the goal call approach said to me, "You got to check out this product ConnectAndSell. It's like shooting fish in a barrel," he said. And I said, "Well, all right, Uncle Pete, I'll check out this product ConnectAndSell." And the rest is history. We used it very successfully as a customer. I think I was customer number 14 back in the day, back in 2007, 2008. To this day, I still come across folks that we were competitive with back in the day. And they say, "How did that little Canadian company get in every deal?" And there we go. We were this small team of 10 top-of-the-funnel sales development folks covering a whole lot of ground conversationally. About three years in, I was so enamored with ConnectAndSell, I joined the company, I joined the mission. I joined the cause back in October 19th, of 2010, I remembered the day vividly. From there, it's been a fascinating journey helping companies and sales practitioners embrace the power of a conversation-first focus. And along the way, we've learned some stuff about how to make those conversations great. And I think you said it right, Chris, when you said, "If we're going to provide a mechanism to allow sellers to have lots of conversations, we may as well make those good Conversations." And there are things that go into that around how do you target and who do you speak to and cadence and frequencies and targeting and all sorts of fun stuff that play into how do you attack your market in the most fiscally efficient way possible. So I'm in the bear trap on the mission and loving every minute of it. Because, there aren't many products in the market that fundamentally solve a problem. And from everyone I come across in the last 10 years having a sales team that speaks to enough decision-makers on regular basis, like I saw with my team at Halogen. Number one complaint in our town halls was, "I'm just not talking to enough DMs." Number one complaint, month over month at ConnectAndSell was able to in future town halls, after implementation of ConnectAndSell that no longer became a complaint. It was now, how do I make good on all these conversations that I'm having and make them great conversations to generate opportunities for the business? So it's been a fun ride and it continues on. We still learn things every day about how to enable companies and teams around this revolutionary technology. James Townsend (05:41): Well, that's interesting. So you've been with the company since October of 2010. Chris Beall (05:41): 2010. James Townsend (05:44): 2010. Chris Beall (05:46): I joined up in 2011. It's been so long, it's kind of hard to keep track. So you've been much more on the front lines. When I joined up, I was the head of products and there was a lot to do with the technology. There was kind of bringing it to the web. There was making it horizontally scalable. There was performance stuff, efficiency, bringing down some of the internal costs associated with having those hundreds of agents actually navigating phone calls and all that. But you were focused on another end of the problem, which is how to take this obvious increase in firepower and help customers apply it to a business problem. Early on, did you see the problem the way you see it today or what's changed? What's the single biggest thing as you've engaged with the customers who are trying to have more conversations, use those conversations, drive their business forward, and dealing with all the realities of sales at the top of the funnel, which is you bring on reps, it's hard to get them on board. It's hard to get them trained. It's hard to keep them. Targeting is always challenging, all that kinds of stuff. But what's the biggest change between year one and where you are right now? Because now you're helping some of the most dynamic companies in the world really go out and dominate their markets. We do Market Dominance Guys here stuff, right? We talk about it, but you actually go out and kind of, I would say, make it happen with those folks who want to go that route. What's changed that you would say, if you had time traveled forward 10 years and somebody said, "Hey, it's going to be like this." "I don't think so," right? It's "This is going to stay the same." So what's been the biggest change? James Townsend (07:31): Oh gosh. I think the biggest change that I've seen is, I think back to when I was a practitioner using ConnectAndSell with a team, the challenge that our CEO at the time charged us with, this is kind of pre-ConnectAndSell, it's about a year before ConnectAndSell, he said, "Go find me the old fashioned way," right? Calling a switchboard and asking for who the HR director was or who the VP of HR was. Data as a accessibility to data now is much more readily available with data plays out there, we know the big ones. But then it wasn't as readily available. So I think what's changed now is because data is so readily available, and whether we empower a revenue operations team or marketing operations team or a team of sellers to profile a set of companies and profile the people in those companies. I think what we saw ourselves back early the year prior to ConnectAndSell was taking a very pragmatic approach to identifying decision-makers by calling switchboards and asking produced a what at the time we called a master state list of super high-quality targets. Now, fast forward 10 years, do we place that same level of focus and diligence when we're building a query in Zoom info or Apollo or any other or LinkedIn navigator? I would say no. So the big thing that I've seen change is companies needing to rely on inspection and more precisely targeting the people inside of their addressable market, because you can have the best message in the world there. I was talking to a head of sales last week, unnamed company, very large sales training and coaching organization, well known. So he said to me, "James, I just don't understand why my team is not setting as many meetings as they used to." And I said, "Well, messaging aside, because that's a very important piece of the equation, let's look at who they're speaking to." When we took that same approach that we did it back at Halogen, which is inspect at a very precise level, the job titles of the individuals that we intended to reach out to, when we ran that exact exercise with this head of sales, it turned out that 50% or more of who his team had sourced themselves were nowhere in the realm of those that would be even modestly interested in sales training and coaching, period. So I think we've evolved to a place in the market where, because data's so readily available, because search technologies and artificial intelligence and community-driven sourcing and all sorts of different mechanisms and big companies that are providing access to data is at our fingertips today, we've lost sight of the necessity to be very precise about who we intend to sell to. That's to me, the number one biggest. The second biggest change is, I think as companies, we focus too heavily on product training and not enough on problem training, in terms of what our solution is going to provide to the individual that we intend to speak to. And I'm seeing a movement out there with other practitioners and certainly we share that the world of what's in it for them. And Sean McLaren's been telling us that for years, right? "It's not about who you are or what you do or how it works. It's about," and Mike Bosworth said it last week and I go to market games, right? It's about curiosity. It's about the problem. It's not about the product. So, the second thing I've seen out there in the market is a much larger reliance on product, and part of it's because we have divisions called product marketers and we have product trainers and we put our team through intake and onboarding. Not our team at ConnectAndSell, but out in the market. And we train them on the offering. And therefore the first thing that a seller, he or she will talk about is the offering. So those two things, how we build very focus sets of target data and look at our market in a very precise way, and then how we message to that market, I've seen a big amount of drift in those two areas, Chris. Chris Beall (12:12): Well, that's interesting. It's kind of like Gresham's law where bad money drives out good, right? Counterfeit money causes good money to stay in people's pockets, so to speak. We don't think about that much anymore because counterfeiting's not the deal that it used to be. But in a way, so much of the data that we can get so easily now is kind of counterfeit. It's so easy to get, we just load it up. And maybe we're part of the problem with ConnectAndSell in the sense that you load it up and then you can talk to a ton of people, and well, it feels like progress. It's kind of like sending emails, right? Sending emails always feels like progress, right? Because you can look at the numbers and you can get into them. I call it digital business porn, where you're staring at the numbers all the time and feeling good in some way. It's like, wow, look at this. We sent out this and we got this response rate and tweaked this and did this. And it feels like progress. And then you look at the results at the end and they tend to be more haphazard. There is an element of that. And I guess we contribute to it in a sense because we bring an abundance of conversations and so it's kind of easy to go, "Well, I'll just push the button, talk to somebody else and they'll get better." One of the things that I've noted is that we have tended to believe over the lifetime of the company that using ConnectAndSell and talking to a ton of people will cause reps to get better. That is at bets will lead to improved performance. And you and I are both golfers, right? You're a little bit more better of a golfer than I am. But if we both hit a lot of golf balls in our life and hit a fair number of them in competition, and we both know that just going around a golf course over and over standing at a range and beating balls all by ourselves, probably isn't going to make us better. In fact, there's a famous well-known phrase in golf, which is grooving a bad swing. And once you've grooved a bad swing, you actually are using repetition to create variety of outcomes. It's kind of funny when you think about it, right? I repeated that so often that now it's unreliable. It's a thing that can happen in the world of golf. I think we used to think that. We're both wearing these Flight School shirts right now, for anybody who's seeing this on video. And if you're just listening, we're both wearing these white shirts that have a logo on them that shows a airplane kind of coming at you, a military plane. And it's because we have invented something called Flight School here in response to the fact that we noticed that folks don't get better just by talking to a ton of people. It's actually a precision process to make people better in terms of their competence and confidence. So what I'm wondering is, how do these two go together? Like if you were to make the ultimate, let's say you wanted to make account-based that's focused on companies that you want to have as customers sales happen at pace and scale, so you can dominate a market, because that's what Market Dominance Guys is about. It's all account-based, always starts with the list. The list is always intentional. The list is ultimately of people, but it starts as being a list of companies. And then what? Then you need a message that's going to be sufficiently intriguing to cause somebody on curiosity to take a meeting so that you're in a psychological space where they can confess. And when they confess what their truth is about their problems, their challenges, and you figure out there's a reason to move forward, now you're, I'll call it down funnel. You're in the process and kind of, we let go of it at that point. When you think all that coming together, what are the pieces that you think are most often missing? Is it one, the belief that you can't do account-based sales at pace and scale? You have to go like, you get five accounts, James, that's all you can handle. Whereas you know that you might need to 50 accounts with 20 entry points each in a week in order to be able to kind of make sense of that market. So what do you think needs to come together? And what frustrates you when you're working with customers? Because you're really a consultant on their sales business process. What frustrates you, where they just kind of like, they don't get it? Either they don't get what they can do or they don't get what they need to do. And that's a big question, but you wrestle in this mud every day. James Townsend (16:37): Well you just said it, Chris, the list is your strategy. And more often than not the most important piece of the people in the company, I think businesses out there do a pretty darn good job at the companies they're looking to target from a firmagraphic perspective, from an industry sector perspective, from a size number of employees. Now, could there be different ways to look at a set of companies to target based on recent growth, based on hiring signals, based on is that company contracting, is there acquisition? For sure, right? But I think from a, who do we sell to perspective, I would give the customers we work with a B plus, let's say, in terms of targeting the businesses. You just said it in terms of insertion points is when we get to the people. And our tendency is in a world driven traditionally through omnichannel, right? You have a social strategy on one side, you have an email strategy on the other side. You have conversations are still important. A lot of our joint clients that are using technology like Outreach or high-Velocity Sales or Sales Loft, or any of the kind of orchestration plays, because narrowing exposure from how many emails am I sending to a particular enterprise, that there tends to be a tendency to narrow the focus to only one insertion point, maybe two, maybe and a half, maybe two and a half. If you look at a, your question is around, how do you scale an account-based strategy? It's identifying those insertion points very pragmatically, understanding the cold spots, right? And what companies do I need to look for adjunct insertion points. And then the meta-point, Chris, is asking a junior, senior, mid-level irrespective of tenure, but asking a human being, a perfectly rational human being to conceptualize the world in terms of adjunct insertion points and direct insertion points, and taking the time to inspect a set of accounts against those insertion points, it's just not tenable. So that you can certainly scale a strategy providing that the initial groundwork, back to our Flight School, when you're in doing the courses and the ground training, and you understand how to maneuver the airplane around the airport before you're even in the air, that's what we need to be focusing more tightly on is getting really good at the groundworks, so we can and take off on the correct runway. And we are up in the air. We can have some level of precision in terms of getting back to that runway. So you hit a couple of important points, which is number one, the message is for sure important, but doing that groundwork to identify those insertion points, then building a message that is unique to those people, not the company. And that tends to be where we focus a lot of our time and energy, which is how do we as a product improve something for that company. It's not about that company. It's about the insertion points, the people that we've identified to reach out to. And a lot of times we have cold spots in terms of our overall strategy, if we look at it holistically in term, are we're selling ourselves short by targeting too few individuals in that company and oftentimes two senior individuals, right? If we're in at enterprise play, I've seen this recently within the last 12 months where SDR Bob, let's call him, was targeting Apple. And Bob had one supply chain leader at Apple, just one. One lonely supply chain, probably the right person at Apple, very high up in the pecking order. But when you look at Apple holistically, in terms of insertion points, there are hundreds of supply chain leaders, right? So, did somebody do the groundwork to understand how to penetrate Apple from a strategic perspective, from a strategy perspective? No, it was provided to the hands of an individual that said, "This is who my AE really needs to sell to, therefore I'm going to go and talk to that person and that person only." So one lesson to take away from that is, companies get a B plus at targeting the organizations, the accounts, the companies, the entities that they're looking to sell to, I would give a D plus to a D minus on targeting the right insertion points in order to penetrate properly. And learn things about that company about how they sell by having enough conversations and getting signals back that frankly, we're not going to get back from email and social at a rate that we need to in order to map out how that company might buy or who I really need to end up going to speak to. Because, you can't always rely on publicly available information to give you that information that you need in order to sell. Chris Beall (22:18): Well, in fact, I'd say you never can rely on it. You might get lucky. But it's incredibly rare, especially when selling to larger companies to find exactly the right person, especially when you take account timing, right? Everybody's got different projects they're working on, different focus areas. So they're delegated stuff. There's things that are being worked on by committee. There's all sorts of circumstances. I would say companies have become more transparent with regard to who works there and more opaque with regard to what's actually going on inside over the last 10 years. But because what's going on inside these companies is much more, it's more complex. There are more people involved when we're selling systems, especially we're always selling something that ultimately has to integrate into their business, right? This always been true of a all B2B products. But, it's like the difference between selling somebody an electric vehicle that they're going to use in order to say, drive around the parking lot, a golf cart, and an electric vehicle they're going to use to deliver their products to the marketplace. They're very, very different. They might seem kind of similar, but at the job that you're doing for them is very different and different people will be involved in even deciding to take a look. And I love what you said about the conversations with these insertion points. And I think for those who don't kind of get it, an insertion point is just a potential way to get in/ to go from being an outsider, to being an insider, which is the crucial transition that we make, I think not just with companies, but kind of with anybody, right? You got to get in a trust relationship before you're going to start to hear the truth. And we always point out at Market Dominance Guys, the only reliable way to make that happen is to get scheduled conversations. Because in a scheduled conversation, the psychology is such that it's okay for both parties to kind of get real. You have enough time, you've come together voluntarily. Whereas in an ambush call, it's ridiculous to expect the ambushed party to get real. Their reality is pretty obvious. They want to get off this call with their self-image intact. Whereas when they voluntarily show up for a meeting, they'll be a little apprehensive about whether you're going to sell to them or not, but you can dispel that apprehension by your behavior. And then you can get down to the truth. And I think, if I hear you correctly, you're saying that in a sense, the big issue is companies, which being sales leaders will choose for what seems like efficiency, to focus on the buyer, rather than having conversations with, scheduled conversations with enough people to learn what's really going on inside that company. And ultimately to be trusted sufficiently to be led voluntarily, probably to relevant people. It's like when I was working with SAP way back in the day, I just went and hung out in Palo Alto for months and talked to different people. And finally somebody said, "You know what? You need to talk to this guy, Kamal." And next thing I know I'm in a room with the guy who has the problem that we're trying to solve, right? It took a long time, many conversations before somebody said, "Oh, I get it. I get what you really do. And I know this other person is kind of the right person for you to talk to." So when you try to help folks with this, and I know you're not a sales consultant per se, but there's something about being in this conversation business that sort of makes you into a sales consultant, right? Especially with regard to engagement, the sales engagement process, where you're going from utter ignorance, other than data, to at some point into a relationship with somebody where you're working mutually to solve a problem. When you are doing that, what is it that you do? Or is it even anything I know it's not really your job, right? What do you say or do or demonstrate to somebody to help them open their mind, to not reaching out to just one person, but reaching out to 10 or 20 or 30, as their way of succeeding in engagement? Is there a speech you give him or is there like a, you make a list and you try, what do you do to make that happen? James Townsend (26:38): I tell them about Mike, and I won't expose his last name, but Mike, a real gentleman, you just retired from sales. 30-year sales veteran. We're in Vegas, running an intensive test drive of ConnectAndSell and we're eating pizzas over lunch. And I say, "Mike, what do you think?" He goes, "Ah, it was wonderful," he said. I said, "Well, why was it wonderful?" He goes, "I now know how Huntsman buys," he says. I said, "Well, what do you mean?" He goes, well, "I've had the account for four years." He goes, "But I had 22 conversations this morning." So your analogy or your experience, Chris, with SAP and walking around the campus and talking to various folks, Mike accomplished in a morning, right? Because he had 22 conversations. Your question around, how do we get folks to focus on it? We look at the data, right? We look at a parade of, first, we ask the question in a messaging experience around who do you sell to, right? And there's often this debate within senior leadership in this messaging experience, workshop, whatever we want to call it, where they're like, "Oh, well we sell to senior marketers. Well, we actually sell to digital transformation." Okay. Who do you sell to?" And they're having this internal struggle within themselves as to who they actually target? I said, "Well, let's pick one." Right? Maybe it's the VP of digital transformation. We go through this experience of this journey of helping them pull out the poetry of what do you say to this person, right? In terms of what's in it for them. If you were sitting at a bar and you walk into the bar in the back of their jacket, you taught me this, I do a customer profile and they're frustrated about things that you solve for them, yada, yada, yada. You latch onto one of those things and say, "Ooh, I can solve that for you. I believe we discovered a breakthrough with that." We go through this evolution of identifying the top one, two and three individuals that, from a strategy perspective, senior leadership, look at it and say, this is our strategy, right? And when it comes to the mechanics of building the list, we can very easily parade out, okay, well, based on what we've already talked about in the messaging where you, as senior leaders have said, "Yes, this is who we sell to and how we will speak to them. And here's the what's in it for them component. And here's the economic, emotional, and strategic angle about what's in it for them." The whole poetry meets brain surgery, as a wise man once said. We can then connect the dots around, "Okay, well, you said you sell to VPs of digital transformation of those in the digital transformation realm. I'm not seeing those job titles in searching points, job titles represented in what we're intending to put into motion for your salespeople to speak to." So, it's this world of like disconnect, reconnect, right? What you were saying earlier, Chris was interesting, because it's about off-topic a bit, but it's the whole public and private information. What you were finding in SAP was the private information, which wasn't available in public. What Mike found with Huntsman was the private information. And then we say, if you're looking to understand private information about what is happening inside this company, one person or two people may not be providing you coverage or an opportunity to harvest private information signals that are abundant. You may be selling yourself short by running this particular strategy, which is either A, the people you're looking to target have no allegiances to what we about in the messaging exchange, right? So there's a huge disconnect. Or, if there is some familiarity between the strategy and what's being intended to be executed, is that strategy deep enough where you're going to get those conversation signals, right? And again, a lot of times we have traditionally narrowed our focus because you don't want to be that company, not ConnectAndSell, just in general, I'm speaking in general terms, that for lack of a better term carpet bombs six or eight or 12 different decision-makers with email and social inside of a particular enterprise. So we've got this mental model, which is, I will email only one, therefore I should only call one. But the reality is I can still email only one, but why should I not converse with others inside of that potential account, which I need to learn from? Chris Beall (30:51): Well, that's fascinating, because when you think about that, it's like what you said, which I deeply believe is true and overlooked is, your number one job is to learn as an insider, to go inside somehow and get that private information. And you're very unlikely to get that from guessing at who's going to give it to you. I'll go back to my SAP analogy. The person that led me over to my friend Kamal, became a very good friend over time, was not the person who was going to have anything to do with electronic cataloging for B2B e-procurement, which was my business. But they knew from having conversations internally that somebody was bothered by that and was being tasked with it. And wasn't comfortable with the solutions at hand. And now I was a convenient person to make that introduction. That's one kind of private information was the, I'll call it the deep who, right? Not the one that's on the surface. By the way, you couldn't have found this guy Kamal to save your life in public information back then or today. His title meant nothing. And every company, when there was big problems, there's always somebody being assigned to go after the really big problems whose title has nothing to do with that problem, right? Because their specialty is solving big problems, which is a kind of a funny specialty. This person that's kind of like a fixer, you know? If you were to go to do business in a very unfamiliar foreign country to you and you wanted to make your way around, you get a fixer and a fixer takes you all around. And we often need a fixer, but we don't know who it is. And they don't advertise themselves much. But getting that breadth of conversations going so that you could learn how somebody buys or at least get an inkling of it very early. And it's more important how they buy than what problem they're trying to solve. Because if your company provides something of value to that kind of company, then eventually it's going to be on their radar. So now the question is, but how do they buy things? That's actually the number one thing we might want to learn. And I would say, we don't know it. In an account-based sense, if you gave me a hundred targets and you let me wave a magic wand and say, "Fix one gap in my knowledge," it would be, how do they buy? That would be it. And yet we can't find that out without having conversations. So, that's pretty remarkable. So when you do all of this, you try to help people do this, it sounds daunting to me. It's like, oh my God, I got to have a message for each kind of person, right? I'm going to make a list. That's now easy, a list of titles. But, if it took them, like we saw one the other day with a 46-page messaging document, right? I'm not going to say who it was. And it'd been put together a big committee of very senior people. Well, that took a long time. And by the way, I hate to say it, but that message wasn't going to work in a five-sentence ambush conversation either. What is the cycle time from, Hey, okay, here's my ideal customer, the person at this kind of company, in fact, name the company too. From that moment to message good enough to try and have conversations with? What's the cycle time? Is it five days, five years, five weeks, five minutes? What is it? James Townsend (34:17): I think it's under 60 minutes. Chris Beall (34:20): Under 60 minutes. Okay. And how much of that is that specific message and how much of that is just, I'll call it the package? How much is the bullet and how much is the design of the gun? James Townsend (34:30): Well, the design of the gun is more like a three to five-day process. There's different pieces to it, right? There's the concept sell to those reps that need to be executing it and rightfully so, right. Scripting documents are just words on paper, right? If we don't understand the why behind the psychology or the approach or the words or the poetry or how to deliver in the tonality and the inflection and the pace and, where do I reflect that? Where do I reflect that? And all the things that go into any A-list actor picking up a script is not shooting the final cut on day one, right? That takes a little bit of practice and development. And then learning from a leadership perspective, whether the message that was ordained, because you never get a perfect day one, right? You never do. You got to go back and listen and see what the market's telling you about that message. So end-to-end, if you think about what we accomplish in Flight School over a three to four-week period, which is really a series of carefully orchestrated blitz's, that could be compressed into five days if we so chose. But it's really about teaching these reps who are, again, perfectly rational folks, they just haven't, back to your golf analogy, they haven't had the repetitions. We're providing the track van, right? We're able to analyze its angle and its tempo and its swing speed, and ball speed when the club had to impact. What's the angle of the club, all these things that we're able to help the rep with. But until they have the repetitions in, on a very precise piece of, in this case, the golf swing, and in our world, the message, they can't improve. So the overall cycle time from start to getting reliable signals out, you can have it in underneath the five days. The act of building the message is a hypothesis at that time, based on who you're targeting, right? So it's this evolution of things up to being able to go back and inspect the tape and say, was our hypothesis correct? And is the message appealing to that individual in a way that we thought it would? Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn't. And then you just have to iterate from there. Chris Beall (36:36): Yeah. It's fascinating, right? My experience with this is that getting folks to accept that the purpose of the cold call is to build trust and that you win a hundred percent of the time after seven seconds, if you do it correctly, that to me is the hardest part. Because I call this the dog piece of meat and the chain link fence problem. I would say the disease of people in sales that they have a very hard time, no vaccine will keep them from having it is, they want sales results. It seems obvious that they should want sales results and they tend to go right at them. And so instead of backing up and noticing there's a gate 10 feet to right, the dog tries to go through the fence and bloodies its nose. Can't get through the fence most of the time. Can't get to that target most of the time. And the idea of backing up and going, "Huh? Okay." So first of all, is it okay to go to an intermediate place? Well, how about trust? How about trust? Is it okay to go from there if you can, to another place? Well, how about a verbal based on curiosity, a verbal agreement to meet? Is that a new place? The answer is, yeah, it is. It's actually a very profound new place, especially with modern technology. You give me the verbal to meet, "Hey Chris. Sure. Yeah. Whatever." I say, "Hey James, you know I'm a morning person, tell you what, I'll shoot you something for next Thursday. We'll move it around." You're going to say yes, just to get off the call, but I know two things about you; you answer the phone, right?And you said, yes. So if I send you a calendar invite, it's on your calendar- James Townsend (38:13): A hundred percent. Chris Beall (38:14): It's like, I can get my words inside your midbrain by having you answer the phone. And I can an appointment on your calendar by sending you a calendar invite. Now we're down to, is it an appointment you agreed to or not? Well, if you said, yes, you agreed to it. And there we are in a new place, right? I think the cycle time, once somebody understands, that's the goal of the call, get trust. That the gravy on the call is to get the verbal and like the cherry on the top is to get it on the calendar, and the bad ideas to try to qualify it at any point, right? Once they get that new messages, I think per persona are actually pretty straightforward to get them to the point of trying to the hypothesis, right? It could be five minutes to the point of hypothesis. So you basically built a manufacturing facility to make and try messages for different insertion points. And as I listen to you, I think, well, that sounds like magic, right? Let's say I had 50 possible insertion points in a hundred big companies. 50 times a hundred's pretty big number 5,000. Let's say I could talk to with two trained reps, a hundred of those a day. So I talk to a hundred a day and one week I've talked to 500 of them. We have talked to 500 of them. We afford to generate say it's four personas, four messages and use different message on different lists and be good at it. Do I have to be a product expert or do I have to be that person? I don't think so. I think it's in the delivery, right? So, I mean, I think you're describing a mechanism that can be used to win a hundred percent of the time through an ABM approach just by expanding your mind to going in at multiple insertion points and having a purpose of learning instead of forcing somebody to buy from you right now. Is that kind of a summary? James Townsend (40:09): That's exactly right, Chris. Spot on. Chris Beall (40:11): Well, I hope that encourages some people to think that conversation first can be used in an account-based world. I see a lot of skepticism, including in our own company. We'll have reps, our own reps will run into somebody that'll say, "Well, we're account-based. That ConnectAndSell thing, that's mass calling, right?"If you got a hundred targets and 50 insertion points, you have 5,000 people to talk to. What are you going to do about it, right? Interesting. So, as you look forward, we'll wrap up for in a moment, but as you look forward, we've got all the contact data out there. You've got a thing called LinkedIn Sales Insights now, that really, I think lets you understand the companies much, much better than we used to be able to. And you and I are both really impressed with that new offering from LinkedIn. What do you think is next frontier? Or are we there and we're grinding our way across the great Plains so to speak? The next frontier is right under our feet. James Townsend (41:08): I think we're there Chris. I think the world of right rep, right list, right message, I think it is upon us. The market needs to continue to, I think the market's moving in the right direction. And part of it, I give a lot of credit to the ABM strategy that leverages an orchestration play like an outreach in the SalesLoft because it takes us back to the days, to my early days of, be very selective about based on information that was available to you. And back in my early days, it was based on information from asking a switchboard operator who the director of human resources was, or who the individual to handle talent management. Where we're moving into the, as more teams rely heavily on this world of orchestration, by very nature they're becoming more precise about the individuals they target. And that's really what we mean by account base. Be precise about who you target. And let's be serious, we wouldn't put call steps in those sequences and cadences if we didn't think conversations were important. Therefore if we can message correctly to those very precisely selected personas that are placed in these sequences and have more of those conversations faster, you don't need to boil the ocean. You just need to have the conversation. So I think the market's moving in a very interesting direction, more towards a level of precision, not towards a, let's just call everybody and anyone and let's hope for the best. And the exciting things that you and I are seeing out of sales insights in order to prioritize companies that are growing in particular roles, sales roles or otherwise, looking at companies that are really growing from expansion, not contracting. I think the market's getting a lot smarter about how to use big data and signals in order to like zero in on areas to target. And I give a lot of credit to teams out there that are running account-based because it just means you're inspecting who's going in. Therefore the conversations that you're having with those individuals should be more fruitful. You're just not having enough conversations such as where we come in, right? So I think the market's moving in a very interesting direction. We're perfectly poised to help in that world in a number of different ways. And I'm excited about what the future has to hold. Chris Beall (43:26): Fantastic. Well, I'm excited about continuing to help customers working with you or at least have you help them. Every once in a while I just go in and annoy them, which is a lot of fun also. So I'm going to wrap this up. James, if somebody wants to learn from you, maybe they want to do a ConnectAndSell test drive, maybe they want to learn how somebody who's an actual practitioner would end up on your side of the ledger, so to speak, where you're heading up customer success and helping people, or they just want to learn some stuff about customer success, how do a hold of you? James Townsend (43:57): Oh, probably your best bet is to reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'm available on LinkedIn. It's linkedin.com/in/jamestownsend. That's T--W-N-S-E-N-D hyphen cas. Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn, send me a direct message. I'll follow up with account only LinkedIn. I'm always happy to spend the time either talking about customer success as an evolving profession out there in the world of small, medium and large business to business. It's actually interesting Chris, you and I saw it on LinkedIn sales insights today in medium-size companies, one of the top three highest sought after highest growth jobs, most listed jobs was number three, was CS, next to information technology and others. So I'm always happy to talk to folks about CS, and I'm always happy to talk about ConnectAndSell because I've been around this machine, this weapon for the better part of my adult life, because my wife doesn't consider my twenties to be my adult life. And I'm always happy to talk about the wonders of ConnectAndSell and conversation first and what makes it special. And also the challenges and how to wire this crazy thing into your go-to-market strategy without breaking stuff. That's important. Chris Beall (45:11): I love it. I love it. Well, you're really good at helping folks avoid amplifying suck, which has always been my big concern. So maybe sometime in the golf course, you can help me not amplify suck. Although I have a feeling your interest run in a different direction at that point. We'll wrap this up for Corey Frank, who just couldn't be here today. We'll apologize to Corey. I'm sure he would've asked better questions than I did, and he's a lot more fun to talk with. Plus he dresses so well. But, I kind of like our Flight School shirts today. I think we- James Townsend (45:40): Next time we'll do the top button up. There you go. Chris Beall (45:42): Yeah. We got to go all the way- James Townsend (45:42): All the way, right? Yeah. All the way is really smart. Chris Beall (45:47): So James, thanks so much for being on, and I think folks are going to get a lot out of this episode, market dominance in an account-based world at pace and scale led with conversations. Sounds unbeatable. Thank you. James Townsend (46:00): You're welcome. Thanks. Thanks everybody.

Does the thought of placing a cold call make you tense, nervous, embarrassed, or tongue-tied? Today’s Market Dominance Guys’ guest, Gavin Tice, a sales instructor for ConnectAndSell’s Flight School, says not to worry about this awkwardness. He even says it’s an okay place to start. What a relief, huh? Our hosts, Corey Frank and Chris Beall, talk with Gavin today about how a standard operating procedure — in this case, a tried-and-true cold call script and method of delivery — can turn that frown upside down. What Gavin teaches is how to have a lot of fun and success making cold calls. Yes, you heard right: FUN! What a great reason to listen in while this Conductor of Conversations and our podcast hosts discuss the ways that SOPs, social work, psychology, and introversion positively impact the cold-calling experience in today’s Market Dominance Guy’s topic, “How to Turn Awkwardness into Success.”   About Our Guest Gavin Tice is a Flight School instructor for ConnectAndSell. His background in the military and as a social worker have bestowed on him the perfect mix of skills needed to be a member of ConnectAndSell’s conversation optimization team, as he helps his Flight School students make success-building changes to their cold-calling delivery. A former team member of Gavin’s gives him this accolade: “Gavin’s depth of experience with sales and relationship building is like nothing I've encountered before. He brings his all to the table, every time.” Full episode transcript below: Corey Frank (01:22): Welcome to another episode of The Market Dominance Guys. This is Corey Frank with the saint of sales, the prophet of profit, and the duke of dials, Chris Beall. I added the duke of dials. That's the new one there, Chris. I don't know if you agree. Chris Beall (01:33): I am excited. I'm excited. I've always wanted to be the duke of something, and not just putting up your dukes, so I'm quite happy. Corey Frank (01:39): Well, speaking of somebody who is an expert at putting up his dukes, we have a very special guest here. We have Gavin Tice. Gavin, a Marine Corps veteran, social work veteran, and now esteemed head instructor, pilot instructor of the Flight School. What do we call Gavin over there in the ConnectAndSell Flight School, Chris? Chris Beall (01:58): Well, he is a Flight School instructor. He's also a member of our Conversation Optimization team, and that's a lot of syllables, but it's what it's all about. It's like the fight is inside the conversation. Let's optimize that sucker. Corey Frank (02:11): Anyway, welcome, Gavin to the Market Dominance Guys. It's good to finally have you on this side of the camera. Gavin Tice (02:16): Yeah, and so this is nice. Corey Frank (02:18): As Chris knows, I would just sit in an empty room and just listen to him wax eloquently about all the topics that we have here. So what we want to talk about today on this particular episode of the podcast is the Flight School and I'm fascinated because as Chris came up with, maybe you can get our listeners up to speed on how the Flight School came about. Since it's been a little bit since we heard that origin story and how you met Gavin and why he's such a good, perfect person to lead some of the efforts and what are some of the special qualities that Gavin has that makes it so successful? Chris Beall (02:54): Oh, interesting question. Well, Flight School came about because we were trying to help a company out that had run into some problems and they'd asked whether they could have a special deal and we don't do special deals at ConnectAndSell. But I came up with a special deal, which is a month of Monday and Friday unlimited use for the team. And then, we realized that the best way to do that, that's four Mondays and four Fridays, was to train like crazy on Friday, but to train live so they're actually getting meetings. And then to sort of let them run on Monday, but with coaching and then go to the next part of the conversation and train that. So, we said let's train on the first seven seconds of the conversation the first Friday, and then on Monday, we'll listen carefully for that stuff and do some coaching around it, but let them settle in. And I figured there were a couple nights of sleep in there and you don't really learn when you're awake. You only learn when you're asleep. So just came up with this idea. And after about the third week, we were flying back from wherever this was and a couple of us on the airplane said this is funny, the first session's like taking the airplane off and the second one's going somewhere, and the third one is we actually changed the order. We said the third ones like landing and the fourth one is handling the objections. Turbulence made no sense. Once you're on the ground, there is no turbulence. So we reordered the Flight School so that it's take off the first seven seconds. And then there is going somewhere, free flight, which is what we call the 27 seconds. And then, handling all the objections that are peculiar to flying, peculiar to the cold call in the third session, which is turbulence. And then you got to ask for the meeting, you got to get the plane back on the ground. That's how it came about. And it's evolved a little bit, maybe even a fair amount, but it's still the same idea. We added a messaging workshop on the front. We added what we call sort of an icebreaker session. I think of it as deicing. You know, make sure the wings aren't ladened down with ice, so that everybody will be warmed up and used to the product. What is shocking to me is I've had the luxury now of watching teams go through other kinds of sales training. But I watch from the back through ConnectAndSell numbers and I've never seen anything move the number, including, I won't say who it was, but who I consider the number one sales trainer in the world. I got to see a team, a big team, go through that training. And I looked for the change the next day, the next day, the next day. And there was nothing, in performance. Flight School, a hundred percent of the time changes performance because you're performing under pressure, actual conversations with real-life prospects. You're doing it at pace, ConnectAndSell speed and you're doing it with precision coaching of just the part of the conversation that gets you to the next part of the conversation. Gavin Tice (05:49): That's right. Chris Beall (05:49): So it's very different. And Gavin was, like so many people at ConnectAndSell introduced by somebody else who said to me 350,000 times in a row, you've got to get this guy on the team. He's like another, you know? And so the question is, was he another Donny or another Nathan? I don't know. He was another one of them. And it turns out he is, but he brings his own very, very special point of view from his experience, which is unlike anybody else on the team. Corey Frank (06:20): Let's talk about that experience, Gavin. So starting in the Marine Corps, is there an MOS for cold calling in the Marine Corps, by the way? I don't know. What is that? Gavin Tice (06:26): Oh, for sure. For sure. It'd be 0351A, yeah. So definitely an infantry level job, for sure. Corey Frank (06:34): Gotcha. And so one of the things that Chris and I were talking about before we hit record here was the unique experience you bring from your service in the Marine Corps and has that helped you train your voice at all? Especially, since you're coaching folks and we're being on tonality in The Market Dominance Guys, as you've heard and nurturing and verbal disfluencies and the ahs and the ums, all that richness that builds trust and authenticity. What's your experience like in the Marine Corps? And what type of voice training do they give you that helped your sales career? Gavin Tice (07:09): Hmm, I think it's just being able to... Well, I'll take a step back. Drill instructors go through a school. I'm not a drill instructor, but they actually learn how to project their voices because they've got to sound very angry, but consistent. And it's funny, if you happen to drive past Marine Corps, Parris Island, you'll see the drill instructors literally yelling at trees. I kid you not. They've got their knife hand out and they're yelling at the trees like they would be recruits. I think what helped me to find my voice is, in the Marine Corps you get challenged all the time and all of a sudden someone says, "Hey, you've got to show the colonels that are here on tour how to do this job." And you have to act, even if you're completely dumbfounded about what you're trying to do. If I had to show someone how to take down a weapon or explain to them the operating range from my old rocket launcher, a Mk 153 small, you don't have time to think and you've got to talk with respect and you can't be afraid. So that, I think, was a great situation for me, because I've never had a fear of talking to a CEO or a founder or a president of the company. A couple years after that, my boss in the Navy was directly an Admiral. Once again, you can't go talk to an Admiral and waste a lot of their time with a lot of flowery language, you really got to get down to the brass tacks. So if I had to really pull that training from there, that's what it would be. Corey Frank (08:40): That's wonderful. Fascinating little bit about the drill instructors. So that's a course on how to project their voice. Different session if the trees ever talk back. But if they were able to glean anything from how to project your voice or how to convey authority, especially as a new recruit, did they teach you how to respond and answer in a certain tonality? Gavin Tice (09:00): It would be I, Sir at all times. And the funny thing is they take away your personalization. So the entire time, if you're an enlisted Marine and you go through the 13 weeks of Marine Corps training, you never hear your first name, it's "Recruit (last name)". So it's really awkward when you finally leave that place when someone calls you by your first name again, because you're like, I haven't heard that in months, but I mean we have to be- Corey Frank (09:29): It's kind of like being married, right? You never hear your first name. Gavin Tice (09:31): You have to be able to communicate on the battlefield, too, right? I mean, not everyone understands that that's actually something that's reality. And whether or not you're wearing ear protection or not, you have to be able to project your voice. So I guess it's just something you learn. I never really thought of it as being something that was special to that experience. Corey Frank (09:54): Got it. Chris Beall (09:54): Well, it's interesting. I just had two recent experiences that made me think of it. That's why I brought it up with Corey. So one experience is I'm currently listening to General McChrystal's book Risk, which I think is excellent. Actually it's very interesting, too, and I'm listening to it becase I love to listen to his voice. And so it's become my workout thing, my driving around thing and so forth. And then, I was on a recent podcast called Bulletproof Sales and I'm on with the guy, who's a Marine. And I thought, wait a minute, there're real similarities in speech and the clarity and the simplicity, the directness of both of these people and one of them is reading his own book. So that means it's been through a process. The other is simply talking to me. Now he's written a book, so he's got a lot of language that's refined around that. But there was something about it that gave me the impression that, and maybe this goes to something else that we were talking about recently. It's entirely possible that what's happened in the military where clarity of communication and then understanding a mission and execution of mission. You're expected to understand and execute the mission, so somebody has to communicate it to you clearly. You're not simply following orders. That's like the big change from way back when to now is I believe, as I listen to people, I not in the military myself, but as I listen, it's like a big change is that there's a relatively greater emphasis on acting intelligently and appropriately within the mission rather than simply doing what you're told. On the battlefield, especially. And that confers competitive advantage to our military, because they're more flexible. You have to deal with each Marine or each soldier or whatever as the enemy, is you have to deal with a smart person who's trying to do something and they know what they're trying to do. And that could be a problem for you as somebody following orders, you might be able to counter that a little bit more easily. And I have this funny feeling that our society of business people actually is learning to execute more like our all-volunteer military. And now that we have work from home everywhere and everybody's a volunteer, you can't lock them down and say, you live here. Therefore, you now have to work for BigCo in this area. It's like they can go work for anybody. Chris Beall (13:17): That we have a lot to learn from the folks who went through the first big, all volunteer revolution, which is the U.S. Military. I don't know. Does that make a lick of sense to you, Gavin? Gavin Tice (13:27): You're touching on one thing which is SOPs, right? Standard operating procedures. Everyone wants to do their own thing, but as you begin to grow, you can't be herding cats all the time, much less how do you benchmark? So the military's built up on standard operating procedures. I can't speak to the other branches, but in the Marines, it's all about small-unit leadership. And there's always a line of succession. Every mission that you go out on, there's a five-paragraph order and the colonel knows it, the captain knows it, the lieutenants know it, staff sergeants know it, all the way down to the private. Because things happen in war and if the line of leadership is taken out, that guy to their left or right must know the objectives, how things are going to happen, where the fire teams are moving, what the codes and signals are. And we use a lot of acronyms. That one's called OSMEAC. So it's orientation, situation, mission execution, and admin logistics and command. And you learn this from pretty much day one in bootcamp. And we have to constantly, everyone knows the operational orders. I mean we've seen, probably since all the way back to the war of 1812, the best military organizations in the world empower even their youngest soldiers on a battlefield. If there's a standard line of only the senior-level people only know what's really going on, within reason if the younger recruits or the people on the lower ranks don't know that, it falls apart as soon as those leaders get targeted and dealt with. That's really one of the things that is pivotal in our American military. Chris Beall (15:11): Fascinating. Corey Frank (15:12): We were talking a little earlier too, Gavin, with regards to that, about the social work background that you have and it seems a little bit of a dichotomy here going from the Marine Corps knowing crystal clear what your objective is, very refined, right? Very left-brained. And now you're on the social work side, which is a little bit more of the connection, authenticity, trust side. So you have this kind of amalgam. This nice cocktail or so. Let's talk about the other side of the brain. We talked about the brawns. Now let's talk about the heart, then maybe we'll talk about the brains. That's Chris' part of the show. Gavin Tice (15:47): Yeah. It's interesting. Social work looks at everything from a holistic perspective. And if you really translate that, my earliest sales interviews were like how does a social worker turn into a sales guy? And I'm like, well, it's really enterprise sales. And the first time someone said, you've been in sales all this time. I said, how so? They said, tell me about your patients. And I said, well, I meet with the patient. They have a problem that they think they have. I asked them some pretty deep questions. I get a better picture of where they're at. I offer them some solutions and then guess what? I try to close the deal. Maybe it's medication, maybe it's group therapy, maybe it's one-on-one and then guess what? Follow up happens. And when they put that into this nice package, I was like, oh, so I guess I have been in sales. I just didn't call it that. And so I find it very interesting that my degrees in psychology and social work really helped me see sales in a different light. Chris Beall (16:44): Sure. Huh. Corey Frank (16:45): Chris, we've talked a lot about this program even recently with Jennifer, I believe, about introverts. How introverts make the best Salesforce. Would you consider yourself an introvert, Gavin? Gavin Tice (16:54): I guess that's one of the roles I play. I put on a lot of different roles in my day- to-day. I'm an introvert when I'm by myself. I'm a father, a husband, a conductor of conversations, as I call myself on LinkedIn, to keep the people from trying to prospect me all the time, because they don't know what to say to me. But, yeah, introvert's definitely a role I play, for sure. Corey Frank (17:17): And so, as you are coaching your clients in the Flight School, your clients, your patients, what's the right term for your folks, your passengers? Is that a right term? Gavin Tice (17:24): Yeah, passengers. Victims. Corey Frank (17:25): Yeah. What are some of the things... We always like to ask a lot of our guests this, Gavin, from your purview, from your perspective as piloting this thing and they've got a tremendous amount of trust that you're going to not crash the plane here for them and you're going to leave them better than how you found them. What is the state of sales today, from your perspective and maybe how it's changed a little bit in the last few years from when you first started? Gavin Tice (17:51): Well, outside of the technology advancements, here's what I think is interesting. Flight school is all about execution. You go through a lot of sales training, you go to workshops and seminars. It's a lot of inspiration. It's a lot of how-to, it's a lot of motivation and that's great. But the minute you get to the car, click out of the zoom, it's over, right? It's up to you to really decide if you're going to take all those things and put any of it to use. I tell people now, I said, look, knowing one's line in your industry or vertical, willing to sit here and make cold calls with me. So I congratulate you, because there's not a big line for it. But what I think is more profitable is what we're doing is we're teaching execution. We're allowing and telling people, hey, you're going to fail. Probably the first time in your career that you've been told, it's okay to fail. But if you follow what we have, if you take our direction and you execute, you're actually going to have a lot of fun making your cold calls today. And it's a beautiful thing. Corey Frank (18:55): And when you say you're going to have a lot of fun making your cold calls today, do they believe you? Gavin Tice (19:01): You get some interesting looks because, especially if it's day one, they're like, you're going to have me say this weird 27 second thing. And I don't know, every time I have made cold calls, people just get angry with me. But again we have a lot of information to provide like, hey, follow our direction and just execute. And then I'm on the back end of things. Hey, that was really good. A lot of people need nurturing, right? If you don't nurture people around you and you're just kind constantly telling them all the doom and gloom, it doesn't go so well. So I think one of the key things that's changed in sales is now people are starting to really empower their teams and to give them a lot of positive strokes. Corey Frank (19:45): What is the state, on that same theme of sales, where you see folks really struggling with today and that, because you see so many, the beautiful thing about certainly what you do at ConnectAndSell, and we do here at Branch 49 is we're pretty business agnostic. Wouldn't you say Chris? Business is business. It really doesn't matter. You really are able to condense it down to people talking to people. Biophysiology, right? All of things that we learned from the Orens and the Chris Bealls of the world and Chris Vosses of the world. So, with that then, Gavin, knowing that you have this special purview where, whether they're selling insurance or plane tickets or cyber technology, it's B2B sales. What are people being taught or what are people doing that they should almost immediately stop doing? And once you pointed out to them, they never do it again. But the habits you learned in bootcamp that you've never done it again because you learned it the right way. Gavin Tice (20:45): Well, the first thing I'd say is stop committing hate crimes, which means how are you today? Right. It just signals to everyone, junior person in sales, probably their first job. And this conversation's going nowhere and you get the immediate, yeah, I'm not interested. All said. I think the other part is the showing up and throwing up. Who wants to be told, hey, all the time that you spent in your previous initiatives, the money, all the personnel that got detailed from procurement all the way on up, hey, you've been doing it all wrong. And by the way, I've worked with all these great companies and we saved them all stuff. And wouldn't you like to be in the same place? It's really like saying, hey, you know what? Corey, your baby's ugly. And I'm here to go ahead and put some lipstick on it and make it a prettier baby. And when you attack people's intelligence like that, because in some cases, a lot of people put their career, their respect within their companies, and it's like Chris's Tesla model, right? If you buy a Tesla for yourself, it's not such a big deal. Go get rid of it. But if you buy a fleet of them for the company and then you find out, oh, you've been doing it all wrong and you should have bought some Toyota Camrys. Like, man, that just beats people down. And who wants to have that in a cold conversation happen, right? Yeah. Corey Frank (22:14): Yeah. Chris, from your perspective, what we heard from Gavin here, if I only had time for a 10-minute Flight School, right? You know how you take those helicopter tours across the Grand Canyon, you could do that full hour or we only have a couple hundred dollars and your kid wants to go. I only have 10 minutes. What's the... So if I only had a 10 minute flight school, just to circle around the Grand Canyon and land, what should I learn? Chris Beall (22:38): This is actually what this whole Market Dominance Guys thesis is about, is that in seven seconds you can get trust a hundred percent of the time and that trust is durable. So if you don't blow it by doing something stupid, like trying to sell to this person later, then you get to keep their trust forever. And trust is true competitive advantage in a world where the buyer is naturally conservative and afraid of making a mistake, because it is their reputation. It's their kid's college education. It's a lot of stuff that's on the line. And so the question is, well, how do you get started? The funny thing about Flight School, and it would be like an airplane, right? Most important thing is to be able to land it. But if it never gets up in the air, you're not going to have an opportunity to land it. So you got to get the damned thing off the runway. You've got to get it up the air, you've got to get it committing an unnatural act. The first time you ever see an airplane jump off the ground, so to speak, you should be surprised because there's nothing you can see that's making it float, right? It's not like a balloon full of helium or something like that. It's like something's going on there and that something that's going on there is magically making this thing fly. Well, if you want to learn to fly airplanes, you got to figure out how to make that thing happen. That's the first seven seconds of the conversation. Once you're in the air, everything changes. Now, you actually have a lot of freedom. If you don't just like drive the thing into the ground or there's not very many other airplanes up there to hit, you have a lot of freedom. So if I had a 10-minute flight school, I would do one thing with somebody and it would be to teach them the importance of, and then have them execute, on the first seven seconds. And the first seven seconds have exactly two components. One, tactical empathy, help them see or understand that you see the world through their eyes and believe that. And the other is the other element of trust, which is proving to this person or at least demonstrating your competent to solve a problem they have right now. And what I find is the big flip for folks is when they realize they're in charge, that you as the sales rep are completely in charge and in control, as soon as you recognize that you are the problem. It's when you try to divert away from the real problem, which is you, that you immediately blow the trust. As soon as you attempt to pivot to value. You're actually saying I'm not the problem, but if you are the problem and you're saying you're not the problem, you're covering up. You're lying. Right? So why should you be trusted? So if you change the goal, like if I were to take everybody at cold calls, everybody at cold calls and ask them, what's the goal? Well, the goal is going to be to get a meeting. Well, the goal is going to be to have a conversation that leads to a deal. The goal is my commission. That's actually the secret goal, right? The whole Market Dominance Guys' concept says that's incorrect. First of all, the achievement rate is too low, sub 5%. And secondly, the impact act is too small. You can have a higher impact on the marketplace. If you think of it as a marketplace, say what's my impact on the marketplace. It's going to be, if I can pave this entire market with trust before my opponent makes the first move on their chess board. So I get to make 64 moves and then they get to make one, all of my moves improve my position in the market relative to the trust that folks have in me. And it's always a person, not a company, then I'm going to win in the long run. And the long run's going to be shorter and shorter and shorter because I can harvest that trust through future conversations that explore possibilities. So I would teach that one thing. It's like you only have seven seconds to get trust. The good news is, it's easy. Let's learn how to do it a hundred percent of the time and then get over this thing. Oh, I failed because I didn't get the meeting. That's gravy. We'll teach you later once you know how to get trust a hundred percent of the time. So now you're winning. Now we'll teach you how to harvest a little sooner and we'll teach you things like the Cherryl Turner Insistence Close, and we'll teach you the nature of the math of the no-show and all that other good stuff. But man, until you can execute. It's like if you asked me, what would you do if you only had 10 minutes to teach somebody how to swing a golf club, it would actually be a very specific thing. I'd put them in a situation where they couldn't make the mistake everybody makes, so that they can learn that it's possible for this damned thing to work. If they're right-handed, I'd take their left hand off the club. Because they're too weak or not physically strong enough to keep the club from releasing, which is the key to the golf swing, if they only have the right hand. It feels funny, but the thing that feels funny suddenly works. And then they have the confidence to pursue the rest of a program of having a real golf swing instead of the fake baloney that most people have. Corey Frank (27:42): You know, I think that could be the fetching Miss Fanucci, the title of her book again, for those that were part of the first part of the call is what, Chris? Chris Beall (27:50): It's Love Your Team: A Survival Guide For Sales Managers In A Hybrid World. And her point is simple. The leverage point in performance and sales is the highest performance art that we do, that's in the main line of business, right? It's right in the line of business, you have to go through a value chain that includes sales to get anything to happen. Whether in the innovation economy or not, you're stuck, you're on one side of a performance and on the other side is a relationship that's trying to explore is there something here to do together, then you've got to go through sales. So that's about a person. Yeah. And now the question is how does that person feel? Before they can play the game of sales, how do they feel about who they're playing it with? And until you get there... My guess is we see this now in military engagement that's going on somewhere in the world, right over in Ukraine. And the question is how much do these people believe in what they're doing, the ones who are defending and the ones who are invading? And the ones who are defending, they believe a lot. Right? And they love their team. They love each other. They're stuck with it, right? How do you get there in the world of managing a sales team? That's what Helen's on about. And I'm telling you, I think that's the true leverage point, is that the leverage point in sales is frankly, the belief that the team has that you have their back. Corey Frank (29:20): Well, I was just comparing the title of Ms. Fanucci there, her title of her book versus I think the title of your book beyond The Market Dominance Guys is I believe the quote says "the thing that feels funny suddenly works". So that's actually not a bad name for the book. What do you think, Gavin? The thing that feels funny suddenly works. It has a nice ring to it. Gavin Tice (29:41): Turn. I would call it this, turning awkwardness into trust. Corey Frank (29:45): Turning awkwardness into trust. Gavin Tice (29:46): Because that's really it. And it's funny because the awkwardness is on both sides. Awkwardness doesn't have to turn into hostility. Awkwardness is a great platform for getting to trust. It's the best platform for getting to trust. Corey Frank (29:59): I did an interview earlier today with a candidate and she is a... I'm not going to say which state, but she is a former Miss East Coast State, about two years out of school. And she had a wonderful, wonderful voice. Gavin, you have a wonderful voice. We talk about a number of folks on this podcast that certain folks have an almost raspiness that just you trust immediately. And this gal has a wonderful, wonderful voice. And I had her read the screenplay, right? And we're big believers here at Branch 49 of the 27 seconds. We are fierce defenders in all things social, as you know Chris. The folks who maybe don't understand the power of the 27 seconds because they're seeing it as merely its words versus the performance art that it entails. And she said so and so and so, so I know I'm an interruption. I was like, respectfully, Mackenzie. We talked about a little bit about the world of haptics, [inaudible 00:30:59] no programming, right? Everybody has the aunt that reaches out and grabs your hand. They touched your knee. If you have glasses, what's the prop, right? Have you pull off the glasses. And for, as Chris has taught, "I know I'm an interruption." Is almost as if you have to do this with your hand. I'm Sicilian, so I have to talk with my hands. It's the law, right? But if you say, I know I'm an interruption. So when you walk the floor of Branch 49, you see constantly one arm is bigger than another for these folks. Cause they're saying, I know I'm an interruption and that's that timing buffer crutch, if you will, Chris. Right? That helps them accentuate that piece that sometimes is missing. What you're talking about if I can only teach 10 minute Flight School, how do I establish that trust? And then hang onto it for your life so I don't lose it. Chris Beall (31:49): Well, Gavin, you teach this stuff. When you're teaching the takeoff part of flight school, that first two hours, how do you know that somebody has clipped, that they flipped over to believing that awkwardness works? You know, that it's an okay foundation. That it's a good place to start from. Cause we know naturally we think it's a bad place to start from. And we've been told our entire child lives and it continues a little less into our adult lives, don't be the bad thing, right? That's what we've been taught. I've been around some babies recently. And even when they're two months old, one month old, we're already telling them not to be the bad thing. And we do it reflexively as parents and then teachers. And then we get to a certain age and sometimes the police have a chat with us. And some authority figure's always telling us not to be a bad thing. Nobody is ever telling us to be a bad thing, but we can't go back through our whole life. Oh thank goodness. Ms. McGillicuddy took me aside and said, I want you to be bad. And yet in the cold call, we are a bad thing. Where did that happen? How do you know that they just got comfortable with the discomfort of the awkwardness and that they are now seeing it as power. Gavin Tice (33:10): I think we all tell them immediately, look, your first five calls are going to be garbage. Just accept that. After that, you're going to see something happen. Depending on, of course, the lists, it happens without fail. They're all right, I'm going to try this whole 27 second thing. And you're listening. And the first couple ones are garbage, but they see... Like people say 27 seconds. Okay. Yesterday I had a fun experience where they were calling some data scientists and they go 27 seconds. It's very specific. Let's go. You must have something really interesting to say. And I was like, wow. Out of probably thousands of conversations, I've never heard anyone say that before. And it happened several times yesterday. So it's interesting. If I could see them physically, I can hear them and you can hear the timbre in their voice change. Once they've had a couple people that didn't slam the phone on them or tell them they're a bad person. Collectively, it's usually like 27 seconds. Sure. And then hopefully you don't pause too long and then they actually go into what they're it's supposed to be doing. But you see very quickly the timbre in their voices change and then about, mm, conversation 15, they're delivering the 27 seconds very eloquently because they know it's going to work. So it's all about the timbre and modulation in their voice. And it's like magic. It happens all time. Chris Beall (34:41): Isn't that funny? And yet what I see out there in the world of sales training a lot is an introspective approach that says, look inside yourself and try to improve by noting your fear and then making it irrelevant or some such thing like that. But you're actually taking people on the opposite journey, which is go ahead and just do it. And then the feedback you're going to get is going to include surprisingly positive things that you didn't expect. It's like the unexpected is the positive thing. And then the reinforcement begins there. Do you latch onto those? When they get that first positive one, is that where you go, listen, what'd you think about that? He said in 27 seconds, that's really precise. Sure. You must have something like what'd you think about that? And what do you do with the first positive? Gavin Tice (35:35): The first positive, if I catch it, obviously depending on the size of the team my immediate is, how'd that feel? They go, it felt good. I can't believe it. I'm astonished. I think what's even more powerful is once they're actually into free flight and they go through this breakthrough, that seems very clunky and like, no one's going to buy this, no way. And then they have what I call the rollover, which is they deliver that breakthrough. It usually doesn't sound so great. They say, do you happen to have your calendar available? And the person says, yeah, I've got time next Tuesday. Not the rep asking for that time, the person. And then you hear them pause. And it's almost like did they really just say they'll take the meeting? Was it that easy? And then I hop on immediately afterwards. I'm like, now do you believe me? And they go, oh my gosh, that was ridiculous. And they're like, they accepted already. And I'm like, of course they did. You grew, you got attention, you got their trust. And then you delivered something that made them very curious. And so that's like the magical moment, I'd really say Chris Beall (36:47): There's an interesting thing about curiosity that I just thought of. I've been speaking with some people recently about individuals, about their own sort of branding about becoming somebody interesting. And if you think about personal branding in professional personal branding or personal personal branding, it's about becoming somebody interesting to some subset of the world. So flip it around and say, well, that means some subset of the world is now curious about you. And what you just described is somebody experiencing having their brand change to the point where somebody else is interested in them, is curious about them, and they might have felt before that, that they weren't worth having somebody be curious about them. So you've inverted a notion of find self-worth by being told you're worth something by me, the instructor or the helper or the social worker, to find self-worth by the reaction of somebody else who's interested enough in you to say, yeah, I'll meet with you. If there's some of the magic hiding in that inversion, I'll call it a reversal of the usual way we think about this. Gavin Tice (38:10): I'd say a hundred percent because the typical situation is anything but. I call up a complete stranger, I show up and throw up all over them, and then they go, yeah, I'm not interested. And then all of a sudden you take this thing that's really weird and a breakthrough. I don't have a breakthrough. What do you mean we discovered? And then they put it all together. And I always tell, look, about one out of every, I don't know, hundred, this isn't going to happen. And so you have to be ready for it. And I prompt them and then it happens. And I think it's magic because they're like a complete stranger just took what I said and it was interesting enough and curious enough that they've taken this with me and I think it goes down to your self-worth. For sure. Because now they know it works. Chris Beall (38:54): Isn't that funny. I never really thought of Flight School as a self-improvement program about your feelings about yourself. But I do actually believe that in the general case, and Corey and I have talked about this with regard to Branch 49. We call Branch 49 finishing school for future CEOs. Because one thing all CEOs have, at least all the ones I know, is not only the ability to have a conversation with a stranger, but the confidence that that conversation's probably of some value to that stranger. It's okay for me to be interesting. I don't have to hide my light under that bushel. It's all right. I can peek it out a little bit, but I don't know, Corey, what do you think about this? Corey Frank (39:38): You know, the same candidate from today she's been in pageantry since she was a little girl and part of the... It was fascinating and a world I know nothing about clearly. Look at me, I know nothing about pageantry. Gavin Tice (39:54): Oh, you're beautiful Corey. Come on. Corey Frank (39:55): So there's the extemporaneous where there's a Q and A portion. How would you solve the world? How would you solve the UK crisis? How do you figure? Right. And a lot of it is just the extemporaneous. How can you think on your feet? And are you interesting? Do you have a beginning, middle, end, and all that stuff. And we talked about after we role-played, because she said, I'm sorry, I'm normally very good at this. Right? But I said, understand the nuances you are used to communicating with no... It's like a hook without a barb. I can communicate, put out information that I think is fascinating. The audience isn't going to rate you. Right? The judges are, but the audience isn't, and you're speaking to the audience, you speak to the judges, but on what you had just said, Gavin, right? That the self-worth, it's almost as if the pitch. Think of it, almost like a little hook, a little barb at the end of a fishing hook. That piece, that barb piece is the curiosity. Did I literally and figuratively hook them enough to say, yeah, Tuesday does work for me. Especially when they could do it proactively without even suggesting a day. And so I find that fascinating when you're dealing with one-on-one communication versus your example, Chris, when I trying to build a brand out into the world of LinkedIn, out into the world of social media, right? Public speaking for insurance conventions or what have you, that this is a very intimate, but also a very tactical exercise to have just enough of a barb where it's not going to wound because I may have to throw that person back, right? That fish has to go back. I don't want to rip anything out. They can break free if they want, but it's enough where they can't because curiosity is just too strong. That connected tissue is too powerful. Chris Beall (41:47): That's fascinating business. The whole... Gavin, I've got to ask you a question. When you were first to exposed to this craziness, right? Cause Flight School's not only about this breakthrough concept that we use, the breakthrough script idea, which is a stumble upon that evolved over time. There was the five hour Saturday morning that it coalesced. Thank God I was working with somebody who knew nothing about sales and a lot about the human mind and language, because otherwise we wouldn't have gotten there at all, I don't think. But when you were exposed to it, what were your thoughts and feelings about it when you first heard this crazy way of talking to a stranger? Gavin Tice (42:30): It was hard for me to acknowledge the fact that I'm an interruption. I'd always been credible by just saying, Hey, look, this is a sales call. You're welcome to hang up on me. Give me 30 seconds to tell you why I called. But to just say like literally I'm throwing myself under the bus, was a leap for me to say, okay, I can get behind this. Chris Beall (42:52): Truthful. Gavin Tice (42:53): I mean, I love standard operating procedures. When I learned that having those procedures in place could make me successful instead of winging it and being mediocre all the time, changed my life. Corey Frank (43:05): Well, that's wonderful. Well, Gavin, I tell you what we can. We've got to have you back again and again here, if anything, to hear the stories, almost get a state of the union of sales, because I think you have a such unique position, certainly Flight School does, but you Gavin, as an instructor there, to see is our profession getting better? What ails our profession as a aggregate that we, as sales leaders, even if we're not users of the ConnectAndSell weapons system should be aware of as coaches, since we want to love our team and we got to have the fetching Miss Fanucci on here, certainly very soon, Chris, to talk about that concept of loving your team. So this is Corey Frank for Chris Beall, the powerful Market Dominance Guys' podcast. Thank you, Gavin, until next time.  

What’s a pattern interrupt? And how can it help you break down the resistance most people feel when ambushed by a cold call? Donny Crawford, Director of Conversation Optimization at ConnectAndSell, joins our Market Dominance Guy, ConnectAndSell CEO Chris Beall, on a Selling Power webinar hosted by Founder Gerhard Gschwandtner. These three conversation experts share some little-known tricks of the cold-calling trade, one of which is that saying something unexpected, like “Can I have 27 seconds to tell you why I called?”, can break a prospect’s usual pattern of hanging up or refusing to engage. As Donny says, it truly is a game-changer, especially when said in a friendly, playful voice. “The friendliness actually matters,” he explains. “You’ve got to be assertive enough, but in a friendly manner.” Get ready to absorb this and other helpful tips from ConnectAndSell’s Flight School cold-calling training lessons in this Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Pattern Interrupts Are Your Friend.”   About Our Guest Donny Crawford is Director of Conversation Optimization at ConnectAndSell. With the expertise developed as a former customer and as Customer Success Manager at ConnectAndSell, he operates as chief instructor of Flight School, a structured program designed to help cold callers find their voice. Hear more from Donny Crawford on his other Market Dominance Guys’ episodes.  Full episode transcript below: Gerhard Gerschwandtner (01:10): Name is Gerhard Gerschwandtner. I'm the founder and publisher of Selling Power magazine. Thank you for tuning in. Donny Crawford (01:16): And as long as we approach them with the sincerity that what we can provide and share and advise them on is something that could be beneficial to them. Well, then we're in a good state. So the five sentences, what I love about the breakthrough messaging framework or the ambush conversation framework is really that it's filled with pattern interrupts, things that sound a little weird. Why is that important? It's because it doesn't trigger psychological reactance or reflex responses like Jeb Blount talks about in his book Objections. He talks about reflex responses. People get a lot of cold calls and they built up this wall in front of them and they know how to reflexively response to salespeople. So you have to have quite a few little pattern interrupts that keep them a little on the edge of their seat while they're listening to you. Let's walk through those a little bit. So the first two sentences within this it's what's called a greeting. You just get right into the conversation, be upfront, be honest, be friendly, be casual. Hey, it's Chris Beall, CEO of ConnectAndSell. Hey, it's Donny over at ConnectAndSell, right? It's just very simple. I'm not hiding behind the fact that I want to keep elusive what company I'm with. I'm just coming straight out in front and letting you know where I'm at. And then I hit you with what's called a pattern interrupt and then upfront contract. So these are terms around the Sandler world. So you want to get them into a place where you acknowledge a truth. I know I'm an interruption. Can I have 27 seconds to tell you why I called? Now, there's a really important method of delivering this line. And it's with the use of two different voices. We actually spoke with Chris Voss about this. Chris Beall, you were at a mystery dinner with him. For some reason, you guys both picked out of a hat, the Batman, and you were sitting at a table together and you were able to corner Chris Voss and say, how do you get trust from someone? How much time does it take to get trust? And Chris Voss said, "You have seven seconds." And Chris is like, "Oh, that's interesting. Our research says eight seconds." And Chris Voss says with his FBI eyes, "Your research is wrong. It's seven seconds." And he is like, "Oh, okay." So Chris then asked the follow-up question. What do you need to do to get trust? And Chris Voss said, "That's the simple part. There's two things. You need to first establish that you see the world through that individual's eyes. You understand the circumstance they are in." This first piece of, I know I'm an interruption, it's not an apology. It's just an acknowledgement of truth. It's just an acceptance that I've interrupted your day. I understand that. And I'm going to state it clearly. I know I'm an interruption. And then Chris Voss said, "The second thing you need to do is you need to have a competent solution to the problem that they are facing. And when we accept the fact that we as cold callers, we who are ambushing people are the problem in a cold call, then we can have a simple solution to that problem. Hey, it's only going to take 27 seconds." But Chris Voss actually said something even more important. And what I really want to emphasize here is the use of our voice, how we come across with our voice actually matters. Chris Voss likes the term, the late night FM DJ voice. That's what you use for, I know I'm an interruption. Hey, listen. I know I'm an interruption. It's a confident, solid voice that someone can trust. And then you change your voice to what's called a playful curious voice. You let it go up a little bit. You might even add a little chuckle every single time I say it. I know I'm an interruption. Can I have 27 seconds to tell you why I called? I manufacture the chuckle. I could say it. I know I'm an interruption. Can I have 27 seconds to tell you why I called but that's bland. I'm a person. You're a person. I'm going to transfer energy to you. If I am energized, you'll be energized with me. I know I'm an interruption. Can I have 27 seconds to tell you why I called? And people usually with me, they say, "Sure, go for it." And they're smiling with me. They might even chuckle them and release a couple endorphins in the back of their mind. Now they're in a comfortable state. They trust me. Now it's my game to blow if I actually don't follow through on this. Once I have a little bit of trust with them and they say, "Sure, go ahead." Now we proceed to the next part. And this part is actually really important because this is why we're really excited to share something with them. This is why we've actually reached out to them is because I have this deep-seated belief in the thing that I have to share with someone. I have this sincerity, this belief, I'm an expert in something but more than important than that, I really do believe that we have something that is going to be able to make a difference for you and your role in your organization. And so when I say I believe, I'm not saying, I think we have something kind of cool here. Now I say, I believe I'm putting my reputation on the line. And I say, I believe we've discovered a breakthrough. We've discovered something. We just happen to be the lucky ones. And we have a breakthrough that is interesting enough that you should learn about it. That breakthrough has a couple different little components. They are value components but we're not talking about what we do, how we do it all, all the various value that we bring to an organization. We just hint at it. Our breakthrough addresses some economic challenges, provides an emotional security blanket, right? It gets rid of those frustrations, those annoyances in our personal and probably career lives. And then it also allows you to do strategic things you haven't been able to do. That's what your breakthrough does. And by the way, everyone has a breakthrough. You might not be landing on Mars, flying a helicopter, taking cool pictures or curing cancer but as long as you do something better, simpler, faster in a more improved way, you have a breakthrough. And why is it important to set stage by talking about this breakthrough? Because you have something you can promise to deliver to someone. If I say we have a breakthrough and you need to learn about it, that's what your discovery call is. It doesn't necessarily need to be you drilling them with questions but if you have something to share with them and something that actually goes through these things. Chris is going to talk about what that breakthrough actually can Intel, if you promise to deliver something, that's a breakthrough to them, then it's what elicits them being curious enough to take a meeting from us. The next couple lines are but the last piece. Gerhard Gerschwandtner (08:01): Before Chris, let me ask you a question. I'm curious, you make it all sound so smooth and so obvious and how to resonate with the customer in a positive way because you established a positive climate. The question I have is, how long does it take for salespeople to get to that point where they have that internal breakthrough, where they get it. And it's almost like an opera singer of finding the high seat. Donny Crawford (08:33): Does take practice. I'll tell you, it takes practice. The wonderful thing about, and Gerhard, I really like the question because it takes not just role-playing practice where you're speaking to a mirror, talking to a manager and doing it. You have to feel how the reactance you're getting from real-life people. And then it starts to click and get smooth. I would say that you can actually become very comfortable with this after about 30 conversations with people, 30 to 40 conversations. Gerhard Gerschwandtner (09:12): How long is it taking in the training school, in the Flight School, 30 minutes, an hour or? Donny Crawford (09:21): It probably equates to close to three to four hours of live conversations with people for you to. If you're sticking to it and you're really practicing it and you're really trying to deliver it, it's going to feel stiff at first. It's like you're reading it. But if you really have a go at it, understanding and embracing the reality of it and what you're trying to accomplish, you're selling an appointment, not your product right now. This type of breakthrough script can actually within probably 30, 40 conversations, you start to understand the nuances of how to deliver it effectively. Gerhard Gerschwandtner (09:57): It reminds me of a book that was written a long time ago by Constantine Stanislavsky. He wrote a book called An Actor Prepares and it is almost like a perfect training manual with salespeople because the book teaches actors how to step into the character, like in your case, that friendly, trustworthy, helping salesperson who wants to deliver value in any conversation. So it's not just about the words but in embodying that character of that helpful, a customer servant, it takes a lot of internalizing where you  search for memories as an actor in your life where you have been exposed to people like that. And then you embody those people and try to walk through those mental steps. So you have the right mindset and you need the right mindset to develop the right skillset. Donny Crawford (11:03): It does start with the mindset. It really does it. You have to have the excitement to be on these conversations. A lot of people are like, "Oh, it's a cold call. I'm just going to be stiff because it's a cold call. And they don't like me. And I don't like doing it." And they get that in their mind. And of a sudden that's going to mess with your energy. That's going to mess with your approach. It's more concerned about them being annoyed with me rather than being confident that I have the right plays in place for me to be stay on the offense on a conversation but keep it light and friendly because the friendliness actually matters. If I do care about someone, and I do believe that we have something that can help them. I am going to put the right amount of assertiveness to make sure that they like what Chris said. If you save someone from stepping off the curb because a bus is coming, you have to hit them in the chest so that they don't step off the curb. So you have to be assertive enough to guide them in the direction that's going to be beneficial for them to learn something but the reality is you can do it in a friendly manner, right? And so that friendly, assertive aspect of delivering this, it comes with practice, but it comes from interacting with people and realizing, wow, I do have the ability to make them react in certain ways. I do have the ability to influence them. Gerhard Gerschwandtner (12:32): I think there's another step that needs to be articulated that a lot of salespeople don't get it. I've trained 10,000 salespeople in Europe and in the United States. And I was always surprised how easy it is to teach good skills, providing you lead them to the first step, which is that they believe in themselves they can actually do it. So people need to give themselves permission to make a change, to make that click in their mind first, before they can integrate new skills into their repertoire. Donny Crawford (14:05): I love that. Chris Beall  (14:13): Yeah. I have something, an experience that speaks to this. So I used to be, as you know, Gerhard, a fairly serious rock climber mountaineer. And I've had the opportunity to teach a lot of people how to climb. And the key to learning how to climb is to recognize that your fear of heights is natural. It's not something to deny. It's not something to push aside. It's something to embrace and understand. I mean, it's good to be afraid of heights. Try falling sometime. As you know, I fell once about 800 feet, and I can tell you it would've been better not to. It's not something you would seek out. When I taught people to climb, the first thing to do is to teach them to trust that they're not going to fall and die or be hurt. So have them climb up one or two feet, step off, have the rope catch them. Do that over and over where they're still comfortable. And that's like Donny's 30 conversations, in a safe setting where somebody can coach you, have the experience of not having a bad thing happen when your reflexes say a bad thing's going to happen. And the click occurs when you forget about the fact that you're now at 10, 12 feet off the ground because you're so accustomed to falling onto the rope. And the rope basically feels like the ground to you. And that's the breakthrough moment when people are learning to climb, they have to go through that moment. And I think that happens in Flight School. I think there's a point usually between day two and day three, for most people, and it happens at night, by the way. These changes only occur within us when we're sleeping. We actually are not capable of changing in a fundamental way while we're awake. And that's why we dream. We go through all of these crazy things that we do at night, which if we take them away, we go nuts and we die, bad combination in that order, by the way. We very rarely die first and then go nuts. And so between session two and session three of Flight School and session two is where those previous couple of sentences are, sentence three, actually the breakthrough sentences. That's where it starts to feel like maybe something good is happening here but I'm not quite there. And then session three that day they wake up and they go with their usual apprehension but it clicks. And it's the click of having this work as advertised, so to speak, it's in the same way that the climber is up 12 feet. And for the first time they go to make a move. They can't make and they fall and nothing happens. It's okay. That's the moment that I think everything changes. And then the sales rep can now embrace the reality of the ambush conversation which is fear of being in the ambusher is fear of height. It's like fear of the sight of blood. You can't become a surgeon if you think that the site of blood. You can't in sales, you can't be successful unless you don't faint at the feel of ambushing somebody for their own good. But you can't declare that. And just say, I'm no longer going to faint at the sight of blood. You have to practice. You can't get over the fear of heights without practicing. You can't get over the fear of being the ambusher which is the person who's going to be exiled. By the way, the deep rooted source of our fear of being ambusher is people who do bad things to other people in the village get thrown out of the village. That's all there is to it. We fear excel much more than we fear death. And so it's worse than our fear of heights. So you're actually addressing your fear of being the bad thing. Gerhard Gerschwandtner (18:00): In the analogy with mountain climbing, I remember interviewing Ed McMahon from The Tonight Show and he was landing a plane that was literally on fire. He walked away from it and he said he was terrified. However, he learned through his military training, you can't transform fear into energy and the energy that somebody told him when he was on the radio, jump and bail and this is going to be a lost plane. And he says, "No, I want to land it. And I want to say that, I think we can fix it." So the lesson I learned is that there is an inner journey to optimal performance that is not clear to a lot of people. And I think, Donny, you hinted at that, that there is some experience that happens where all of a sudden everything changes and you turn fear into energy and that energy turns into greater performance. Donny Crawford (19:15): I agree. And it's interesting hearing the part of the benefits that can happen when you've embraced it. And you've made that change. You have to go through that process that Chris was talking about which is that initial fear and that initial fear, once you overcome it, it actually can transfer that fear to this great energy. There's several times in flight school when people are executing on a script and sometimes they just read it really blandly. They just, "Hi, it's Donny over ConnectAndSell. I know I'm an interruption." They're afraid to be saying it. "Can I have 27 seconds to tell you why I called?" And someone's like, "Yeah, go for it." Great. I think we have a breakthrough here and they're really timid and they're not very energized. And then at the end, it's like, "The reason for the call is to see if I could get some time on your calendar. Do you have your calendar there?" And someone will say, "Yeah, I do." Just by reading the script and being horrible at delivering it. Some people are just like, "Yeah, that's fine. We could set up time." And then the rep is like, it doesn't have to be that difficult. It doesn't have to be something where I have as much energy as Donny is demonstrating I need to have it, but I just need to follow a certain path. There is security to the right type of path to take but then you're going to enhance that experience by really allowing yourself to let your personality shine. I think the best example of this is actually I ran a Flight School for a manufacturer of machinery that they sell to manufacturing plants and food processing plants and all this stuff. And their sales reps are individual sales reps that live in the area that they sell in. And they go door to door to these manufacturing plants, selling their equipment. And some of them are on the east coast and they have that east coast attitude and they got the sharpness to their voice and the speed and energy and aggressiveness. And then you have the salt of the earth in the middle of the United States sound from Kansas and they got all this personality and sound great. And then you got the Californians, they're all loose and hanging back and chill with the way they talk and super friendly or whatever it is. And what's amazing is they all say the same words in a script but they've allowed their own personality. They embrace their personality. And they're saying the same words, but they have the same effect on people. And so it's hilarious. Once you allow yourself to be yourself and allow people to get a sense of who you are and that you truly do have something really powerful for them, people are willing to listen at that point and they really are comfortable saying, "Yeah, I'd love to meet with you. You sound great. I love your energy." Whatever that type of energy is. Gerhard Gerschwandtner (22:07): It becomes a positive feedback loop because they see they get results with the new narrative, with the new script, with the new delivery, with the new need that is manifesting itself in a positive way. And then they want to do more. And then you create the addicts, the self actualizing. Donny Crawford (22:28): Talk about rock climbing. It's scary at first, but dang it. When you're at the top of the mountain and you just accomplish this very hard thing, the high you get from that, it's fun to execute little things well, but the high at the end when you've executed this hard thing and it actually you get a result. Holy crap, I'm hungry for that a lot. I need that over and over and over again. And so once you embrace the little tricky parts to get to that place, it's super rewarding moving forward. Gerhard Gerschwandtner (23:02): Donny, there's a book I want to recommend. It's by Josh Waitzkin, it's called The Art of Learning and it actually has the subtitle on inner journey to optimal performance. And Josh Waitzkin was the junior chess champion in the US at the age 16 or 17. And he actually was a subject of a movie called in search of Bobby Fischer. And he actually gave up chess and transferred that inner learning to tai chi push hands competition which is a Korean specialty. And he actually went to Korea to compete in the world championship. And he became world champion. Donny Crawford (23:54): From chess to tai chi? That's awesome. Chris Beall  (24:01): Let's talk about a breakthrough. By the way, we told folks that we were going to teach them how to have a fail safe discovery meeting. What's funny is, and it's just a funny thing. I'm going to put this in and then turn it back over to Donny. The fact of the matter is, you promise in this breakthrough approach that you're going to share a breakthrough with them. Therefore, a fail say, pre discovery meeting is nothing more than sharing this breakthrough. However, for it to be fail safe, you need to have the psychology of that meeting appropriate to that meeting. When somebody accepts a meeting with you, you actually have got to start that meeting off a little bit differently than an ambush because you're not ambushing them. So now you need to actually establish a connection at the beginning and then you have to get them to go from their current mental, emotional state, which is apprehension that you're going to sell to them to some other state, which is basically a mutual curiosity and collaboration in order to find some truth. What I call the confessional and there's a little path you can take somebody on in that conversation also from that feeling of apprehension about being sold to, to a feeling of pride. So rather than going to trust what you already have, you can go to pride. And many times I've seen people say, experts say, just get to the point. Well, the point is not, hey, I'm going to interrogate you about what's true about your business in some dry fashion. The point is that we might actually decide to do something together. That's pretty risky for you. It's not very risky for me, by the way, I'm the salesperson pretty risky for you because your reputation's on the line, your careers on the line. And we need to make that move from apprehension to it's okay to work together through some other emotional states. And the easy one to get through too, is pride of place. And that is just ask somebody, "Where are you on the face of our blue whirling planet?" And they will speak with pride about their home. They chose it and they'll speak with pride about it. And it's quite an amazing experience to allow their pride in themselves in just where they live. Something as simple as that to allow you then to go to their pride and their mission just by asking them this question, which is when everything goes great. When it's really outstanding, when it's the perfect fit between your solution and the customer's need, when their budget is there, when the price is right for them, where your customer success, people do the right thing. The customer does the right thing. When everything works great, how does your product or your offering change that person's life? And you let somebody answer that. And now there's pride in their professional world. That's how to actually conduct that breakthrough sharing session because then you can get to those three things, the economic one, the emotional one and the strategic one, but you're doing it in an emotional setting. That's got a shot. So there I threw in the purpose. Otherwise, we're not keeping our press or [crosstalk 00:27:18] webinar, but now you've learned it while you've heard it anyway. And Donny, take us home here. We have three minutes. Donny Crawford (27:25): If you back up to the blueprint, I think that there's something really important here. If you are able to enter into a relationship with someone, there's two types of people in the world, I'm going to classify the human race. You have the ability to classify them. People you've never spoken to and people who you have. As long as you treat the people who you have never spoken to before with a certain understanding that they are somewhat afraid of you when you try to reach out to them for the first time, everyone has a little bit of that apprehension. If you're able to get a little bit of trust with them, every touch, if you've established trust right at the beginning, get go of the relationship. Just to reiterate what Chris was saying. Every touch from that point forward, if you are able to maintain that trust then in any other discussion that you have with them after the first one. So I've talked with them the first time. Those are the people who I need to reach out to for the first time. Every other interaction moving forward from that point, they are able to trust you and therefore give you what you need to help them out moving forward. And when it comes to these breakthrough sharing discussions or discovery calls or getting them into a pilot phase, if you've opened up the relationship with a trust building process, and they're able to continue trusting you on an ongoing basis, they are willing and eager to continue to learn from you, work with you, confess their problems with you. And from that point forward, you're able to continue to reach out to them when the timing is right and be able to share with them what you need to share with them so that they're going to be able to essentially get all the benefits that your product, your service you are offering is able to offer to them. But it all does start with this trust. Chris Beall  (29:32): Flight School is unlike anything else in the world. It is completely unique. It's life fire. It's the only sales training in the world where you make money. You're not spending money, you're actually making it because you're talking to real prospects, having real meetings and real good things happen. You build pipeline during the training at a much higher rate than you might be doing otherwise. Gerhard Gerschwandtner (29:53): That was fascinating, Donny. I just reminded when you talked about the magic that happens in a conversation, I think we all want to discover a better way of connecting with people and you have shown us today. There is a better way, and it's not just about the message. It's about how you deliver the message. The message has to come really deep from inside of you, the essence of you needs to resonate with other people. So you are talking about authenticity, but the authenticity only comes out if you do the opening right. And I see the opening like the first button on a shirt. If the first button is right, all the other buttons are right. Chris Beall  (29:53): It's going to line up. Gerhard Gerschwandtner (30:48): But if the first button is wrong, they don't line up and you're not going to have a positive connection with the customer. Chris Beall  (30:54): It's true.    

When you’re making a cold call, is the voice you’re using an effective voice? Or could it use a little fine-tuning so that you can engender trust with your prospect — the trust needed to secure a discovery meeting? Donny Crawford, Director of Conversation Optimization at ConnectAndSell, joins our Market Dominance Guy, ConnectAndSell CEO Chris Beall, to walk you through how to find your most effective cold-calling voice. In previous episodes of this podcast, you may have heard our guys talk about ConnectAndSell’s Flight School cold-call training program. In today’s episode, you’ll get a mini–Flight School lesson all your own, presented by master instructors, Donny and Chris. Not only will you get a tried-and-true script, but more importantly, you’ll hear detailed instructions on how to use your tone of voice to achieve cold-calling success. As Donny says, you’ll learn to bring out your “friendly voice,” and when you do, you’ll see how that voice can make some magic happen. All this — and so much more — in today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Finding Your Cold-Calling Voice.”   About Our Guest Donny Crawford is Director of Conversation Optimization at ConnectAndSell. With the expertise developed as a former customer and as Customer Success Manager at ConnectAndSell, he operates as chief instructor of Flight School, a structured program designed to help cold callers find their voice. Learn more from Donny Crawford on these Market Dominance Guys’ episodes:  “Three Reasons Sales Reps Don’t Follow Up” https://marketdominanceguys.com/e/three-reasons-sales-reps-dont-follow-up/  “The Power of the Anti-Curse to Overcome Rejection” https://marketdominanceguys.com/e/the-power-of-the-anti-curse-to-overcome-rejection/  “Your Sales People Are Brain Surgeons” https://marketdominanceguys.com/e/your-sales-people-are-brain-surgeons/  “Never, Never, NEVER Retire a Follow-Up Call” https://marketdominanceguys.com/e/never-never-never-retire-a-follow-up-call/    Full episode transcript below: Gerhard Gschwandtner (01:38): Hi. My name is Gerhard Gschwandtner. I'm the founder and publisher of Selling Power Magazine, and welcome to our webinar. Thank you for tuning in. We have two experts today that will talk about the topic of how to conduct a fail-safe free discovery meeting, and that's a vital part of the sales funnel. And I want to welcome Chris Beall. He's the CEO of ConnectAndSell, and also Donny Crawford. He is the Flight School director with ConnectAndSell. Welcome, Donny. Welcome, Chris. Donny Crawford (02:13): Hey, Gerhard. Thanks. Chris Beall (02:14): Hey, Gerhard and everybody. Great to be here. So Donny and I are here from ConnectAndSell. For those of you don't know what ConnectAndSell does, we let you or one of your reps push a button and have a conversation with somebody on your list with no effort whatsoever. So all that dialing, navigating phone systems, hanging up on voicemails, yapping with gatekeepers, all that stuff that 95 times out of 100 leads nowhere ... and by nowhere, I do mean voicemail ... goes away. You push a button. You wait a little bit. You can have a cup of coffee, write an email, pet your cat, whatever you want to do. And then bloop, you're talking to somebody on your list. Chris Beall (02:53): So I'm the CEO of ConnectAndSell, been around this company for 10 years, used to be a product guy. Donny Crawford ... His title has actually just changed. He is our director of conversation optimization, and there's a little background that's required here. Donny's been with us for longer than I have in that he was a customer of ConnectAndSell, a user, end-user, a cold caller and follow-upper sales rep back in the day. And he was famous for refusing to take a job unless they would get him ConnectAndSell. So he'd go all the way through the interview process, and then when they'd make the offer, he'd say, "Great, happy to do it and come to work for you. However, I have one requirement." And eventually, when he had done that often enough, apparently somewhere along the way, we were smart enough to beg him to come to work with us. And he worked as a customer success person for a long time and then became our chief Flight School instructor. Chris Beall (03:52): And Flight School doesn't make sense what ... The name of it doesn't quite tell you what it is. Flight School's a program, structured program that helps a set of rep together, five or more of them, to go from their current state regarding their skill and their competence, their confidence with regard to cold calling to the top 5% in the world. And they do it through a series of blitz and coach sessions where Donny or one of Donny's colleagues actually coaches them live while they're talking to real prospects. So this isn't role play. This isn't lecture. This is live fire under pressure. Chris Beall (04:30): And the reason that Donny teaches this is that the key to first conversations, cold calls, or any conversation is the human voice, right? Almost all the information in a conversation is in the emotional part, which is handled by the voice, not the words, and what is required to get people to be really great at performance with the voice is they have to practice under pressure. Anybody can sound great in a role play. Nobody sounds quite so good when they're talking to a real prospect, and that's what Flight School lets you do is learn to be great. And that gives you confidence, and that's kind of a virtuous cycle. So that's what- Gerhard Gschwandtner (05:08): Chris, let me ask you a question because I find the term conversation optimization very interesting. And what you seem to be saying is that in Flight School, you learn just to communicate content but to pay close attention to how that content is delivered in an emotional atmosphere that's optimized. Chris Beall (05:32): If I tried to say it better, I would stumble all over the place, so I'm just going to stick with that. That's fabulous. Donny, I mean, tell us. You were just a regular rep at one point in your life, struggling through the world, probably not thinking you were particularly good would be my guess, knowing you, because you don't go around thinking you're great. And then somewhere in there, you got introduced to this ConnectAndSell thing, and somewhere else, you must have had this kind of aha that said the how that we speak with somebody and how they receive it emotionally turns out to be not just important but maybe the key. Donny Crawford (06:07): Oh, absolutely. When I first used ConnectAndSell, it was probably 14 years ago at a little startup company, Electric Cloud. And I was a part of a team of really dynamic reps. They were all different personalities, very interesting guys and gals that I was working with, and their voices were really interesting to listen to. And because you're having conversations in a bullpen together, you get to hear a lot of different styles of reps speaking with people. But then ConnectAndSell came to the team, and then we were having more conversations. And so we were exposed to a lot more of these experiences of interacting with people. And at first, I think all of us are stiff when we are kind of reengaging in cold calling and trying to get out there and talk to a marketplace, but there is a moment in our career when we find our voice and we find how comfortable we can be on these conversations that we're having with people. Donny Crawford (07:06): And it's that moment that it clicks, and you're like, "Hey, this is my voice. I can be friendly. I can be assertive. I can sound like an expert, but more importantly, I can really make a connection with people." And when you find that voice and within yourself, it's amazing how from then on, it's just going to be magic, and then you can improve little pieces of what you say and how you're saying things. And so I found that to happen probably 13, 14 years ago. Donny Crawford (07:32): And then in Flight School, we get an opportunity to work with all of our customers who go through Flight School and their teams of reps who go in there, and they find their voice. And it's fascinating to be able to hear when that moment happens, when it clicks, when it's not just a script they're following anymore, but they've internalized it. And they like it, and they get the friendly voice out there. And they're able to actually make some magic happen on these conversations. It's a neat moment when that actually occurs. Chris Beall (08:00): Wow. You just gave us the tagline for Flight School. Our tagline for ConnectAndSell's always been around, right? Conversations matter. Flight School ... Find your voice. Donny Crawford (08:10): Finding your voice, totally. Chris Beall (08:12): Wow, find your voice. I love it. Thank you. We don't need the rest of this webinar. Thank you, everybody. We've gotten our little piece of marketing development done today. Find your voice. That is what it's really about. Gerhard Gschwandtner (08:23): [crosstalk 00:08:23]. Chris Beall (08:25): I'm an old computer scientist, right? And I'm a physicist mathematician by background, so I always think about things in terms of what's really going on under the covers. And just for everybody in the audience, just to think about this, an email contains about 5,000 bits of information. And if you want to get the rough calculation, it's about 10 bits per letter, per character. Some people would say eight, but given all the emojis and everything, we got up to 10, right? Donny Crawford (08:51): It's averaged to 10 now. Chris Beall (08:52): [crosstalk 00:08:52] 10 bits per character, and there'd be maybe 500 characters in an email. It's something on the order of 70 words, 80 words, something like that, maybe less. So when you kind of think about that and go, "Wow, 5,000 bits, that sounds like a lot," the human voice carries 20,000 bits per second. That's four emails per second, and every one of those bits will have an impact inside of that other person, because our response to the human voice is entirely involuntary. We can't decide whether in advance, when Gerhard speaks, am I going to end up feeling like I trust him or like him or know him or not? I can't do anything about that. That's something that happens inside of me well below the conscious level. And so while I might be preconditioned ... I've been told Gerhard's a great guy, and so when he speaks, maybe I have a little bit of more of a positive bias. Fact to the matter is, his voice is either going to captivate me, or it's not. Chris Beall (10:49): And that's at a rate of ... For those of you who send emails, in a seven-second conversation, you have just sent and had received and paid attention to the contents of 28 emails. But of that, 95% of that information is emotional information. It's carried in the tone. It's carried in the pace. It's carried in things we can't even really put a finger on, but they put a finger on us right in the middle of our brain. Gerhard Gschwandtner (11:17): I want to add something. This is really fascinating to me. It's so interesting that you focus on what resonates with other people. There is actually brain research when two people have a conversation that is constructive, that's enjoyable, that is productive, then their brain regions, the same brain regions that light up in the speaker light up actually in the receiver. So when a salesperson or a customer have a productive conversation, the same brain regions light up. However, when you say something that does not resonate, nothing lights up, and there's no communication. Chris Beall (12:01): Wow. Wow. So we have a podcast episode on the Market Dominance Guys Podcast. I don't know which episode it is. Maybe somebody will find it and put it in the notes. The title is Your SDRs are Brain Surgeons, and that's what it's about. Well, let's jump into this a little bit, and it basically kind of comes down to this. And I'll give you an overview, and then I'm going to turn it over to Donny here, who's the expert. Chris Beall (12:26): So there's a view that we have at ConnectAndSell just kind of founded on a fair amount of experience. We've been doing this for, as Donny said, 15, 16 years and at a pretty decent pace, about 3 million conversations per year that we connect for people. So we have a lot to study, and here's what we've learned, is that in sales, we're taught to lead with value. And we actually imagine something that, when you think about it, is crazy. We imagine somebody sitting there waiting for us to call them and tell them how to do their job, tell them that here's something of value you are not paying attention to, and that's kind of an odd conceit when you think about it. Chris Beall (13:06): An alternative to leading with value would be to recognize that trust is the key in business-to-business especially for a number of reasons and that if we can begin with trust, then everything else that follows works better, is easier. It's within a trust relationship. If Donny calls me and I don't know Donny and he has a brief conversation with me and I find myself trusting Donny ... I don't even know I trust Donny, and then he sends me an email. And he sends me an email afterwards. I say to Donny, "Donny, I'm just too busy. I got to go. I got to go." And he says, "Well, okay." And he lets me go because he has ConnectAndSell, so he knows he's going to talk to me someday. So he lets me go. Chris Beall (13:52): And then he sends me an email that has the only subject line in email that will actually be open and paid attention to 100% of the time. Thanks for our conversation today. Thank you for our conversation today. That's the ultimate subject line in the world of B2B but not if you haven't had a conversation. So a trust-building conversation, which takes about seven seconds according to Chris Voss, the author of Never Split the Difference, the FBI hostage negotiator guy ... He told me one evening, "We have seven seconds to get somebody to trust us in a cold call. By second number eight, it's too late." Chris Beall (14:30): So what this webinar is about is, okay, so say you accept that. Say you accept that beginning with trust and then not blowing it, by the way, which is the other key, because you blow it and you start to sell to somebody, try to corner them with your clever questions ... If I showed you a way to save 23% on the blah blah, what would ... That's all those trap questions we ask them. You can blow the trust that way. Feel free. Salespeople do it every day of the week. They trade trust for the off chance of a lucky commission. They do it every day. Chris Beall (15:07): But once you get trust, it's precious enough that you might consider conserving it and preserving it through the rest of the relationship, which might take years. It might take years for an interesting reason we'll share in just a moment. So whether it's email, digital, content sharing, future conversations, meetings, phone, video, you meet somebody to conference, if you've had a trust building conversation with with them, you're ahead of all competitors. And by the way, any competitor that comes and tries to displace that trust will themselves not be trusted. We do not trust people who ask us to not trust people that we already trust. So become that person. We call it paving the market with trust. Chris Beall (15:53): So here's why. There's a big idea in here. So if you're selling a B2B product, the replacement cycle for your category of product is about three years. It might be two. It might be four, but in general, in B2B, if we just bought something yesterday, we're not looking for something that does the same thing today. We just aren't. We're not looking to discard our products and services that we buy and solutions in favor of something else because our reputation depends on them actually working. If we're the decision maker, we recommended that solution. You recommend ConnectAndSell, by gumbo, it better work, and you're not going to look for anything else for three years. Chris Beall (16:33): So three years is interesting. That means only 8.3% of your total addressable market is in market right now of your perfect market, 100% perfect. You've done every kind of imaginable research, and you know it's dead center bullseye perfect. And guess what? Guess what? 91.7% of them aren't in market, not this quarter. So what are you going to do about that? Chris Beall (17:01): Well, there's two alternatives. You can just try to grab them when you got them in front of you, choke them to death, whatever, get them to buy right now, and you can get 8.3% of the market if you're perfect if you had 100% market share of those in market those quarter. But what about the 90 whatever it is, 91.7%? Well, if you build trust relationships with everybody in the first seven seconds and nurture those relationships over that three years, you can dominate your market. That's why my podcast is called Market Dominance Guys. It's not puffing up your chest. It's like math. Chris Beall (17:38): Here's the math. Build trust with everybody in your market in seven-second conversations. See if you can get a meeting. Why not, right? You're in a conversation. Sometimes they're in market now, and sometimes they're willing to learn more. Own that market as long as you don't blow it. How do you blow it? Either sell to them inappropriately or neglect them. So this is the big idea, right? Chris Beall (18:04): So now imagine you embrace this approach. So you're using sales correctly. You're searching the market for those that fit your TAM. They're your ideal customers, but most of them aren't ready. And for those that are in market now, how are you going to find out? Well, you'd actually have to set up discovery meetings. Now, they're usually called discovery meetings because you want to discover that they need your product. You're all guilty of this, by the way. You have this hope. I sure hope this meeting leads to a deal, right? If you can abandon that hope and actually just have an honest discovery meeting, what I call time in the confessional, where you let them know what it is that you think you do of value you or provide a value and they let you know what their circumstance is and you explore that together, some pretty amazing things can happen. Chris Beall (18:57): Andy Paul has, by the way, written an entire book. I'm going to hold it up here. Anybody who hasn't bought Sell Without Selling Out by Andy Paul ... just came out February 22nd. Go by this book. Read this book. Then go get the audiobook, and listen to this book. And then go back and read the book again, and then examine your soul because there's some stuff in here that he's talking about that's really, really simple. Let's make a connection. Then let's go to curiosity, our curiosity. Be curious. Let's truly try to understand, and let's be generous. Now, I didn't blow the book. There's more to read in there, but that's kind of it, right? Chris Beall (19:34): So how do you find out who's ready to go forward with you from curiosity to understanding? Well, in what we call a discovery meeting, we might be able to achieve some understanding by asking questions and truly listening, not just hearing but listening, and not listening for what we want to hear but listening for what they actually say and then trying to understand. So here's where we start. We start in a funny place. This person's a stranger. We're a stranger. We're a bad stranger, by the way. We're that tiger. You're the tiger, right? So you're going to ambush somebody. Why? Because there's no alternative mathematically. That is, if I'm going to have a second conversation with somebody, I got to have a first conversation. That's just math. It's damned hard to count to two unless you first count through one. Chris Beall (20:27): I know lots of folks would love to skip the step. Can't we just have them come to us out of the woodwork, out of the wild for discovery? Won't they be looking for us? Yes, you and every competitor you have, every alternative, they'll be looking for them too. So your chances of building trust before they have a chance to build trust goes way down unless you're willing to do the hard thing, and the hard thing is to be an ambusher, to ambush somebody. It's just the way it is, and I apologize to all of you who don't feel that ambushing is okay. It's not okay to ambush somebody. Chris Beall (21:04): My friend Scott Webb, who is a chief growth officer over at HUB International, he's a pretty dynamic sales guy. He told me once, said, "When I go in to a session with ConnectAndSell to ambush people and talk to them, here's my mindset. They're about to step in front of a speeding bus. I'm going to stop them. They'll thank me. And I don't care if it hurts them a little bit to slap them in the middle of the chest and keep them from walking in front of that bus." So what is the avoidance of the bus? It's the attendance at the discovery meeting. Chris Beall (21:38): Now, we call it a prediscovery meeting because it's kind of funny only because discovery, like cold calling, has a funny connotation. It means I want to discover that you need my product soon so that I can make my quota. That's what it normally means. This is a little different. So imagine you have this ambush conversation, and in the ambush conversation, you use five simple sentences, all based on sort of an emotional journey that you believe that you can help somebody go on from their ambush-state fear of you, fear of you to a state where they're actually trusting you in seven seconds, then to a state where they're curious about why it is that you called them and what you're talking about and to where they actually commit to saying they'll come to a meeting. Chris Beall (22:35): So this is what Donny teaches, and I'm going to turn it over to Donny at this point. And I'll tell you a story about Donny. I called Donny one day when I was in the Orlando airport. This is an embarrassing story, but it's not really. It's got a great ending. So I said, "Donny, I've really become convinced ..." This was many years ago. "I've become convinced that there's a different way of holding these first conversations that is 100% reliable with regard to getting somebody to trust, and that's helpful for them because it takes them on a journey to actually learning about whatever or it is that we offer that might be able to help them and that learning is the value that we want to offer in the meeting, not the product but just the learning. So I think that this is something we can embrace." And Donny said, "It's a script. It's a terrible thing." And then I took him through what it was, and he said, "It's worse than I thought." Donny Crawford (23:31): Oh my word. Chris Beall (23:33): "It's the most terrible thing." Donny Crawford (23:34): This is painful. Chris Beall (23:34): "This sounds terrible. This sounds awkward. I couldn't do that." So for two hours, I walked around the Orlando airport. I thought security was going to come and start talking to me like I was a piece of abandoned luggage or something. They're looking for somebody who had left their child who's 6'1" and 215 walking around, because he doesn't know how to get on an airplane. And I'm talking intensely to Donny, and finally, he says, "Well, okay, I'll try." And then the next day, he calls me up and goes, "Oh my god, this is magic. This is magic." He said, "The first time I tried, it was really awkward. And then but there was a little something. Something resonated." Chris Beall (24:11): It turns out there is a way of talking to folks that you ambush that is magic, and that's what Donny teaches in Flight School. But it comes with a consequence, and the consequence is now you got to keep the promise that you make within those five sentences. And the promise is that you're going to share something with them. So Donny, at that, I'm going to turn it over to you. Donny Crawford (24:32): Well, let's talk about the five sentences. And you're right, it felt super awkward to begin with. This was back in 2016 when you wanted us to field test it. And so me and James Townsend, our VP of customer success, we hit the phones. I was actually in Klamath Falls, Oregon, this little town in Oregon, Southern Oregon, visiting my sisters, and I was sitting on the bottom bunk in my niece's bedroom, making cold calls with this script that you handed over to me, Chris. And it was awesome, actually. It was a really interesting experience. Donny Crawford (25:02): I'm going to recite the five sentences, and we'll go through of what they are. But if I were cold calling and I was reaching out to someone, I would start off ... If I was selling ConnectAndSell, it'd sound like this. "Hey, it's Donny over a ConnectAndSell. How's it going?" They're like, "Good. What can I do for you?" "I know I'm an interruption. Can I have 27 seconds to tell you why I called?" And at that point, they're like, "Sure, I'm a nice guy. I'll give you 30 seconds. How about that?" "Perfect. I appreciate that. So here at ConnectAndSell, I believe we've discovered a breakthrough that eliminates all the frustration and the waste that keeps your best sales reps from being effective on the phone, maybe even been using the phone at all. And the reason for my call is to see if I could get 15 minutes on your calendar, share that breakthrough with you. Do you happen to have your calendar available?" Those are the five sentences. Donny Crawford (25:50): Now, it sounds like I went through a whole weird pitch or something like that, a monologue, but the reality is there is some engagement there. And as long as you're using the right voice during each little play, each little sentence that you're delivering, it actually gets someone comfortable enough to ask the question, "Yeah, I do have my calendar, but what is this, right? What do you want to share with me? What's this breakthrough?" And the word breakthrough actually has a really interesting power to it because it elicits curiosity from someone to learn something about something that they potentially could use. They would benefit from it. Donny Crawford (26:28): And we're putting it in the context of being able to say, "Hey, there's something really important that we'd like to share with you, and if you give us that opportunity, no big deal for 15 minutes. It's really something everyone can consume. But if you give us that time, this is something that could be really beneficial to think about and to learn from us." Donny Crawford (26:50): Now we don't want to be salespeople. We want to actually be advisors. Chris, I've heard you say one of the less trusted professions, probably grouped around politicians and lawyer, are sales people. We want to be more like the nurses, like the therapists, the teachers in our lives, who we trust a little bit more, and us shifting from being a salesperson to being an advisor is actually something that we want to accomplish. Donny Crawford (27:19): So in an ambush conversation, we need to treat them appropriately. These people are afraid of us when we've come out of the blue. We caught them off guard. They don't even know why they answered the phone most of the time. They're running into another meeting. They're jumping on a plane. They're picking their kids up from school. They don't know why they answered the phone, but you have them there. And a lot of times, we think of these as cold calls. But the reality is, a cold call just means it's rigid and frozen, and there's not a lot of information around it. But we do have a lot of information about them. They're the right type of person at the right type of business that potentially our breakthrough can make a difference for them. Announcer (28:02): We're going to end the first part of this webinar right here. In our next episode, Donny will continue to take you through those five sentences and give you more background and ways you can implement this that maybe entice you to want to sign up for Flight School. Join us again for the next episode of Market Dominance Guys.  

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.

Jennifer Standish, Founder of Prospecting Works, is preaching to the Cold Calling Choir when she says that cold calling trainers don't spend enough time working with their people on their delivery. Jennifer and our Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall and Corey Frank, all believe that a great script that hits all the points but has a terrible delivery won't get you any appointments. However, a great delivery — even if you're working with a mediocre script — will absolutely bring in the appointments. In this podcast, they also emphasize the importance of a salesperson's mindset when it comes to being a successful cold caller. If you think everybody's going to hang up on you, that everybody's going to be nasty to you, well, then, that is generally what you're going to get. But if you believe in your core that your product or service can truly help people, if you are certain of the integrity of your offering, then you can sell people on your belief. Why? Because your authenticity will come through to your prospects, loud and clear. Listen to this first of a three-part Market Dominance Guys' series by these three cold-calling gurus on today's episode, "Learning to Manage Your Voice Under Pressure." Then, listen to the next two parts of this conversation here: EP123: Hire Yourself a Grandma 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: Corey Frank (01:29): Welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with the sage of sales, the profit of profits. With Chris Beall and Corey Frank and today we have a guest that is near and dear to both of our hearts Chris, we're going to speak in reverent tones, hush tones of cold calling. Jennifer Standish is here from Prospecting Work so, Jennifer, welcome to The Market Dominance Guys. Please say hi to our seven listeners, including my mother on this well esteemed almost 200 episodes of this podcast. Jennifer, welcome. Jennifer Standish (02:03): Hello. Thank you for having me. It's been a great pleasure to be here. Corey Frank (02:07): Great. So I understand that you are well skilled in the black art of cold calling but then I also heard, right? When we were talking about it in pregame a little bit that as skilled as you are, you also want to make cold calling obsolete. Do you swear that's true? Jennifer Standish (02:26): Well, where did you hear that? That I want to make it obsolete? Corey Frank (02:29): Oh, the sage of sales had shared that thing with me beforehand so. Jennifer Standish (02:32): Yeah, because I work with a lot of people that have call reluctance and it's such a struggle for them and I just wish that we could somehow rename it, do something, something to help these people be able to make cold calls and I would also like for it to be acceptable to be able to call a business during business hours to discuss business and be able to call somebody and get an appointment and it's such a struggle and cold calling is such a bad name. That if there was a way to just be able to call somebody and schedule appointment and have it be done. I would love for that for it to happen. Corey Frank (03:12): Well, I can already tell, Chris and you probably picked up on this. You've known Jennifer a little longer than I have, right? The cadence and the tonality you use just to explain yourself is probably indubitably what hooked Chris, so is that how you guys met? Chris, were you a cold call from Ms. Standish here? How did you guys meet? Chris Beall (03:32): I can't remember. Jennifer Standish (03:32): No, you- Chris Beall (03:35): But I know she told me that she had an idea and it's such a tremendous idea that I asked her not to tell me more about the idea until she got a provisional patent on it because I think I said, "Jennifer, at this moment I'm the most dangerous person on the face of the earth and you should protect yourself before you speak with me." Jennifer Standish (03:56): Yeah, so we were introduced by David Masover because we were both on his podcasts and so Chris and I just had a nice lovely conversation and I said, "I have this idea about how to end cold calling." And so I told him and then we spent two and a half hours on the phone. Corey Frank (04:10): Oh that's nice. Jennifer Standish (04:11): And he said, "you need to get a provisional patent for this. You have to protect yourself and then we can build it because it's a brilliant idea." And I got off the phone thinking that I was going to be the next Elon Musk and I felt as if my life trajectory had just changed and it didn't turn out quite as I had expected but the idea is still there. Corey Frank (04:34): Sure. Jennifer Standish (04:34): And who knows but I really think that what's missing is we spend so much time on the sales side, becoming more efficient, trying to be more effective, working on bettering ourselves, coming up with a great cadence and all that stuff. Jennifer Standish (04:48): But nobody's dealing with the prospect side and how they're part of the problem. When we call these prospects, there are so many things that get in our way from reaching the prospects. Nobody's dealing with them and their bad behavior and how they are costing their company's money and how their gatekeepers are costing their businesses money and how somebody needs to tell these people or maybe it's the CEO or the president, guys you need to start taking these calls. There's a lot of reasons beyond why these sales people are calling you. It's a great networking event. You have no idea why they're calling. Jennifer Standish (05:26): It could revolutionize our company. How about karma? Are people cold called? Why don't you need to pick up these cold calls? Because our people are cold calling. What goes around, comes around. You just never know. All of this types of reasons. Take these calls. What I would hope to happen is the number of calls that you were required to get through would go down. We wouldn't need to be making all of these numbers. We wouldn't need as many sales people out there hounding away. It would just facilitate business. We could- Corey Frank (05:58): And if I have it straight Jennifer, that... Chris, help correct me. I'm hearing you say if your message to the world, if your message to humanity is to accept and take more cold calls. Jennifer Standish (06:13): Yes. Take the call- Corey Frank (06:14): Take the calls. Jennifer Standish (06:16): Take the call. Corey Frank (06:17): That's a great t-shirt. Jennifer Standish (06:18): And what I tell them whenever I present, I will have people come back a week or two later and say, "Jen, I didn't think I would ever want to say this to somebody but I took a cold call and it turned out to be a great decision for my business." Corey Frank (06:35): I love that. Jennifer Standish (06:36): Time and time and time again. Corey Frank (06:38): We had a guest on who's a great friend of ours, his name is Robert Vera. He runs the Center For Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Grand Canyon University and one of the things that he mentions a lot is that to take a phone call, to take a cold call especially, there's a special intrapreneurship mindset that these folks have to have. Not an entrepreneurship but an intrapreneurship. So, Jennifer calls me and she's going to give a face melter of a screenplay of a pitch and it moves me but still I got to think of my boss, Chris Beall here whether he tolerates this culture of intrapreneurship of change, of improvement of kaizen, et cetera. What do you think about that, Chris? Is it our job as cold callers to arm them, to preempt the message that a boss will say to stifle the great message and emotion that you just stimulated and was a catalyst for me to say, "Hey boss, I got an idea,” versus. “I get a lot of crappy phone cold calls" Chris Beall (07:45): Right. Corey Frank (07:46): And I may not be that motivated to make change. Chris Beall (07:51): Well, I think that there's two kinds of change that you're dealing with. So one is very private which is the choice to attend a meeting and when we think about the psychology of a cold call, a cold call is always a mistake not by the person making a call but by the person answering the call. It's very rare that they answer the call thinking this could be a really cool cold call, I'm so ready for this, right? And so what they're really doing is going, huh, I don't know what this is and for some reason I feel like I got to pick it up and then they realize it's a sales rep and then the defenses go up and then we have an issue, right? So I think then this is a fascinating area to me. In fact, I just had a post golf meeting two days ago with a marketing expert. Chris Beall (08:42): And she said, "Hey, I'm helping a company out that's doing account based marketing, ABM." So ABM basically is like Market Dominance Guys, basically we say make a list. It's like okay so make a list, right? And she asked me this question. She said, "how can cold calling work together with ABM? It doesn't seem like it can because in ABM we have to know lots about each individual target on the list before we have a conversation." And so I think the first order of business for the cold caller is actually a psychological order of business which is can you get somebody curious enough to take a meeting and nothing else. And all that requires is that they be a human being. It doesn't matter what business they're in. As long as you can say something that A doesn't cause them to reject you. I don't mean reject you as a person. Chris Beall (09:34): Just reject the idea of taking a meeting with anybody you're associated with but B has to resonate with them while not answering the question. So, that's thing number one. Thing number two, the intrapreneurship thing I think comes into play once you're in the discovery meeting or the breakthrough sharing meeting or whatever you want to call it because that's when you're on stable ground. That's when you're in the confessional. If it's run correctly and in the confessional, you can discover the answer to the question. Chris Beall (10:02): Does it make sense to do the next thing, right? Whatever the next thing is. Does it make sense for Corey to come talk to Chris or does it make more sense for Corey to go do the test drive? And de-risk it a little bit through direct experience? Corey can make the decision but it's funny how this relates to cold calling. Cold calling is essentially a mechanism to allow enough human trust, human interaction and curiosity to be generated such that two people will get together for a little bit of time and explore a possibility and that's it and I think the key to cold calling is to know that's it and not much else. Corey Frank (10:46): Mm-hmm (affirmative). Jennifer Standish (10:48): Can I add something? Corey Frank (10:49): Of course. Jennifer Standish (10:50): I also think that we have to accept that a certain percentage of the population doesn't like to be sold to and they will shut down meetings to their own detriment but there's nothing you can say to them. They just will not be sold to and we just have to accept that but everybody else is somewhat willing. Some people are more willing than others. I've had situations where I get no objection. I get, "sure I'd love to, absolutely. I'm available in this particular date and time" and it's super easy. Other times there's a little bit of pushback but then people are amenable to scheduling appointments. So we just have to accept that some people are more willing to meet with people and are interested in what people have to- Corey Frank (12:37): Jen, how much of that do you think and you've seen, you've probably experienced bad cold calls, you've probably from your background, taught many folks to learn this skill. You have, right? A voice. We have a handful of folks on this podcast, all brilliant folks of course present company included with me and Chris but a lot of the folks that are on these podcasts of ours, right? They have a voice that can just melt butter and they have a command of their tonality, their stammer, their pregnant pauses, is that something that you see as correlating to your success? Jennifer Standish (13:15): Yes. Corey Frank (13:15): When you're on- Jennifer Standish (13:18): And I'll tell you cold calling trainers do not spend enough time working with people on their delivery because it's 80% of your success as a cold caller. A great script, hits all the points with a terrible delivery will get no appointments but a great delivery with a mediocre script will still get you appointments. Absolutely. Chris Beall (13:41): But write that one down. So this is actually why we do Flight School. Flight School is about learning to manage your voice under pressure because it's one thing to learn in some role play but then under pressure, away it goes and you tighten up and I have an analogy I've used it before here. I'll use it again. So in the next room over there I have this wonderful Kurzweil electronic piano and it's got all these beautiful voices and stuff and there's a song that I play most evenings for Helen and I play other stuff too but I play for my fiance, right? She's been a guest on the show so go check her out anybody who wants to do that and I know full well that she thinks that I am a very good piano player and a pretty passable singer but I'm also pretty sure if somebody walked in the room while I was playing that I was sure was a real piano player or worse, a real piano player and a real singer. Chris Beall (14:46): I would suddenly suck to the degree that even Helen would know it even though she'd be too nice to say anything about it and that command of your voice under pressure is the essence of being able to cold call. Helen and I listened to Cheryl Turner once for about 20 conversations and I asked her, "what'd you think?" As Helen's not a cold caller of any stripe and she said, "what's amazing is the emotional pivots and they happen in split seconds and so she knows what she's going to do, but then she does what she has to do with her voice." And I thought that was a really good phrase. She knows what she's going to do but then she does what she has to do. Jennifer Standish (15:30): Yeah. Chris Beall (15:30): And that's it. Jennifer Standish (15:31): It's the mental agility. Chris Beall (15:32): Yeah. Jennifer Standish (15:33): Yeah. Corey Frank (15:34): How do you teach that to... I'm a new grad, Jennifer and I was a history major, liberal arts major, communications major. I'm going to land on your floor. Maybe I'm a middle child so maybe a little bit more introverted, right? Chris has some theories on that in a minute but how do you draw it out to somebody because these are big bad strangers, people who hang up on me and they have teeth and they can ruin my career and they can pull up my LinkedIn and they're going to track me down on social media. What do I do with all this stuff here before I make a phone call? Jennifer Standish (16:07): Well, I'm an extreme introvert and I can do this and I think right there I would say well, we got to talk about your mindset because if that's the way you're going into this, yes, you're going to have problems. If you think everybody's going to hang up on you, everybody's going to be nasty to you, that is exactly what you're going to get. But if you believe to your core that your product or service can help people. If you have integrity, if you're calling because you believe that you can help people and you do your homework but if you do your homework and make sure that you're calling the right people, you're not calling everyone under the sun. Nobody likes to receive irrelevant calls, right? Jennifer Standish (16:48): You come up with a targeted list and you're calling with the motivation of wanting to help. You're not here to sell. You're wanting to introduce yourself and have a conversation that you're going to sound very different and sometimes I can't make somebody sound different and I will send them to a vocal coach. Sometimes it doesn't help and there's very little I can do but I can always start with a mindset and I can sit down and go through all the things that they're bringing to the table that are going to get in the way and I can help them. I can't do the work for them. Corey Frank (17:25): Mm-hmm (affirmative). Jennifer Standish (17:27): And then we'll see. But a lot of times when I'll say you're allowed to call a business during business hours to discuss business, I give you permission. Right then and there they're off to the races. They're like, that's all I needed. Just give me permission. That's all I needed. Other times it's when you told me that I really help people, that's all I needed. I do help people and I sell cleaning supplies but I keep people safe and healthy and my customers would be lost without me because when you really look at it, all of the businesses all over the world, we are all ultimately trying to help people. Corey Frank (18:05): Mm-hmm (affirmative). Jennifer Standish (18:06): Even paper, look at paper. What is paper? Well paper communicates ideas to people. It's all about people. So if you can trace your company and what it does back to how it helps humanity, then you're selling with a purpose, a noble purpose- Corey Frank (18:21): That's beautiful. Jennifer Standish (18:22): And then people can get behind it. So I tell sales managers all the time, where are your case studies? You need to be telling these people every single day look at what we did, look at how we helped these people. Look at all the wonderful things we're doing. That's what we are as an organization. We need to be proud of ourselves. Chris Beall (18:39): Well, so Donnie Crawford and I are going to be doing a webinar two days from now about how to conduct a breakthrough sharing session. What people should call a discovery call. I'm not really fond of the word discovery call even though I love discovery as you all know Corey, I'm into it but it means I'm going to discover something about you that lets me make you buy my product. Corey Frank (18:59): Yeah. Chris Beall (19:00): And that's a disingenuous approach to that next step. If you think of it as a breakthrough sharing call, I called you because I truly believe we've discovered a breakthrough and I want to share it with you because I think it has potential. At least this meeting has potential for you to learn something that'll change your life. We may never do business together and this to me is the critical break point that Donnie and I are going to go over. Chris Beall (19:26): The mindset break point is to get to the essence of the mindset, to say the following. In the event we never do business together, as I have to sincerely believe in the potential value of the meeting that I'm offering not the product but the meeting, to this human being not their company but to them, in the case where we will never do your business together and if I believe that sincerely then I can take what I'll call the Scott Webb mindset which his mindset is, I envision this person is about to step in front of a speeding bus and I may have to hit them hard in the middle of the chest to keep them from stepping in front of that bus but I know of the bus is coming and they don't. So it's my responsibility to get them to the meeting because that's where something magical can happen. Chris Beall (20:20): And when he adopted that mindset he went from a world class but to him mediocre 30% conversion rate and Jennifer was calling for me yesterday, kindly to set meetings for me and she set at a 50% rate on a list she'd never heard of before and God knows it wasn't. I don't need its best list in the world actually, a little hard to get ahold of him too. It'll dial the connective, I don't know 131 to one today or maybe worse and yet she said 50%. Well, when Scott adopted this mindset working at HUB International as the head of sales, he's the big guy there. He went from 30% to a hundred percent overnight. Jennifer Standish (21:01): Yeah. Chris Beall (21:01): Not overnight but in the next hour and he stayed there ever since. He converts a hundred percent of his cold conversations to meetings and he says the essence is to truly remind himself. Jennifer Standish (21:15): Yeah. Chris Beall (21:15): He's saving their life. Jennifer Standish (21:16): Oh yeah. I tell people all the time, imagine you had the antidote to COVID. You would be relentless. You would find the person who you needed to talk to, who could distribute that to as many people as possible, you would do your homework and you would not stop calling. You would not stop calling because this thing could save lives. It's that sort of purpose and you would be annoying but you would be okay. Chris Beall (21:45): When you hit somebody in the middle of the chest. I've actually done that by the way, when Scott said that thing about the bus, it turned out once in Des Moines, Iowa, there was a bus coming and it was coming in the fog and I did reflex without thinking and I hit somebody very hard in the middle of the chest and kept him from stepping off the curb. So when he said that to me, it actually made me shutter. Jennifer Standish (22:06): Yeah. Chris Beall (22:08): It's a little emotional just to remember that moment. Corey Frank (22:10): Mm-hmm (affirmative). Chris Beall (22:11): So this is a big deal. When we have a breakthrough, it doesn't have to actually be something that they end up taking advantage of, the knowledge of it is of value. Jennifer Standish (22:21): Yeah. Chris Beall (22:21): And that's all we're offering. It's that knowledge. Corey Frank (22:24): I love that it really comes about. We've talked about this several times Chris, right? The belief, the insistence mindset. You can only have an insistent mindset when you have firm belief in the value certainly of what you're selling, right? To your earlier point Jen, right? If I'm a new grad and I have all these boogeyman fears or worse, let's say I'm apathetic to what it is. I think I've shared this a few times on the podcast here is one of the stories, one of my great mentors years ago taught me when we were first starting one of our first companies is about a guy who's just minding his own business and walking past a construction site and there's five guys laying bricks and he goes to the first guy and says, "Hey, what are you doing?" He's like, "laying brick." Goes to the second. Corey Frank (23:10): "What are you doing?" He's like, "I'm building a wall", goes to the third guy, "what are you doing?" He's like, "making eight bucks an hour", goes to the fourth guy, "what are you doing?" He's like, "I'm building a cathedral." And the fifth guy, "what are you doing?" "I'm saving men's souls." All right. So arguably the latter two construction workers are the ones that you want as team members, you know that they're going to pay a little bit particular more attention to the runoff and maybe the cleanup and maybe the hard right corners of the walls. The first three pedestrians, tourists in the space apathetic. Yeah, I work for Saunders Prospecting here and well, what do you do? Well, I make 18 bucks an hour. I get paid X amount per appointment. Working my way through law school but generally not the folks that you want to put on any campaign and certainly they're conversion and rates will go less than pedestrian, I would imagine. Jennifer Standish (24:07): Right. So I would tell hiring managers to be very careful and I would also tell candidates be very careful. You could be a great salesperson, a great cold caller if you align yourself with organizations in which you believe, right? And I work with a lot of commercial insurance producers and I tell them, do you know that business could not continue without you? And you start them the story about the history of commercial insurance and you keep roofs over people's heads. You keep people employed. We wouldn't be able to do business without you, right? And then they start thinking oh my God, absolutely. So be very careful who you work for and if you don't work out one place, don't give up, try someplace else. Think of really about what is in your- Chris Beall (24:58): Wow. I love it and Scott, by the way, his thing is commercial insurance and I know he believes he's potentially saving these companies lives. Jennifer Standish (25:09): Yeah. Chris Beall (25:09): Saving those jobs. Jennifer Standish (25:11): Yep. Chris Beall (25:11): I look at ConnectAndSell somebody ask 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 port 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.

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

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

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