Season 5

So, what's the biggest challenge in sales? Today, the guys have a special guest, Hitesh Shah, CTO and CPO of ConnectAndSell. As Hitesh puts it, it's the fact that we don't like to be sold to. That's why sales is about helping, not selling. And if you want to succeed in sales, you have to understand who your target audience is and what their business problems are. You have to start at the bottom and work your way up, building relevance and trust with each person you talk to. Hitesh says there are two things, one is always trying to understand what happened. And, when it goes against your instinct -  what did you expect it to do? Be open to the possibility that you may have missed something. Corey says that this requires a level of humility that doesn’t exist in high quantities in sales, even though it should.
One of the things these three have learned over the years is that when something starts working when it shouldn't, it can be scary. But in the digital world, everything is deterministic. There are causes and effects, and there's no such thing as waiting or hoping that something fixes itself. As Hitesh puts it, you have to have a childlike curiosity and naivete, especially in the digital world where computers are deterministic. Join us for this episode of Market Dominance Guys, “The Power of Childlike Curiosity in the Digital World of Sales”
Links from today's episode:
ConnectAndSell - https://connectandsell.com Branch49 - https://branch49.com 
Hitesh Shah on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/hiteshrshah/ Chris Beall on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-beall-7859a4/ Corey Frank on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/coreyfrank/ 

In part two of this series, Barry Traile, Chris and Corey bring a touch of humor to the conversation on the topic of sales and how it relates to the corporate business world today. Barry emphasizes the importance of establishing and elevating relationships over time, stating that sales isn't about predicting anything but rather bringing people together. He compares the unpredictability of sales to the unpredictability of a baseball game, where even the best players are out 70% of the time. Chris Beall adds that the desire for predictability is a universal human desire, but sales is about doing things that have a reasonable shot of bringing people together so that problems can be solved that would otherwise be left unsolved. There is even a reference to fortune tellers, who are able to convince people to believe in the impossible. They guys agree that while the game of sales has not changed, the tools available to do it have improved, and the ability to access and share information has greatly increased, making sales performance level much higher today than in the past.
If you haven't listened to the first half of this series, we highly recommend you to check it out, "The Scarcest Commodity in Corporate Business Today.”
Links from this episode:
Sales Mastery - https://salesmastery.com/ConnectAndSell - https://connectandsell.com Branch49 - https://branch49.com Sales Education Foundation - https://salesfoundation.org/ 
Barry Trailer on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/barrytrailer/ Chris Beall on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-beall-7859a4/ Corey Frank on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/coreyfrank/ 

Revealing the scarcest commodity in corporate business, especially in America today, first requires an understanding of how we got there. Today Barry Trailer, Co-founder of Sales Mastery, joins Chris and Corey. He reviews the four levels of process implementation: the percentage of revenue, the target revenue plan attained, the percentage of reps meeting or beating quota, the outcome of forecast deals, and rep turnover. These are real numbers. But higher levels of relationship and higher levels of process implementation lead to higher levels of performance. And the numbers are just the numbers They continued talking about the turnover. There's a huge contributory factor to the failure to implement significant change on the part of most sales organizations other than the change that a new leader brings in.
What is common is that the new lion, so to speak, the new CRO, the new VP of Sales, comes in and kills the cubs. They attempt to prove that whatever was being done before must not be done anymore. Because I've come in with my new way of doing things and territory must be marked, I was brought in to do something in a new way, and away we go. When the performance isn't there, the CRO or the CSO takes the bullet that the CEO doesn't want to take. But the only reason is that there's been this unholy alliance or this unspoken agreement that as long as we make the numbers, you'll stay out of my sandbox. Listen to this episode to see where your company falls in place in, “The Scarcest Commodity in Corporate Business Today.”
Links from this episode:
Sales Mastery - https://salesmastery.com/ConnectAndSell - https://connectandsell.com Branch49 - https://branch49.com Sales Education Foundation - https://salesfoundation.org/ 
Barry Trailer on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/barrytrailer/ Chris Beall on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-beall-7859a4/ Corey Frank on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/coreyfrank/ 

In this follow-up to last week’s, “The Theory of Constraints and Ice Cream” Chris reminds us that all talent problems are wrapped up in lots of politics. And it turns out the key to all of this, whether you're like Corey and Chris and your company provides a discontinuous innovation. Something that naturally could bring change too fast or if you are the leader and something needs to change because it's the constraint and it's time to go after it no matter what. If you fail the finesse test, you fail all the tests. Because then the politics turn on you. And quite rightly, by the way.
Finesse is a very elegant way of describing the search process, reading the signals, reading the tea leaves, and understanding where the constraints are. Understanding that in this discontinuous innovation process, you're going to have of extraneous pipeline that's going to come in very rapidly at a flow rate that you’re not used to. And finesse is, as a way to almost like when you see a bullfighter, they have this big two 3000 pound beast that's bearing down at you and bull bullfighter. And he just finesses his way from one to the next and dances and it's a glorious thing to see in action where internally they may be sweating.
People underestimate the power of finesse and the reason that you need it. We are all machines when we sell, we're a machine that turns a potential opportunity into something that's taking a next step. That's all we do. So the more mathematically you are, that is, if you're listening to this and you're going, yeah, gold red theory of constraints I'm in, I'm in. Right? You probably need to spend more of your life thinking about and exercising the finesse components.  Listen to this episode, “The Power of Finesse and the Bullfighter.”
If you missed the first part of this conversation, "The Theory of Constraints" you can catch up here.
 
Full episode transcript below:

We've heard the phrase, "Be careful what you wish for..." It's not unlike wanting to build pipeline quickly and how it relates to a kid in an ice cream store. What is the goal? Build as much - eat as much as possible to gain as much success and pleasure as possible. Think of the system of building pipeline like a child who isn't sufficiently mature enough to handle all that ice cream. Belly aches will ensue. So the issue with too much too fast is you can't find the bottleneck anymore. And if you can't find the bottleneck anymore, you can't manage.
In this episode, Corey asked Chris to visit the theory of constraints. Businesses are artificial, in the sense, that we say we're going to do something for others, and they're going to pay us money for it.  And then the question is, what are the inputs to the business? And whenever you have a system with inputs and outputs, you always have exactly one constraint within that system. That's what the theory of constraints says. 
The reason that people like Mark Cuban, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musks, and the like are such outstanding business leaders is they put their eye on the bottleneck regardless of the noise that's produced by the change that they are willing to induce in order to improve. Most of us can't do that. Listen to this episode of Market Dominance Guys, "The Theory of Constraints and Ice Cream."
 
Full episode transcript below: