EP127: How to Turn Awkwardness into Success

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.