Work From Home

Who’s behind the curtain making the Market Dominance Guys the great podcast that it is? It’s Austin Finch, an editor at Funnel Media Group, which produces Market Dominance Guys. In listening to this conversation between Austin and our host, Chris Beall, you would never know that Austin is the youngest guest ever interviewed for this podcast. Currently 17 years old, he has edited Market Dominance Guys for several years and has recently added Helen Fanucci’s “Love Your Team” podcast to his editing responsibilities. In talking with this intelligent, thoughtful, and insightful young man, Chris asks about the challenges of podcast editing, including the pruning and grafting necessary to increase a podcast audience’s understanding and to decrease the distractibility caused by any audio glitches or guests’ faux pas. Austin loves his job and sees his editing work as that of a translator for the hosts’ and guests’ messages, and his goal as “Helping to Get the Message Across,” which just happens to be the title of today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode.

“When you go to a doctor, do you want that doctor to be excellent — or okay?” Elena Hesse, our Market Dominance Guys’ guest and the Vice President of Operations of Thomson Reuters’ tax and accounting professionals, poses this question to our podcast hosts, Corey Frank and Chris Beall. Their answer — and yours too, no doubt — is that they want doctors who love their job and do it extremely well. Elena, Chris, and Corey talk about how this equates to the role of the salesperson. In the old days, sales was generally a “hit and run” affair. You’d probably never see your customers again once the sale was made, so there was little reason to provide true value in a product or to develop and maintain a relationship with a customer. But in the modern world, most of us want to sell our customers an upgrade or an add-on or a renewal. So, product value and excellent customer relations are essential. In other words, if you want to be successful in sales today, our three sales experts say that it’s crucial to have skin in the game. Oh, yeh. It’s self-examination time. Evaluate your personal investment in your job as you listen to today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode. “Do You Have Skin in the Game?”
 
About Our Guest
Elena T. Hesse, Vice President, Operations – Tax & Accounting Professionals at Thomson Reuters, has been with this firm for more than 13 years. Elena is also a thought leader for #GirlsClub, leading the book club discussions to support #GirlsClub and its continuing work of changing the face of sales leadership by empowering more women to earn roles in management.

You may have heard the term “post-pandemic” bandied about in recent months, but there’s nothing “post” about the COVID pandemic yet: We’re still in the thick of it. It’s not all downside, though, as James Thornburg, Enterprise IT Strategist at Bridgepointe Technologies, and our Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall and Corey Frank will tell you. In their third conversation together, they talk about the upside of the pandemic as it concerns sales. Because what is “post” for most salespeople is that bone-wearying business air travel, and the time-waste of business lunches, and the tedium and expense of that daily commute to and from the company office or to and from the offices of business prospects. The combination of cold calling by phone and discovery meetings by Zoom has made a new and successful world for salespeople, one that doesn’t require leaving home. Yes, you’ve heard of attempts to return sales to the pre-pandemic days, but as Chris predicts in this episode of Market Dominance Guys, “There Is No Going Back.”
About Our GuestJames Thornburg is the Enterprise IT Strategist at Bridgepointe Technologies, which offers a service that helps design IT and telecom projects for their clients and includes selecting the right supplier at the right price with no extra cost to their customers.

This week on Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall is once again flying solo while Corey Frank is out traveling the world. Chris’ guest today is Helen Fanucci, Strategic Accounts Global Sales Leader at Microsoft — and Chris’ fiancée! The topic today veers away from competing with other companies for market domination, to competing with other companies for market talent. It’s just another result of our almost year and a half of working from home due to the pandemic: People now want flexibility in where they work and when they work.

Chris Beall and Corey Frank, our Market Dominance Guys, explore the subject of artificial intelligence taking over jobs held by humans. It’s an emotional issue, to be sure. But instead of looking at this as an either/or concern, the Market Dominance Guys take a different tack by asking,” What do humans do well? What do machines do well? And what can they do together?” You may be thinking, “Wait a minute! Using AI will help us run our business much more cheaply than keeping all those humans on our payroll.” If so, Chris asks you to take a few steps back and look at the big picture by asking yourself, “What’s my main goal here?” In other words, should you be concentrating on how to operate your company more cheaply, or should you be thinking about what will help you dominate your market? And what skill sets are required for your company to do that?
 
Using a sales department as an example, Chris and Corey discuss the different cluster of skills needed for each type of job in that division and which ones can be handled by either humans or artificial intelligence — or by a combination of both. As usual, you can trust the Market Dominance Guys to steer you in the right direction when it comes to dominating YOUR market, just as they do on today’s podcast, “The Right Skills for the Job.”

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

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

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

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