EP115: The Enemy of Your Message Is Drift

The only reliable way to see if your company’s value statement resonates with your prospects is to have lots of conversations with them, and for that, of course, you need salespeople. But as our Market Dominance Guy, Chris Beall, tells our guest host, Gerhard Gschwandtner, founder and CEO of Selling Power magazine, that’s not all you need. You first require an expert to craft the scripted message salespeople will use in their cold calls. And you need a coach to train your callers to deliver that message in the most effective way. Once cold-calling begins, you then need a coach to make sure your salespeople don’t drift from your carefully crafted script and specified way of delivering it. “Under pressure,” Chris says, “we all begin to drift, to try something a little different, something unproven. So, somebody’s got to keep the salespeople together, and that’s the coach.” Join Gerhard and Chris as they provide coaching on the importance of sales-call coaching in this week’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “The Enemy of Your Message Is Drift.”

About Our Guest Host

Gerhard Gschwandtner is founder and CEO of Selling Power magazine, as well as CEO of the Sales 3.0 Conference series. Gerhard’s career has always been centered around helping sales leaders create peak performance in business and in life through video interviews, online events, and live workshops and retreats.

Full episode transcript below:

Chris Beall (01:20):

You're going to start with one. Right. This is really simple. So you make a list of some possibilities and then you start putting companies in those lists and then you choose the one that's kind of right-sized. Hey, we think we're going to sell for average sales price of $37,000. That's our guess. And we're going to have a gross margin of 73%. That's our guests because we've looked at our cost of goods and all that. And so if we get about this many looking at our overhead, we will be profitable. That's cool. Or maybe we'll be financable, which is a speculation about future profits.

Chris Beall (01:57):

So we need a market about this big. So let's not make one any smaller than that. And then we're going to make some lists. This is why having the reps make the list doesn't make sense. This process would not work with a bunch of sales reps. This is executive management with the marketing function and the product function, getting together and you make the list. And you go, here's one, here's one, here's one. You could close your eyes and pick one at random, but don't pick two or three and don't address two or three at a time. We address two now, ourselves at ConnectAndSell. We've been in business 15 years.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (02:29):

Wow.

Chris Beall (02:29):

We've been selling successfully in the marketplace for 15 years. We're up to two. I'm thinking of adding a third. I'm almost there, but guess what? My salespeople are not adding the third. We're going to add the third over here in executive mysteries. This is board of directors level stuff. And like, are we going to do this? Because it represents risk and it represents an investment. So how do you choose the ones you're not going to pay attention to? It's all the ones that aren't the one you are paying attention to. One is an easy number. It's a lonely number. It's according to a song,

Gerhard Gschwandtner (03:04):

Right.

Chris Beall (03:04):

Lonely. But you have to be as old as us to even have heard that song Gerhard. So that's what an addressable market is. So I've already addressed this, but I'm going to address it again. Business leaders and sales leaders need to be business leaders. You must dominate at least one market because somebody will. That is whatever you're doing fits in one market, two markets, three markets, whatever, somebody is going to be the dominant player. That's called just math. Right. If you run a race, somebody's going to win the race. I don't need to know who it is to know that it's somebody. There's a little piece of calculus if you remember Gerhard, that they taught us that, right?

Gerhard Gschwandtner (03:42):

Right.

Chris Beall (03:42):

So it's a little fact about curves and this has to do with this maximum and minimum thing. So if you don't dominate at least one market, you have two problems. One is a survival problem because whoever dominates that market is going to choose whether you survive or not. They're going to keep you around kind of as their servant. Oh yeah. You take those, we'll take these, the good ones. You can have the leftovers. Right. So you're the dog under the table, hoping for scraps. That's not the greatest position to be in, especially if somebody can put the dog out or put the dog down, which is not so great. Right.

Chris Beall (04:19):

So the other reason is that it drives valuation. And whether you're a private company or public company or whatever, valuation is an expression of the willingness of others to invest in your future. That's exactly what it is. So you'll get 10 times the valuation for being a dominant player than for being the number two player. So you only have to dominate one 10th as many markets, like one and you get evaluation. That's according to the dominant player, and according to the other factors of your business. Like what are your gross margins, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now I realize in the venture capital-dominated world, this is a funny thing. They don't like this so much. What they want you to do is to spend their money relatively quickly and show that you might have some currency across a whole bunch of potential markets.

Chris Beall (05:16):

And they rely on roughly speaking, only two or 3% of you surviving and the rest turn into salvage operations. So if you want to play that game, you can go play that game. It's still really smart early in that game before you take the venture capitalist money to know that you can dominate one market. So what you do is you just make the list and you go talk to them and you don't even build the product. You just talk to them and you get the resonance and you know the meetings are moving forward. Then go get the money from the VCs and then you won't be conflicted because now you can sell and make them happy, sell and grow.

Chris Beall (05:51):

And meanwhile, you can also be dominating, which is your, that's your safety factor, because guess who you have to deal with at that point? You have to deal with the VCs. And if you dominate one market, if they don't want to fund you in the future, you just tune your overhead down and you're profitable and enjoy life. And then go find another market to dominate. So instead of being in that two or 3% that succeed, you will be in the 100% that succeed. Dominating at least one market assures success. It's very hard to go out of business as the dominant player in one market. It just is.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (06:26):

It's a very, very powerful lesson  . And there's something I think a psychological inhibitor that especially in S&B where business owners don't think that way. They think more in terms of survival or meeting immediate needs. But I think that the domination strategy that you're espousing makes a lot more sense.

Chris Beall (06:55):

Well it does. And by the way, it goes along well with survival and meeting immediate needs in a funny way. But it does mean you have to have the discipline to not do deals with folks that are not in your market. Or to reevaluate a very specific question, which is, did we just miss them? We should have put them in the list and we didn't. But I tell you confirmation bias will make you invite unwanted guests into your market and they will distract you. The disease that kills companies is distraction. That's why little companies shouldn't do quote-unquote strategic partnerships with other little companies. They give each other the disease called distraction and it's highly communicable. So be careful of it. You need focus. And the focus is, starts with the list. It's really easy to stay focused when you have that list.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (07:45):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (07:45):

You can go through the list and say, have we talked to everybody on this list? We haven't. Let's take the ones we haven't talked with and try to talk to them. Okay. If somebody wants help doing that, come to me. I can help you talk to a whole bunch of people. That's what we do, is like to folks. Right. And we help you talk to people. Have we got a meeting with everybody on the list? Not yet. Well, we have a job to get a meeting with the rest. Have we learned from the meetings that we've had? What resonates? So what percentage are resonating on the economics, what on the emotional, and what on the strategic, and what didn't resonate at all? That's a little trickier, but it's very objective step, by step, by step.

Chris Beall (08:26):

And by going step by step, we do take care of immediate needs. Because guess what? We'll actually be closing business sooner than not. And the best part is it keeps getting easier instead of getting harder. That's the reason you do this. Now here's a funny thing about markets and it's really awkward. One is you need different people to go on a market dominance program than are normally hired. And we already saw the answer in the poll. You need either externally or internally, somebody to do dispassionate research and make that list. And they cannot be distracted by oh, their comp plan for instance, right? I mean, it's like, can you imagine CEO of the company goes well, I made the list like this. It turns out it took us right off a cliff, but it helped me make an extra $50,000 last year. Like no, you get fired for that as a CEO. Well, this as a person has to have the CEO hat on, so to speak and they've got to be tied to future market dominance. So you need to hire either internally or externally somebody to do research.

Chris Beall (10:19):

Research. You also need to either hire or put in place processes that cause you to have a structured identical message that asks the question, do you care about the economics? Do you care about the motions or do you care about the strategy piece of what we offer or nothing? And you need to have people who are expert at delivering that. That means you got to hire somebody to help you put together a message that reliably, I call it taps the bells. So think of it like this. You have an assembly line going by you and your job is to determine which of these things that look like bells are actually bells. I was just in Italy and they have beautiful bells there and they're made out of whatever they're made out of metal, right, brass, bronze. I don't know how they make bells.

Chris Beall (11:06):

So they have these beautiful bells. But what if the bells could be made of clay? And they just go thud and they look identical. They weigh the same and they're going by you. And your job is to figure out which ones are bells that we can ship to our customers and which ones are duds that we have to just send back to be crushed up into clay again. Well, you tap them. Boom or thud. Right. That's what we do with conversations.

Chris Beall (11:35):

The only reliable way to determine that somebody is resonating like a bell with our message is one, to have a message. So we need to hire somebody who is really good at putting together a message that works psychologically for people so that they will resonate or not with one of these three elements. It's simple. It doesn't take very long to do. But now we need to hire another person and could be the same person, a coach to make sure that everybody's staying precisely on that message because the big problem with focus is the enemy of focus is drift. So distraction leads us to be scattered, but drift and Gerhard you and I know this well, right? We're both golfers. And we both know what happens to our golf swings.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (12:22):

Right.

Chris Beall (12:23):

When we quote-unquote, find something, right, on the range or whatever, or we have a lesson or whatever it is and we kind of got it, what happens? Under pressure of playing on the actual golf course, whether competitively or not, we begin to drift. We're tempted to try something a little different, right? We're tempted. And it's why golf is this funny game, right? It tempts you inside your mind to try something unproven because that last one didn't work so well, I'll try this. So drift is the enemy of the precision you need to have your message delivered the same every time, which it takes to know if you're resonating.

Chris Beall (13:06):

That is if sometimes I'm tapping the bell and sometimes I'm just waving a stick around, and sometimes I pick up a little hammer into it, and sometimes I do it with my finger, I'm not learning about bells. I'm learning about hammers and fingers. I'm learning about my reps. So somebody's got to keep the reps together and exploring the market systematically with a message. And that's a coach. Coaching needs to be done in real-time. Just like a golf swing. You can't bring me your golf swing from last week. Describe it to me and I'll coach you. I got to watch you while you're doing it and go, Gerhard, remember when it was really, really great because you actually had your right hand a little bit more on top of the club so your wrist could hinge rather than the thing you're doing right now with the thumb behind it that ain't going to work. Right.

Chris Beall (13:53):

In real-time, we could do that. At the end of the week, you're describing it to me. That's how we tend to coach sales reps. We get them together on a one-on-one at the end of the week and then we tell them war stories or we ask them how it's going or whatever. Right. This is performance. This is performance. And we've got to have a coach who coaches to performance in real-time. And then of course, we need to hire people who can have the conversations. By the way, they can be junior people, they can be senior people as long as they sincerely believe in the potential value of the meeting that they're selling, but they got to sell the meeting. The meeting is the first concrete step into the market that tells you whether that resonance is happening.

Chris Beall (14:33):

How do you know the bell rings? They take the meeting. Not they said a nice thing. Oh, I'm interested. Send me some information, blah, blah, blah. No, no, no. They take a meeting. So you've got to be trying to sell the meeting, but what's valuable in the meeting, learn it. So your reps have got to know what's valuable in the meeting, right? So you have to hire the right kind of people. You have to train them up to sell the meeting. You got to coach them in real-time and they need to avoid drift. Otherwise, you don't know what's going on in your market. That's a bunch of very practical things to do. And then your list is made by a research team or by marketing, if they're doing it honestly. And the driver for that is the company strategy.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (15:12):

I think you did a lot of thinking on your vacation about this because we have done a number of webinars together. And this is an experience today where you come up with a lot of clarity and a lot of good insights that are fundamental to running a business that's focused on market dominance. The enemy of focus is drift. We got to share it on Twitter. We got to share it on LinkedIn because so many salespeople drift away from their process, from their script, from their story, and they improvise like you and I do on a golf course.

Chris Beall (15:53):

Exactly, exactly. And they do it because it's uncomfortable doing the other thing. And by the way, you need to build what is conventionally considered sales pipeline in order to know that you're dominating the market. You got to actually be engaging with folks. That first engagement is probably going to be an ambush conversation. And the reason is simple. You can't figure out that resonance with the economics, or the emotions, or the strategy by sending somebody an email. The clever email that gets somebody to take a meeting, for instance probably is not a gate other than this is a person who takes meetings. That's not what you're looking for. You're actually, you have to do it the other way around. Define the role and the company and then talk to them. But the first time you talk to them, they're probably not going to be as ready for you to talk to them. You got to ambush them. It's kind of sad actually, but you got to do it.

Chris Beall (16:52):

And so to build that pipeline, we have to have first conversations. And first conversations with strangers are extremely uncomfortable. In fact, they're right at the edge of choosing to be exiled from the village. If you want to kind of go in the hierarchy of bad things that humans really don't like, here's what they don't like. One, they don't like invisible strangers. They don't like them. Because in the environment of evolution, I'm reading The Decameron right now, by the way, Boccaccio's Decameron. Right. So even just back there in Florence, in the 1300s, just then not that long ago, it was dark at night. There were no electric lights. Probably a quarter of the stories that those 100 stories involve an invisible stranger. Invisible strangers are scary, scary things. They're not here to bring us a Bud Light.

Chris Beall (17:46):

They're the bad people from across the river. We're really civilized in the village that we live in. We paint our faces vertically. Those horrible people, they paint them horizontally. That's terrible. Everybody knows that's bad, except them apparently. And they speak a little differently and they eat food that smells not quite like ours. And when they show up at night, that's why they're invisible. And they're not here to bring us a Bud Light. They're here to change the demographics of our village to look more like their village because we won't be here anymore. So we don't like invisible strangers. And we don't like exile. We don't like being kicked out of the village. So here we are getting those emotions about being an invisible stranger and maybe being rejected by somebody, exiled. And we package it all together and call it a cold call.

Chris Beall (18:38):

And it's awkward and it's tough. It's not as tough as people think. You can learn how to do it. And you have to have the right mindset and you teach mindset, been teaching mindset for years, how important it is. And you have to have the right technique. And I'll compare this to surfing. It's like being a surfer. It's very artistic. It's very beautiful. And you're probably not going to shape your own surfboard because you don't know-how. When you're learning to surf, you surf on somebody else's, on a board that was made for surfing, not on your eye idea of a surfboard. The script you're going to use is just like the surfboard. It's shaped by an expert so that you can bring your emotions out and be human. You don't have to invent the words and wonder whether the words are right, wrong, or indifferent.

Chris Beall (19:24):

You don't have to worry whether you're using colloquialisms or too many syllables or whatever and got the pace wrong or whatever. You can actually work with a script just like working with a surfboard that was designed by an expert based on years and years and years of experience and experimentation. And then you can get comfortable there and express yourself like the surfer using their body, using their balance, using their cerebellum, all that stuff they use in order to make that beautiful move on the wave. They didn't invent the board. Right. So your speaking voice is the surfer. That's where your artistry is. That's where your humanity comes out. I'll just give you a little piece of computer science here. It's actually information science. As you know, that's one of my backgrounds, right? I'm a,

Gerhard Gschwandtner (20:10):

Right.

Chris Beall (20:11):

Written millions of lines of code and all that kind of horrible stuff. And I'm a physicist and mathematician by background. I look at this like this. How much information is going back and forth as we're building our pipeline? Because it takes a lot of information to get somebody to trust you enough to listen to you, enough to get to the point where they might resonate with your message. Well, if I send you an email, I've got about 5,000 bits of information in there, if you read it. That's just information theory. A character of information is about 10 bits and I can add them up. I might get to 5,000 bits. When I'm speaking with you, that's 20,000 bits a second. So an email corresponds to one-quarter of one second of human speech. And yet there's not all the words of the email in that one-quarter of a second.

Chris Beall (20:59):

So what's in there? Is it just waste? Probably not. Right. Evolution kind of carries that stuff away. It's the emotional content coming from the tone of voice. It's who am I and can you trust me? That's what's coming in my voice and that's actually all of the 20,000 bits except the words. So the job of the words is to carry the voice. It's the job of the voice to create trust. It's the purpose of trust to allow us to get curiosity. It's the job of curiosity to get somebody to commit to doing something they don't want to do, which is to spend more of their time with us or with our expert. And then it's the job of that expert of the expertise to actually explore the possibility of working together to solve a problem.

Chris Beall (21:47):

So we've got a handle in our sales pipeline that first little bit. How long do we have to do it? According to Chris Boss of the FBI, used to be with the FBI, he told me the answer to this question one night, seven seconds. We have seven seconds to get somebody to trust us. So our sales pipeline really is this. Of that list we made, how many of those folks in that list now have some trust with somebody on our team because that person had a conversation with them and executed the first seven seconds correctly. That's the beginning of your pipeline. The rest of the pipeline flows naturally from the mathematics of the situation. Put more in, you will get more out. When somebody tells me there's a quality, quantity disparity, well, yeah, I have very high-quality conversations. I just don't have very many of them. It's like that's nonsense, because that's saying your psychic. You know in advance everybody who's going to buy.