EP19: The Best Surfer (or Sales Rep) Out There Is The One Having The Most Fun.

A lot goes into building a surfboard. In fact, depending on the expertise and the quality of the board, there can be upwards of 39 steps from start to finish. It’s not a fast process and takes a skilled surfer on the shaper to know what a particular board size or shape will do in the water. Take Dick Brewer, the undisputed 83-year-old grandmaster surfboard shaper from Hawaii. Dick has designed boards surfing legends all over the world…the big guys like Laird Hamilton and Garrett McNamara. He says he has made more than 50,000 boards in his lifetime. McNamara says, "He makes the boards that I can trust my life on." Dick doesn’t take that trust lightly since Garrett regularly hunts waves of 100-feet plus to ride. Today, Dick hand-makes about 200 boards a year, putting his crisp, neat signature on each of them with a pencil and some of his custom wood boards sell for as much as $12,000.

Dick’s fundamental innovation was to shape the nose and tail of the board into a teardrop rather than an oval, allowing the board to cut into the water more precisely and help surfers ride inside the tube of the wave…this was revolutionary at the time and is credited with helping explode the skills and confidence of the big wave riders and also help newer folks try their hand at the sport. Tune in for this episode of Market Dominance Guys, "The Best Surfer Out There is the One Having the Most Fun."

In the previous episode of the Market Dominance Guys, we compared the surfboard to the words or scripts that are used. And the surfer – the professional salesperson who wields and performs those words with an exacting tone, pace, and delivery.  

And so in this week’s episode, I ask our own grandmaster and sales-pitch shaper – Chris Beall, about the critical nature of the focusing on the first seven seconds of your call to establish true trust and how that simple revelation was akin to Dick’s innovation of shaping the tail of a board into a teardrop and brought about a very similar revolution into our sales craft. 

This is the Market Dominance Guys and this week’s episode entitled, “The Best Surfer Out There Is The One Having The Most Fun.” 

Dick’s fundamental innovation was to shape the nose and tail of the board into a teardrop rather than an oval, allowing the board to cut into the water more precisely and help surfers ride inside the tube of the wave. This was revolutionary at the time and is credited with helping explode the skills and confidence of the big wave riders and also help newer folks try their hand at the sport. 

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The complete transcript of this episode is below:

Chris Beall (03:45):

When Chris Voss said, right now, to me that evening, when he said, "You need to show this person that you're competent to solve a problem they have right now." It was the words right now that blew my [inaudible 00:04:00] up because I just suddenly realized, wait a minute, the problem this person has right now is me. And it turns out the secret to the whole damned thing is for me to actually say, "I am the problem." And to offer a solution to the problem that is me and that moves the trust needle every time. And this is where our customers, we teach them this get confused because they then go back to the traditional model and say, "Yeah, but did it produce a meeting?" And that's not the point. The point is 103 million, right? I said, 100 and this little test drive here, and 103 or 108, I think it was, million bits of information.

Chris Beall (04:53):

Most of which were not in the words. This is the other part that's hard for people to understand is within those seven seconds, I can only get out so many words. I can probably say 40 words, right? So let's try to see how many words there are. I know I'm in an interruption, that's five and I have 27 seconds to tell you why I called, that's 11. So 16 words are emitted during that time. So those 16 words average in this case, I think six, seven characters each. So 16 times, six times, eight, right? 16 times six times eight. That's only about a 768 bits of information. That's not very much, right? 768 bits. And yet those 16 words took seven seconds. And in those seven seconds, there are 140,000 bits of information that I've emitted. Well, all the rest of it's tone of voice, it's pros to what do I sound like?

Chris Beall (06:02):

It's who do I sound like? Is do I sound like somebody you can trust? So this brings down the talent issue to something that's really people don't think about, which is the quality of the voice. I'll call it the obvious sincerity of the human being who is having that first seven second conversation, is the key to market dominance. This scripts purpose, the 768 bits of information, its role is to be like a surfboard. The job at the surf board is not to ride the wave. Pro surf boards in the ocean all day long and you will not have very many artistic wave riding experiences. Surf boards just bop around and do whatever they do. And every once in a while, one of them kind of comes in on a wave and stays on it for a while. Nothing very interesting happens.

Chris Beall (06:52):

You put a surfer on the surf board, constrained by the surf board, right? They can't walk around anywhere else on the water. They can only walk around in that little tiny little floaty thing that they got underneath them and a fairly small amount of that. But if their skill is high and their courage is there, they know what they're doing, within that script, that is the surf board. They can express their personality.

Corey Frank (07:14):

Well, let me talk about that for a second. I love, first of all, I love that analogy. The script is your surf board. The surfer is the tone and the sincerity and who wields that tool.

Chris Beall (07:24):

Yes.

Corey Frank (07:25):

So James, what's the gentleman's name? James Wahlberg? He does the videos. I love his...

Chris Beall (07:31):

[inaudible 00:07:31].

Corey Frank (07:31):

[inaudible 00:07:31] . Right? And I love his breakthrough script, but his value prop that he delivers that I think that's where the hiccup is because his tone is exceptional. Right? Very empathetic. His pacing is a masterclass. His body language just gets into it. Right? I mean, he doesn't have 100 calls, right? He has one call a hundred times. I mean, he is just the iceman. He does not leave his wing man. I love it. But it just seems that the far be it is for me. I don't know. I, I respect the hell out of him for doing it, but seems like he could do some help on his, on that initial big idea. That seemed to be where he's missing a lot of his success. Now, granted, it's not the sexiest product, but I still think that's irrelevant.

Chris Beall (08:21):

Yeah. Well, if it's a pure trust product too, I mean, it's got the issue that it's a funny kind of software, right? It's something to do with this analysis, he is reluctant to talk about a breakthrough because of his own personality. I've actually taken him through the entire messaging workshop. And this is what I do a lot of now is messaging workshops. And the more sophisticated somebody is, the less likely they are to like the message that we come up with.

Corey Frank (08:50):

Yeah. [inaudible 00:08:52] It's close. I think really he's so close.

Chris Beall (08:55):

He's close. But I'm happy to have him out there amusing masses, right? It works like crazy, but it is true that the surf board constrains the performance, but I'd rather have a master surfer on a shitty surf board than the other way. Then me on the best surf board in the world. You put me out there on a wave and you're not going to get much because I won't even get up on the board. Right? But it does say that our talent management is we should be looking for, the guys at 511 Enterprises do this. So they hire people who are graduates of a couple of the religious schools up there in Redding, California. And they hire them because they were on a mission to help these people stay in the Redding area. And so if they could get them sales jobs and put them in this inside sales organization, that they run on the outsource spaces, then that would help their mission.

Chris Beall (09:51):

So they're kind of a nonprofit for a while. And then they became a profit-making entity and now a serious business. And what we call it is packaged sincerity on steroids. So they hire people who've been through a sincerity filter. It's not average people who go to school in these places, these are people who are above average sincerity. And then these people can be scripted. They can be given a surfboard and taught to surf, but they have good balance. That's like sincerity is like good balance, right? If you want to be a great surfer, you got to have good balance. Now this analogy, I think plays all the way out in a fascinating way. And again, it is the exact opposite of how people think about it. I had a nesting workshop yesterday with the manager and some other people and his paradigm was this. Well, my reps need to be themselves. They need to be creative.

Chris Beall (10:46):

Well, they need to be themselves. They need to be identical each time. And it's their voice that's going to carry this. Of the, how many bits did you? You get a lot of bits in here, 140,000 bits in a seven second conversation in which less than 1,000 of those bits are the words.

Corey Frank (11:04):

Yeah. Be yourself. I work a lot with Oren Klaff, his new book comes out today, great by the way. And he has a bit that he uses, he was on London reel with Brian Rose a year or two ago. And Ryan says, "You know Oren, in a high stakes sales pitch when this is your craft and your profession, can't you just be yourself?" He said, be yourself, terrible idea. You're not that good. Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld do not go on stage for a three minute set at the comedy store or in Carson and be themselves, right? It takes 30 hours to condense it to three minutes. Like Mark Twain. Mark Twain used to go through his words and his manuscripts. And if he could take out words, every other word, and it still made sense, he would leave the words out. And he took the word and it changed the fundamental meaning of it. Like Hemingway, every word is very compact and appropriate versus [inaudible 00:12:03].

Corey Frank (12:04):

Tarantino? You could create, you could exude three minutes of different scripts. It stays the same, the art isn't there, but the meaning is still the same. So yeah. Be yourself, terrible idea.

Chris Beall (12:15):

Terrible idea. Express your true belief in something? Absolutely a great idea. This is the other part that I find so fascinating. This sales person has to be selling something. So first they have to get trust. That takes seven seconds to move the trust needle. Then they have to sell something. And the question is, if I want to consistently go through a market and own that market. I want to dominate that market. I'd better be selling the same thing over and over.

Chris Beall (12:42):

That thing can't be my product because my product being software, no matter what it is now is always software is too adaptable. So it can't any longer say, "You know what Corey? See this, this you got to have one of these. The reason I have got to have it, it's got a little cover on it. And that texts the inside and it's orange. So it's easy to find because you're misplacing things all the time and you look at it and you go, "That's interesting, but you know, what you can do with those is I can use that as a doorstop. I can swat a fly with it. I can toss it across the room to amuse my dog and have him fetch it.

Chris Beall (14:16):

You know it's software, right? These aren't software, but everything we sell nowadays as 1,001 uses or 10,000 or 100,000 micro uses. Why do we have to configure software products? We're making the product that is the product. I don't have to jump out of the box of work except ours, actually, for a funny reason, it's because our product is not a product. Our product is the conversations that it produces. And so those are consistent because they're ancient. They go back 500,000 years or quarter million years or whatever it is that people, whenever people started talking to each other, that stuff so old, I don't have to worry about whether it's going to slip out between my fingers and become something else. The conversations are ancient and they're very reliable, but the sales person is still once they get that little bit of trust, they have to have something to sell.

Chris Beall (15:06):

The product that you can sell consistently is the discovery meeting. And when you sell the discovery meeting, you must believe in the product, which is the discovery meeting. So the key to everything in market dominance is this, make sure you get the first seven seconds right, by showing the other person that you're on their side. I know I'm an interruption. So one way of doing that and then showing them that you're competent to solve a problem they have right now, the problem I have right now, or they have right now is me. So let's solve me. Can I have 27 seconds to tell you why I called? And that's how we're going to solve me. You do your thing. You listen, I do my thing. I tell you why I called and it takes 27 seconds. And so we've solved the problem. Now, the question is, what am I going to sell you in those 27 seconds?

Chris Beall (15:56):

I'm going to sell you something I have to truly believe in, which is not my product will solve your problem. It's my meeting we'll teach you something. That's what I have to sell you. And to sell you that I have to know what that something is. All good discovery meetings teach something in one of three dimensions. There's an economic dimension. They teach you something about your business with regard to, or your own situation with regard to risk or with regard to time, or with regard to money out of getting it or saving it. There's an emotional dimension, usually around frustration, occasionally around fear, almost never around anything else. Those are the only two emotions. The third one is...

Corey Frank (16:39):

Is it economic and emotional?

Chris Beall (16:43):

Economic emotional. And then the third one is strategic, which is you're going to learn something about another way that you might not have thought about, or you didn't know it was possible or safe or whatever of going from where you are to where you need to go. And you're going to learn all three of those things to some level in this discovery meeting. Therefore, since I know that, I believe in the potential value of that discovery meeting for you, the human being who's going to attend it because companies don't learn. People learn even if we never do business together.

Chris Beall (17:13):

If I have that belief, and then I say anything that doesn't make you not want to attend the meeting, that's all, that's really, what's funny about it. It's like a negative rule, if I don't use the category of my product at all. So I keep you from being able to say, "Hey, you know what? That's great, Chris, but we're set." If I can avoid you making that fatal mistake of saying you're set, which you will always say, if you think, you know what I'm selling. Why will you say that? Because the alternative is that you're incompetent and you don't want to be thought of as incompetent. So you don't say, you say...

Corey Frank (17:50):

Large amount of time. Wordsmithing, nuance, pacing, tone. Role-playing around how to describe this discovery meeting that you're offering.

Chris Beall (18:01):

Yes.

Corey Frank (18:02):

As opposed to, "Hey, let's take 15 minutes and tell you a little bit about what we do and how it can help your business team save time, money, and whatever it is." Right? And so folks spend all this money on lists in their tech stack and their sales rep up a fucking ping pong table in the hoopla. And when it gets down to it, ConnectAndSell, they flip on the switch and they have just a terrible surf board that doesn't take them where they're riding terrible waves, if you will.

Chris Beall (18:31):

Yeah, they look ridiculous. They look like me on a surf board, right? They look like they're lying down or, you prefer, I hope a shark eats that one. I don't ever want to watch that again. It's that kind of thing. So I'll give one example and then I'm going to go talk with my friend Fallon at Node. Because she's got the answer to something. She's going to call me in five minutes. So we'll just wait for her call. So this is why our pitch sounds like it sounds. So ours is, Corey I believe we've discovered a breakthrough that completely eliminates the waste and the frustration that keeps your best sales reps from being effective on the phone or even using the phone at all. And the reason I reached out to you today is to get 15 minutes on your calendar, and share this breakthrough with you. Do you happen to have your calendar available?

Chris Beall (19:14):

No, every word in there, that's five hours of work to come up with that original set of words. Now it's down to one hour for somebody to learn the framework and maybe to believe in it enough to manage to it, which is what our challenges is. Please manage to this new framework. And why do we care about it being precise? Because every word counts in the surf board, it's like, do you want the surf board to have a fin on it? Because if it doesn't have a fin, when you move your weight a little to the side on the back part and nothing happens, it spins, we don't want it to spin. We want it to cut into the wave at that point. Oh yeah. But I don't like the fin because when I'm carrying the surf board, the fin sticks out in a funny way and it's harder to put it on the roof of my car.

Chris Beall (19:59):

Well, screw your issue with the fin, surf boards need fins, right? The reason for this word here, the reasoning for, I believe in here as uncomfortable as it is, is that's the fin on the surf board, I believe allows you to come back later and move your weight a little bit and change the direction of the conversation. So that's why we put it there. Right? So when we go through this process with folks, it only takes like Sean McLaren says, "Oh, it takes me three minutes to work somebody's message." And I say, "It takes me an hour." It's like, what do you do for an hour? I say, come watch some time. And so he came and watched and just sat in and I did one of them and afterwards he said, "Oh, that's different." I said, "Yeah." And yet the part where they do the only three minutes and all I do to get them to do the message is this, you walk into a bar.

Chris Beall (20:53):

I take him into the bar. And there in the third bar stool from the left is your person. They're wearing their ICP jacket. It says ICP, that looked like a motorcycle game, kind of person with patches and stuff. They're drinking with their right hands. You have to sit down to their left because right-handed people want to be free to punch you with the right hand or strangers. And then you ask him, "How was your day?" And they said, "You have no fucking idea." Then they give you the litany. And it's, Deming's litany. It's always the same. I didn't have one of the three things I needed and I didn't have the time, the resources or the support that I needed to do my job as well as I believe it should be done.

Chris Beall (21:34):

The only thing we have to sell in the world. Sadly, that's not the meeting. We have to know that that's out there or else we don't build our product. We use that personal thing is it that their feelings about that day as the bridge to the meeting and we do that by taking their feeling and turning them into negative words that follow the phrase, I believe we discovered a breakthrough that completely eliminates. And then we put that in there and then before they can screw around with it, because that will hurt them, we got to actually do something obvious. One, tell him why we called. Two, use the extra few seconds to set up a meeting.