EP45: It‘s the CEO‘s Job to Feel the Ice Rather than Harpoon the Whale

CEOs are allowed to have weird thoughts and consider odd possibilities. You need input from the market you don't have yet. This is why a CEO needs to be selling to understand what is actually happening. Their job is to feel the ice rather than just sending your reps to drive the road.

Put yourself in there as CEO, don't absorb the friction, find the root cause. The marketplace is always changing. CEOs love to harpoon a whale, but they need to experience every aspect of a sale. They need to be in the mix and feel what is behind the numbers. Listen to this episode of Market Dominance Guys, It's the CEO's Job to Feel the Ice Rather than Harpoon the Whale.

 

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The complete transcript of this episode is below:

 

 

Corey Frank (00:35):

Welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with Corey Frank and the Sage of Sales, Chris Beall, with all things markets dominant oriented.

Chris Beall (00:45):

This is something that drives me a little bit nuts when CEOs stop selling and they cut themselves off from the only information flow that counts, which is what's happening inside of a discovery conversation that indicates to you that something needs to be different, something about your positions, something about your product, something about your company needs to change in order to stay current and stay ahead of what's going on in your marketplace. As you go through the process of dominating market, things change. One of the things that changes is some things get easier, and so if you keep doing certain things the hard way, you're wasting money and time. It could be that there's an easier way to move ahead at that point. So who knows, but unless you're out there on the front lines, and particularly, very specifically, CEOs need to engage in discovery conversations.

Chris Beall (01:38):

Discovery is discovery. Discovery is not discovering whether they need your product. That's what sales people tend to think of discovery as "I'm going to discover that you, Corey, need to buy my thing. You know a miracle that every discovery conversation has the same outcome. You should buy my stuff", it's like, "Really?" I thought we were going to discover the nature of the problem that you think you have. And then we're going to examine that problem in the light of different ways of looking at it, thinking about it, that might reveal a solution to the problem that you hadn't considered before. It may well be that that solution is something we can help you with. It may well be otherwise. That's why it's called discovery. And it's actually been flipped on its head. It's like, "We're not discovering what we're doing is hoping. We're hoping that you want to buy something because I going to make my number." Right?

Chris Beall (02:27):

It's kind of funny that we call it "making my number", when I get lucky enough that the hope turns into an outcome. So as a CEO, I want to know what's going on. I'm driving on a road that hasn't been driven before. By definition at all times, my company is going into new territory. Even if all we're doing is going into the easier part of this market, how do I know for instance, something we've talked about which is, when I've gotten far enough into one market where it's time to seriously consider a foray into an adjacent market. Well, I've said before, it's stunned by the numbers. But in fact, I'm lying when I say that. It's actually done before the numbers. There's a point in the process where a discovery conversation with the wrong person shows incredible opportunity.

Chris Beall (03:12):

And it's only when it's with the wrong person, which is why you must eat false positives in the discovery process. You have to put false positives and it says you don't know there are false positives. You just need to be a little bit promiscuous. As you throw opportunities into the discovery process, you have to be a little bit tight. And I've said before, on a different episode, 15% false positives, that's a pretty good number.

Corey Frank (03:36):

That's right.

Chris Beall (03:37):

10% is light, 20% is okay, but a little bit wasteful and 50%, you probably don't know what you're doing. So if you had about 15% and you have like, "I'll look at our team again for the day. Let me just see how we're doing." What would that mean for us? So today, so far we have just to take a little peak here. We've got 20 meetings and so 15% of 20 meetings would be... Three of those meetings would be with people we shouldn't speak with.

Chris Beall (04:07):

So say three of those happen a day. So every week we're going to speak with 15 people we shouldn't speak with. So say one out of 15 of those people actually has a problem we can solve. That's nice. That's a problem we can solve, even though they're not correct with regard to our idea of the market and say, that problem turns out to be a problem. It's fundamentally interesting in the sense that it represents a market opportunity, not a one-off. Well, how are we going to know that? My salespeople aren't going to report that back to me. And if they do, we're going to say, "Hey, focus on the ones that want to buy what's in the bag" right? We're not going to say, "Hey, great. You brought us something weird." So who is going to take an appropriate action called thinking in the face of something weird.

Chris Beall (04:57):

There's only one safe place to do that. That's a CEO position.

Corey Frank (05:00):

That's correct. Right.

Chris Beall (05:01):

CEOs are allowed to have weird thoughts and consider strange possibilities and maybe bring them forward and have them argued, shut down, whatever. You kind of get used to it as a CEO and you get used to your team kind of saying, "Really, again? Nutty I... Didn't we do that before and it didn't work?" That's a very common [crosstalk 00:05:20] CEO, right? We tried that in 2013 and it failed in a spectacular way. Well, sometimes you end up prophesizing something that is different from what happened before and kind of outcome, but you need the input from the market. And I don't mean the market you're selling to, I mean, the market that you're not selling to. The one you don't even have yet. So CEO needs to be out there doing that.

Chris Beall (05:45):

It's kind of like, if you're driving a car and you're driving on a road you've never seen before. Say it's the middle of winter and back in the day, you were going to come up and visit me at my house up Pine Needle Notch, for extra effort. You weren't aware because you've never driven that road before. You're a desert guy, right? You weren't aware of that sometimes there's a stretch of the road just above long canyon. Then when everything is great, sometimes has a little ice on it and it's outward sloping. And it's about a 950 foot drop down into that canyon. Don't you want to actually feel that ice rather than just checking the outcome. "Did Corey make it?", that's how we do it in sales. We say, "How many deals did you close to how are we doing?" That would have been, "How often did you make it to my house?"

Chris Beall (06:32):

"Oh, well, why didn't he make it?" The answer is there's a 26 foot stretch of road that tends to have ice on it, that tilts to the outside. And somebody forgot to tell Corey, "Hugged the cliff a little bit, angle the car over there, slow down and by the way, you can't have tires that can't handle this. Where's your form of threat?" So it's the CEOs job to feel the ice, to feel the difference. And then to kind of be the early warning system or the early opportunity system to close the loop from back. CEOs who don't sell also have another problem. They don't know where the friction is in their sales system. All systems have friction. Every system in the world has friction. Some dumb thing, right? It's just there, every single one. How do you know? Well, your reps will complain.

Chris Beall (07:17):

Really? You're going to listen to all their complaints. No. You're going to dismiss their complaints because reps complain because their reps and they're looking for excuses, right? And they're in a game where it's like golf, you and I played a little bit of golf. What do you do when you start around a golf? You assemble the most important club in your bag. Your number one excuse for how you're going to fly. That's the most important club because you know it's not going to be great and you got to have a good excuse. So right now mine would be, "Oh, I haven't played since last September", more rough. And it's, "You know, I've had some issues with my back as I've gotten a little bit older" but you've got to have an excuse, right? Salespeople need an excuse because they're in a game that has a lot of law and a lot of failure, so you stop listening to them.

Chris Beall (07:59):

But when they're telling you about legit friction, be great to listen to them. I tell you what, you put yourself in their as CEO and you absorb that friction. You have to eat it. It's wasting your time. Suddenly it's like, " Oh I'm worth extra zillion dollars an hour. Why am I spending my time doing this? Why is my show rate this low? I had two meetings scheduled today. They didn't even show." Well, okay. You just experienced it. Now, let's go find the root cause maybe nothing can be done about it. Maybe something can be done about it, but you're the one complaining now and when you're done complaining, we'll figure it out.

Corey Frankl (08:31):

Well, I find it interesting.

You're listening to the Market Dominance Guys with your host, Chris Beall of ConnectAndSell and Cory Frank of UncommonPro.

Corey Frank  (09:29):

I've always been fascinated, right, as long as I've known you longer than the ConnectAndSell days, of course, but since even at ConnectAndSell, it's unusual that you, as CEO, your esteemed VP of Sales, Jonti, and your chairman, all still make regular sales calls and sell and in fact, they're some of the top producing folks in the company. Why continue to do that? Don't you have the market figured out by now. Isn't your time or Jonti's or even Shawn's at the chairman level. I mean, you guys are dominating your market. You're growing at a great rate every year. It seems that there shouldn't be that many changes to the marketplace or are there?

Chris Beall (10:14):

Are there? Yes. There are. Always are changing, unless you do regular sales. So CEOs love to do this kind of stuff, "I'll go sell something big. I'll go harpoon a whale. I'm a whale harpoon. Right? Well, I got a couple of little whales that I've harpooned and I kind of liked them. They didn't start that way. However, they just started little. And since they're my accounts, I have to pay a lot of attention to what happens every day. And so I'm in contact with all the way through the process, through renewals and particularly through customer success. And why, because my customers really feel free to call me, right? I'm the CEO. They don't like something. They know that they're going to get something out of a calls. Give me a call and say, "That guy you sent over for the messaging workshop the other day, it wasn't as thrilling as you. What's the deal?"

Chris Beall (11:03):

Well. Whatever, right? I get to hear it. So that's the most important thing is you have to hear it all the way through, but it's not about the whales. It's not about bringing in the big deals. It's not about any of that. It's about being in the mix and feeling what's behind the numbers so that we can have rational discussions with each other about it and goes, " That real is that not realistic, it's just my emotions", by having all three of us sell and we do sell a fair amount. It's pretty beefy numbers that we put up and we compete a little bit. Jonti caught me by 10 grand on December 31st, last year. I'm not saying he's a sandbagger. I'm really not. I'm just saying that he's a guy who knows how to get you by 10 grand on December 31st at 11:00 PM. Right? I'm not bitter about it.

Chris Beall (11:49):

I just think it's a good thing, right? But what are we really seeing? We're seeing the flow of the business every day, at every stage so that the numbers can be interpreted in the light of shared experience. We can get together and say, "Are you seeing X, Y, or Z? Are you noticing that more people that we talk to seem to be interested in an outsource solution of having somebody else, like Youngblood Works, actually have their conversations for them at the top of the funnel. And do you know why?" "Yeah. I am seeing that. Well, why do you think that's going on?" "Well, I talked to this one and I got this particular enlightenment." "Really? Can we go back and talk to that person again? Maybe we can take them into a different sales process. Maybe we can do an experiment."

Chris Beall (12:36):

So when you're running something... If you think you're running against stasis, you're out of your mind. You're running against continuous change and everything you think about it that's interesting is wrong. Everything you think about it that's uninteresting may or may not be wrong, maybe you think a bunch of correct things, but the interesting things are the ones where you're wrong. And when you're out selling, you feel it and you go, "Wow, that bothers me. The way that conversation went, bothers me." A salesperson kind of go, "I didn't get them. You're going to go that bottles."

Corey Frank (13:06):

That's right. So in other words, what I hear you saying Chris is never trust a CEO who wears flip-flops.

Chris Beall (13:12):

Absolutely. The ones wear flip-flops will not go very deep in the canyon. The barefoot ones, you can trust. Actually, there was a personal note, I was just told by my fiance the other day, she didn't tell me. She told somebody else that she hasn't seen me in any footwear other than barefoot and flip-flops since March 13th of this year. So yeah, don't trust me. I will never go past the flip-flop line. That's all there is to it.

Corey Frank (13:40):

Correct. How about so professional CEOs, right? You reach a certain stage as a venture-funded company, or even a private equity-backed company, if we go up the food chain a little bit more, and you're a hired gun Chris, right? I'm from XYZ Venture firm.

Corey Frank (13:57):

And the CEO is now going to become the Chief Visionary Officer or Chief Strategist or whatever title that they deemed because the CEO got us to 25 million. And now we're thinking of a new change, a hired gun to come in and take us from 25 to a hundred million or so, what should the CEO do and not do in those types of situations, because the ownership of the company is still very much alive. Those founders obviously, still care very much about that. If they're humble enough to bring in or let their VC bring in a CEO or a hired gun, or was placed by a PE firm. And let's talk a little bit about that as we kind of expand this concept of what should the CEOs be doing in the sales role, obviously under the guise of making sure that alignment is tight functionally between sales and marketing.

Chris Beall (14:50):

Well, for one thing, I mean, those people are real-life professional CEOs. They're not like me, so I don't really know, but I have observed a few of them and some of them are my friends, so I have a sense of what their challenges are. You kind of have a choice when you come in as a hired gun, you can choose to be what we call Mr. Monkey, in my circles. You know those little monkeys that the toy one that you get, that you wind up and it's got the symbols that have bangs together and that's all it does. It bangs the symbols together and makes this noise, right? [crosstalk 00:15:20] Sort of a cheerleader monkey, right? And they're just doing the same thing over and over. And then if the company grows under them, they take credit for it, much like stockbrokers-

Chris Beall (15:33):

Stockbrokers bring you a bunch of stuff and some of it's great and they take credit for that and stuff that's not great. Suddenly, they're just bringing in new stuff, just banging the symbols together. So you can be Mr. Monkey and you'll probably do okay. I don't object to it. Mr. Monkeys tend to negotiate hard for themselves. And as a result they tend to do okay. And there's kind of a desperate shortage of people who are willing to be CEOs, regardless of what everybody says about the job. It's not actually that popular for some pretty good reasons. It isn't the very, very most fun job in the world and a lot of places at. It's the Lonely Minds Club because they have no hearts. That's one way to do it. But even if I were Mr. Monkey, I would do this. I would take one discovery call per day. One. Not curated, just one, out of the mix.

Chris Beall (16:18):

And I'd have it assigned to me, one per day, half an hour. That's what I would dedicate to my sales activity. And then I'd pass it off, because frankly, it's in discovery that we make the greatest discovers, kind of learn a lot in discovery. I'm going to learn what our sales processes like at the tip of the spear, finding out what customers need. I'm going to find out what my flow is like. Can you imagine if I came into a company and said, "Give me one discovery call a day" and they said, "Boss, we don't have one", right? "We don't have one for you. We are going to have to work at that." It's like, "Really? That tells me something already."

Corey Frank (16:52):

And five no shows in five days or whatever-

Chris Beall (16:54):

Exactly. You'll gain more information through that half-hour. Then all the staff meetings you will ever hold in the entire year. You'll gain credibility because you'll be out there executing discovery calls. And if you're really good at taking credit, you can take credit for the deals that come afterwards. Now, it's kind of funny because all you are is a filter. You're a pretty good filter if you can discover need, and the need turns into something that happens downstream, turns into business. Those are your deals, so you'll be an actual player. But what you'll learn is the stuff where you can move the needle with very little effort. It's always hiding in there somewhere. No one's going to tell you, "Did you know, that we have three extra steps in our sales process that we inherited from five years ago, that drive away the best customers?" "Why?" "Well, because somebody once said that if we make them sign the contract first, rather than whatever, blah, blah, blah, blah." Right? And when you're the rep you're going, "Are you kidding me? That's crazy."

Chris Beall (17:54):

I could feel it. Right? So you'll find the points where you can have the maximum impact with the minimum disruption and credibility factor is huge. One of the things you need as a CEO in all cases is either credibility or the illusion of credibility and real credibility doesn't hurt the illusion. So if you're an illusion and kind of Mr. Monkey, then this will help. If you're not, and you're a reality kind, then this will help. So the one thing I would advise any CEO to do, by the way, if you're a VP of Sales, Chief Revenue Officer, whatever you are, including if you are that director of business development, take one discovery call per day on your calendar. 250 discovery calls a year will transform you and will transform your business.

Corey Frank (18:39):

That's exceptional advice in today. If you had to guess, since I've done all those roles and I failed in all those roles, and that's such an incredible piece of advice Chris. Like I said, we've known each other for a long time. You've seen some of the organizations that I've been a part of and that I created. And I can tell you that I fall into a lot of those same traps, "Hey, I only want to be on the big deals" or just kind of saved me for just the ones that have a lot of meat on that chicken wing. And I've been doing it completely backwards. That's so incredibly embarrassing. Cringe-worthy for a sales guy like me to hear that something so simple, outcomes raiser, in that regard, that's just one a day. I mean, you talk with sales organizations, you and Jonti and Shawn talk with sales organizations, VPS all day long. How many are doing that today, would you think? What percentage?

Chris Beall (19:30):

I'd be shocked if it was 5% of CEOs... I'd be shocked if it was two. I'd be shocked if it was 2%. The easiest cheapest thing in the world to give yourself information and the organizational power, including by the whiteboard power. Because when you're in a board meeting and those numbers are up there and somebody poking at the numbers, do you want to be held hostage by your VP of Sales? That's the only person with the story, right? That might be the person you need to fire tomorrow, for all you know. You better have some of your own stories and they better be firsthand, not secondhand. And so, 250 stories to choose for a year or so, a lot better than maybe zero or one whale or whatever you called in on the big deal or whatever.

Corey Frankl (20:10):

That's malpractice insurance, as far as I'm concerned, what you're just communicating here. I've certainly been guilty of it for many, many years.

Chris Beall (20:17):

It's massive. And it's simple. It's easy. It's executable. And guess what? It's also fun because one of the problems at CEO job is your office, if you have one and you might notice I tend not to, for this reason. Somebody once asked me, "Why aren't you ever in the office?" I said, "Every time I go there, there's no customers." I tell her I don't see anybody that's interesting there, because I know you guys and talk to you anytime, but no customers, right? When you think about it, it's like your office as a CEO goes from being a place of discourse to an echo chamber, because people will want to tell you what they think you want to hear. And the one-party who won't tell you what they think you want to hear is a prospect. They'll tell you the truth, but at least they'll tell you the truth.

Chris Beall (21:01):

If you're humble enough to do what it takes, to get a confession out of them. So if you can do that, you'll get the truth. And the truth will set you free. Shawn McLaren always repeats that. Anytime somebody goes down, one of these perceptions is reality paths, or they don't want to know the truth. He says, "Just repeats that", know the truth. Truth will set you free.

Corey Frank (21:22):

That's right.

Chris Beall (21:23):

So here's the simple way of getting the truth, with variety. What's statistical variety? 250 is a pretty big number. I had 200 squared. If we just had 200 a year, 200 squared as what? 40,000. Your market is 40,000. You just did a clean sample in a year with statistical validity. You got to hear all the different things people are going to say. And every once in a while, you're going to find something.

Chris Beall (21:45):

I found something three weeks ago. I let people just jump onto my calendar and ask the Sales Development team to really load me up, because I wanted to see what did it feel like friction-wise to have 10 discovery calls in a row back to that? I wanted to see how bad was it. Would I have time in between them? How much research does it really take? What's the handoff like? How much logistical work do I have to do? I wanted to drive myself crazy. It's not obvious, but I'm a really impatient person. I frustrate relatively easily. I know a lot of people, " Oh, you're so patient. You're so mellow." "Yeah, exactly." Get close enough sometime. And you'll find out that's not always the case. And I know myself pretty well, so I wanted to see what's it like. Beat me up. I want to be in the ring.

Chris Beall (22:28):

I want to have one fighter after another. Come in. Boom, boom, boom, boom. So the first one was at 7:00 AM, if we did 10 in a row, it's only five hours.

Corey Frank (22:36):

That's right.

Chris Beall (22:37):

Done by noon, really think about that. 10 discovery calls finished by noon, kind of nothing to it. And I was tired by the time we got to the eighth line and I was concerned that I was starting to not pay attention very well. And the eighth discovery call was an individual and I didn't research this person very well, but she turned out to be somebody who had worked as a consultant to one of our most interesting customers, who was in a new vertical that we hadn't played in very much. And so I did this discovery call and what happened? She says, " Oh, I want to start a company using ConnectandSell as the core in a vertical that I believe I know an awful lot about. And I want to set appointments in there and I'm going to create this company on these foundations. What do you think?"

Chris Beall (23:19):

Now, that was just a lucky hit, but it gave me a thought and it actually comes back to what you're doing at Youngblood Works. Maybe it's time for us to consider how hard it is for folks to take conversations at pace and scale and turn it into results and have a smaller number of folks who do it professionally, included with all the customers who do it themselves. Let's not just offer a do-it-yourself product. Let's offer something more package, but not just by happenstance. Maybe we should go out and start looking at this as a go to market. Now, had I not had that conversation? I might've gotten there eventually, but I tell you it stimulated me because there was somebody passionate about starting a business.

Chris Beall (23:58):

And when I pushed back and said, "I don't know. That business has got some dirty qualities to it. Be pretty rough. Customers come and customers go." I call it the chocolate chip cookie business. You promise them two dozen chocolate chip cookies with 12 chips at each one. One of them has 11 chips. They say, "Take the entire batch back and give me another rep." Right?

Corey Frank (24:20):

That's right?

Chris Beall (24:21):

And then, she pushed back on me and said, "No, I believe and this is why I believe. This is what I've done to prepare for it. What do you think?" And I said, "You know what? I'm willing to do that experiment." So now we get to do an experiment, looking at a new market as a possibility, a whole new go to market, which you're already pioneering for us in a very pure [inaudible 00:24:39] with somebody I don't know. I know you, so it's a big variable difference and would I have discovered that otherwise? No, so now I'm getting lucky, but that's important too.

Chris Beall (24:49):

It's important too to get lucky. I don't know what CEOs are thinking of. What are they going to do? Talk to their staff. I mean, they have work to do. We don't want to be bothering those people all the time. Track? Yeah. Look at spreadsheets? Well, that's a good one. And that's why God made weekends, so that on a Saturday morning, we can take a glance at a spreadsheet. And if something jumps off of that, ask a question or two. But really staring at data, doing analysis, reading endlessly, all that. Sure. Take half an hour a day. All the discovery call that's legit, just like any one of your other sales reps. Again, no cherry picking. And by the way, don't complain about the false positives. That's part.

Corey Frank (25:30):

As always. It never disappoints. You put the quarter in and you listen to not just one song, but we get a whole bunch of songs here for our value. Thanks for the time today as always. This is another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with Chris Bealls and Corey Frank.