EP10: Are You Serious About Reaching the Top of Your Market?

What do you need to believe when you ask someone for 15 minutes of their time? What’s the underlying emotional and rational DNA of true belief that is pulsing through your brain?

And even beyond this, it would be helpful to remind our listeners about our mission here at the Market Dominance Guys…what’s the real reason these nuances and steps and tactics of market dominance even matter? Because, after all, if we don't get past the discovery step consistently we can never dominate our market.

So all of these steps are not necessarily put in place for the salesperson themselves to be successful, although that is great byproduct; The real underlying purpose of all of this is to provide an alternative or an adjunct to the traditional funding, mergers, and acquisitions as a way of executing corporate strategy …That’s actually the purpose of all this…as my esteemed and candid co-host is very fond of saying, “You can go sell any damn way you want…if you DON’T want to dominate markets. Why? No one will care.”  

In this episode, I poke Chris into a controlled burn on the mathematics, the reasoning, and the basic economics of how to dominate your market…and why it matters even more in today’s booming economy.  This is “No Tourists Allowed: Are You Serious about Reaching the top of your Market.” 

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The complete transcript of this episode is below:

Chris Beall (02:47):

Exactly, and that's why the belief for the rep, wait a minute I'll go back to, what do you need to believe when you are asking somebody for 15 minutes of their time? At the very top of the funnel, what do you need to believe in that first conversation, not the discovery conversation, but the first one. And I'll go through the words one by one, I'll do the Jerry Seinfeld. These words did not come easily.

You need to believe in the potential value of the meeting that you're offering... Not certain value, but potential value of the meeting you're offering for this human being you're speaking with, not their company. In the downside case where you're never going to do business together... With never being a very important word. So there's, in the case where after the fact you learned that there's no hope that you're ever going to do any business with this person, you are still convinced that there's potential value that they will receive from this discovery meeting. And the reason there's potential value is there's always potential value in self discovery around your own problems. Understanding your own situation better by explaining it to someone else which no one has ever asked them to do, their boss has never asked them to do it, their peers have never asked them to do it, in the political environment they find themselves in its dangerous to do it.

That's why confession works. Why do you go confess to the priest instead of your mom and dad? It's dead obvious, right?

Group (04:26):

Yes, yes.

Chris Beall (04:27):

The sanctity of the confessional.

Group (04:30):

That's right.

Chris Beall (04:30):

it's built that way for a reason. And we import that into sales and allow that process, which is an age old process, the best tested process in human communication, amongst, among strangers. Right? It doesn't matter who the priest is. It doesn't, you don't have to have a personal relationship with that person.

Group (04:52):

Yeah

Corey Frank (04:53):

Sales reps start these conversations with, "So have you been sleeping around, have you been stealing anything lately? And have you thought about killing anybody?"

Chris Beall (05:04):

Exactly.

Corey Frank (05:05):

You know, do you suffer from these three... [Inaudible 00:05:08].

Chris Beall (05:08):

Exactly.

Corey Frank (05:09):

... without any empathy, without any trust built up, as like, I'm not going to confess... I don't know. You...

Chris Beall (05:14):

Yeah. What are you going to do with this information? Well, I'm going to trap you into giving me your money. I mean, it's not the standard sales call. I'm going to ask you questions and I'm going to trap you into giving you, me, your money in exchange for something that since I'm trapping you, it must be a lower value than what you're paying, you just don't know what it is.

So this [inaudible 00:05:35] ... again, I'm going to go all the way back. The purpose of all of this is not for the salesperson to be successful. The purpose of all of this is to provide an alternative or an adjunct to mergers and acquisitions, as a way of executing corporate strategy. That's actually the purpose of all of this.

You can go sell any damn way you want, if you don't want to dominate markets. But if you want to dominate markets, you have to have a repeatable means of having a conversation with somebody in which they confess. And you can determine from the nature of that confession and then their response to your three offerings, your three dimensions of offering, your economic dimension, your emotional dimension and your strategic dimension. You can interpret their resonance with one of those and determined, should we take a next step?

If we don't get past the discovery step to the next step, we could never dominate the market. So we have to have a reliable foundation and a reliable foundation as people have problems. We know what kinds of problems they have. They have one problem. They're frustrated with the fact that for something that's important in their life, for their professional life, they don't have the time, the resources, or the support to accomplish that at the level that they believe, inside themselves, it should be accomplished. That's a universal, it's the universal, as universal as sin. You don't have to worry as a priest and as a confessor. You never have to worry that a person without sin just walked into your confessional. Is that like a concern?

Corey Frank (07:12):

That's great observation. That's fantastic...

Chris Beall (07:15):

An impossibility, right? So that priest has a... The confessor has a super reliable foundation and all they have to do is kind of help it come out.

Corey Frank (07:25):

Yeah. Yeah.

Corey Frank (07:26):

That's great. And you can sell any model you want to, if you don't want to dominate your market. So if you want to be a sales tourist, if your company wants to be... They're just happy to get a participation trophy.

Chris Beall (07:40):

Yes.

Corey Frank (07:41):

You start something in this world, "Hey, I have a ConnectAndSell More... That's my product, and I was able to replicate 90% of what you do, and I just call it ConnectAndSell More. Instead of seven minute, ads it's, you know, six minute ads". But if I butchered this with terrible discovery calls, lack of empathy, lack of tracking my market, lack of understanding, I need 6,000 people in the market, I need 6,000 discovery calls to get there. Then I'm just happy just to get the ribbon. And that's fine, but don't try to kind of commingle your intent that you're truly out to sell your shareholders and your investors that you're out for market dominance, when you don't want to invest in any of the science behind this.

Chris Beall (08:33):

Exactly and the issue is, without market dominance, you're in existential peril.

Corey Frank (08:39):

Yes.

Chris Beall (08:39):

All nondominant companies go out of business. I mean, it's not like some of them don't go out of business, all nondominant companies that failed to dominate at least one market go out of business. It's the most predictable thing in business. The reason for business failure, for all the books that have been written about it, the reason for business failure is fundamentally this, you failed to dominate one market.

It's very hard to kill a business that dominates any one market, however small. They might have to shrink their overhead, to fit within the revenue that, that market and the product, the gross profit that market provides. But it's very hard to dislodge a dominant, a dominant player. Secular forces can take you out. That is that market could vanish, it could evaporate. So you want to have a portfolio of markets over time in order to protect yourself from secular forces.

That's why you, that's why you dominate multiple markets. That's why the ultimate business strategy is to dominate one market and use it as a stepping stone to dominate another. And preferably the other one is in a different state of market development with regard to whatever, technology, regulation, forces of history, some secular stuff you can't control. And your portfolio is built by having multiple markets at different stages of development, from which you cannot be dislodged. If you fail to do that, you will always go out of business. You just don't know when.

Corey Frank (10:03):

Mmhhmm (affirmative).

Chris Beall (10:04):

So this... What's so odd about this, this sort of approach to business is, it's actually an insurance policy. The first market you dominate is a policy that grants you immortality for the lifetime of that market. And immortality gives you freedom to execute, and the freedom to execute allows you to go dominate another market.

You have only two ways of doing it. One, buy companies that already dominate that market or aggregate enough of the market through acquisition that you get there, you get to 50% plus one. That's one way to do, it's traditional. It's hard to execute nowadays because the private equity guys have figured out, with a world awash in cash, which is the world is now, just awash in cash. And that's primarily because of the defacto redistribution of income toward the top of the income pyramid. So now there are folks with lots and lots of money, a small number of people own most of the money in the world. And they've got to put that money to work. And where do they put it to work? Well, they have people who work for them, they're called private equity firms. And what do they do?

Well, they invest that money in companies. So what does that do? Well, supply and demand says that drives up the price of the companies you would have to buy in order to dominate markets, as a corporate. So now that it's gotten so damned expensive to execute corporate strategy, this other strategy, which is, seems unreliable and scary, called organic growth, but it's not really growth, it's organic market identification, penetration and capture. Where you dominate a market that you take from a notion to a list. You say, "Here's a notion. I'm going to make a list. And now I got to go dominate that market. I need 50% plus one of them." If I do that, I'm granted immortality. If I don't do it, I've got to play against the private equity guys. And they have more money than me, no matter who I am, unless I'm Microsoft, they have more money than me.

The reason that I'm doing this whole thing that I'm doing, which I could be sailing and Puget Sound right now, I actually could be. The reason... It turns out, but the reason I'm doing this and that we're doing this at ConnectAndSell, this is what Sean and I deeply believe, is that the entire economy has changed in a fundamental way, that has very little to do with what everybody talks about, which is, "Oh, there's all this information and people come and blah, blah, blah," All that stuff, we don't see any of that as relevant. The thing we see as relevant is that this tectonic shift in the nature of market acquisition, that's occurred over the last 25 years and combined with the attenuation of the ability to get ahold of somebody and have a trust conversation. So you have this massive shift of how money works. It's huge.

And then you have this compression of how trust can be built by more than 95%. So you now can build only 5% of the trust in the world that needs about 10 times as much because of the way the money has moved, because you can buy a company without trust, but you can't get into a market without trust. So there's this new situation where there're specters and forces at play, that are multiplicative by the way, that is, if I need 10 times as much sales power in order to take a market, as I used to, and my ability to take step one, which is trust is reduced by a factor of 20. Then I have 200 times bigger problem.

Corey Frank (13:35):

Yes.

Chris Beall (13:36):

For survival because without dominance, I don't survive. So I have a 200 times bigger problems. So ConnectAndSell comes along and says, I'll take 15 to 20 of those off the table for you.

Corey Frank (13:47):

Yes.

Chris Beall (13:47):

I'll take that down. But now you still got this 10 X problem or 15 X problem. And it turns out that's all in mathematically the conversations at the very top of the funnel immediately followed by a new problem, as soon as you solve that, which is discovery. If you solve both of those, unless your product is junk, unless you insist on not listening to your market and adapting your product to it, or vice versa, you will dominate a market. If you're over ambitious, you go for too big of market. You might run out of money before you pull it off.

Corey Frank (14:19):

You're talking about the human element is so much bigger and what we're talking about here, then the average, you know, go to market strategy. The average go to market strategy and seed from a typical PE firm or newly seated company from a VC firm is to, as we talked about in the first call, right? Get some technology and hire some sales reps, and then, and then go. And you're talking about, that technology does a great job at bringing in leads and ConnectAndSell's case technology does a fantastic job of expediting the people that you need to talk to, but the skill of discovery, and then therefore closing is still 100% human. And that typical, and if I use tech, PowerPoint, Skype, Zoom, whatever it gets in the way of someone, gets in the way of connecting. So, in essence technology sometimes moves everything backwards because we don't know how to sell anyone anymore.

And, you know, right, I mean, people, people are drowning in leads. Think about this, right? You have, let's say I had best of breed and all these products, let's say I had an unlimited budget for ConnectAndSell and Seamless and SalesLoft, and you name it. And, but people are drowning in leads, but they're sitting on a glacier and they're dying of thirst.

Chris Beall (15:57):

Yes, exactly.

Corey Frank (15:59):

They're literally standing on water and, but people can't convert these leads because they don't know the human part and getting the commitment from someone. What I hear you saying, Chris, getting the commitment, the trust from someone in a competitive environment, that's on you. That's not on your tech. That's not on your pricing. That's all on you to be able to make this connection. And that... and PE firms, it seems like they would, that would be difficult for them to grasp because they don't want the human component, right? They've worked in technology for the last 20 years almost to, to get rid of the cumin component because there's too many variables.

Chris Beall (16:43):

That's what they think. They think it's idiosyncratic and it's not. But think about it. We'll go back to the analogy of the Catholic church. The church was built, not with buildings, it's built with practices, and these practices or traditions are highly reliable, very refined. Then there's the traditional mass. That's the marketing element we're altogether, because there's a... there's something magical that happens when a bunch of people are together and they're experiencing something that's uplifting at the same time that operates in a multi-dimensional, multimodal, multi-sensory kind of way. So there's the tradition of the confession. That's a reliable tradition. These things are human. They're very, very human. They don't rely on very many of the external trappings, but they're a hundred percent reliable and market dominance was achieved.

So it's... it's a dominant play. So it's kind of funny that the PE guys, by and large, don't understand that there are old models that are very reliable, because you always want old reliable models, when you come to human beings, you don't want to be inventing new models because you don't really know if they're going to work. So you want these old reliable models. Here's an old reliable model that basically says, "Here's how you take over a market. You have trust-based conversations over and over and over and over and over and over and over... People become reliant on them in order to get through their next period of time. Because they got these issues some side, right?" It's completely reliable.

Corey Frank (18:27):

But trust-based conversations. And they would say, "Wait, wait, wait, I heard Chris Beall say conversations." "Oh, no no." "Oh, that's great, then I can get all kinds of technology to add... To fill in conversation." "Your like, "no, no, no, hang on, trust-based conversations."

Chris Beall (18:40):

And now I've got to go to the most challenging of them, which is the first seven seconds of the first conversation when I'm an invisible stranger. And therefore I have induced fear. I have no, this, this is the hardest part in a way of all of this, conceptually is that the only thing that can work, the only event that can work a process that can work to build trust is one that exchanges hundreds of thousands of bits between two people. So I can't do that with email at 5,000 bits, I can't do it with social at 250 bits. I can't do it with advertising because that's attenuated over everybody who sees it. I can't trust an ad enough to simply buy a product or take a meeting. I need a lot of information before I trust you. Right now in a video call, we're exchanging millions of bits a second.

My brain is taking in millions of bits per second, every nuance of your facial expression of every, when do you nod? When do you blink? Does your shoulder go up or down? All of that stuff is coming into the right and vice versa. That's right. Huge amount of information. And once we get over this trust barrier, we relax and that information is less processed, unless there's something that's odd. And we are always on the lookout for the odd. And then when we hear it, if we have a trust relationship or we see it, we comment on it. "Hey, do you need a minute?" Something like that, right?

Corey Frank (20:16):

Yeah. Looking at my watch...

Chris Beall (20:18):

Exactly. So you have this, this problem and the problem is, we need trust, it takes a huge amount of information. Information moves in time. That's bit rates. This is Shannon's information here. I mean, this is, this is real bits here. This is not like some airy, fairy thing, this is bits. It takes about 600,000 bits be exchanged between two people. Before we begin to trust each other.

Corey Frank (20:44):

600,000.

Chris Beall (20:46):

600,000... We can get part way there and get just the first inkling of trust, that as we can not blow it in about 140, 150,000 bits, that's seven seconds of conversation. Conversations operated about 20,000 bits. A second. That's the sampling rate that we use on, on audio, where we want to have sufficient fidelity that we can hear in somebody's voice the truth about their intentions.

So we have this funny problem. We've got to get those 600,000 bits across, and we've got to do it in a way that's reliable. So on what can we rely, the equivalent of sin? There's one universal, you're afraid of me.