EP116: Who’s Ready to Buy Right Now?

When your prospect’s response to your cold call is “Not now,” do you assume they mean they’re too busy to talk at that moment? Or perhaps this is just their way of getting rid of you altogether. Our Market Dominance Guy, Chris Beall, talks with Gerhard Gschwandtner, CEO and founder of Selling Power, in this podcast about a more probable reason you’re hearing “Not now.” It has to do with the replacement cycle and consideration cycle of businesses. In other words, where they are in the three-year buying cycle most businesses utilize for timing when they begin considering a new product or service — or replacing an existing one. Once you determine if “Not now” really means “We’re not ready to purchase at this time,” what you do next is critical! Listen in as Chris and Gerhard divulge the intelligent way to deal with the 11/12ths of the market who aren’t ready to buy at this time. Take my word for it: You won’t want to miss the market-dominating advice you’ll hear on this Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Who’s Ready to Buy Right Now?”

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 (01:22):

The big question in sales is who's ready now and 11/12ths of your market ... In the perfect case, 11/12ths of your market is not ready to consider your solution now. Consideration cycles are about one quarter, three months. Replacement cycles for solutions are about three years, 12 quarters. So one-twelfth of your perfect market, if your list is perfect, is in a consideration cycle this quarter. 11/12ths, you're going to have to address later. Well, on what foundation? You can address them without trust or with trust. Which do you think works better? It's actually as simple as that.

Chris Beall (02:04):

So, think of it this way. You dominate markets by building a pipeline that consists of paving the market with trust, and then harvesting the trust over the 12 quarters it's going to take to get to dominance. Market dominance is generally a three-year process. That's how to do it. Step by step, I have 104 episodes of a podcast. For the people who don't like this compressed format, you can go listen to it for hours, and hours, and hours and go, "I think I heard of all that [crosstalk 00:02:33]."

Gerhard Gschwandtner (02:33):

Let me jump right in, because it makes me think about the tone of voice, the emotions, the emotion of trust. And that is the emotion that you want to create in the buyer. But at the same time, you talk about the fear of strangers, that not only the buyer has but also the seller. So fear decreases confidence, and a decrease in confidence is also perceived by the buyer as a decrease in trust.

Chris Beall (03:02):

Yes. Immediately. You've hit it. One of the biggest problem in market dominance, it's getting started in those conversations such that your lack of confidence or lack of competence doesn't sabotage the trust you're trying to create. And, it's not easy to overcome. exhorting people to be unafraid is of not value whatsoever.

Chris Beall (03:26):

I went to a fantastic weekend experience with you once, in which the culmination, the last thing that we did, was jumped out of an airplane. Not all of us did it, but some of us did it. And, I did it. I'm like anybody else. I looked out of an airplane, I looked down at the ground 10,000 feet below, or whatever the heck it was. You're two miles about the ground. You're going to jump. Are you kidding me? I spent a career as a rock climber, mountaineer. Falling is a bad idea, trust me. I've tried it once or twice. This looked like a big fall. So my fear was an issue. The confidence I got was from the guy I was strapped to and from the preparation. Rationally, I knew we probably weren't going to die. And, the person I was with expressed confidence. Why? Because he'd jumped a bunch before.

Chris Beall (04:19):

So you need to be introduced to the problem of overcoming your own fears so your confidence isn't an issue. So that now, the buyer's fear can work for you. Their fear works for you because when you relieve their fear, they'll trust you. "I know I'm an interruption. Can I have 27 seconds to tell you why I called?" When you take responsibility for being a bad thing, and then you show them a solution to a problem, you are the problem, they'll trust you. It'll really simple, but I've got to say it right, which means I need that confidence. Confidence comes from preparation and from practice.

Chris Beall (04:54):

That's actually why we finally gave up over here at ConnectAndSell, you see this thing called Flight School. We finally gave up and decided to start teaching people how to have those great first conversations. And, it takes not just the confidence that comes from being taught, but it takes practice. If I'm going to stand in there against a major league curveball, have you ever seen one of them things? They're not fun.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (05:19):

Right.

Chris Beall (05:19):

It's not fun. That thing's coming at your body and it's going to break over the plate. And if you bail out, well that's an easy strike for him. And now that he knows you're afraid, he's going to keep throwing it over and over again. You have to practice that.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (05:31):

Yeah. I think a good way to take your analogy with tandem jumping is that you, as the salesperson, put yourself in the position of the experienced parachute jumper and your buyer flies in tandem with you. Because your buyer needs the confidence, your buyer buys the confidence first before he or she is going to buy your solution.

Chris Beall (05:58):

Absolutely. Absolutely. And the mindset shift you need to make as the seller is, "This is good for this person."

Chris Beall (06:06):

We're working with a company called HUB International and their chief sales officer, Scott Webb, called me up one day. And he leads their blitzes, personally. He converts conversations to meetings at an incredible rate today. But back then, he thought he was bad, it was 30%. He called me up one day and said, "Chris, my mindset's not right. I've got to more deeply believe in the value of this meeting, to the point where I insist on it." He now converts at 72.9% and considers that to be a poor form.

Chris Beall (06:37):

How did he get from one to the other? First, he made that belief change. He decided he didn't believe deeply enough in the potential value of this meeting for this human being he was talking with, even if they never do business together. No ulterior motives and boom, three X. By the way, the average conversion rate, conversation to meetings, is 4%. His is 72.9%. He is the rough equivalent of 17 people when he's cold calling. He's like a team of 17 people.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (07:08):

Wow.

Chris Beall (07:09):

And that's from a mindset shift. His technique, obviously good. He's been around, he knows what he's doing. But even for him, it was a factor of three.

Chris Beall (07:20):

Oh, I have another analogy here. I think many people know that when surgeons work on human beings, they use a knife. They call it a scalpel so it doesn't sound so bad. But, it may as well just be a sharp kitchen knife or something like that. They cut into that human being and there's blood. And often, a lot of blood because people seem to be full of blood. Now, does it do any good for the patient if the surgeon never went through the process of getting used to the sight of blood? Because the sight of blood is not a good thing for human beings, we don't like it. If we do like, by the way, I don't want you to ever reach out to me. If you like the sight of blood, that's a bad thing. Here, we have an important part of becoming a surgeon. It's not the anatomy, it's not the understanding of disease, it's not the steady hands. The first thing we have to do is overcome our fundamental aversion to the sight of blood.

Chris Beall (08:13):

The first thing we have to do, in order to dominate markets, is to overcome our aversion to ambushing somebody so that we can serve that. If we can do that and we can manage that, this whole thing becomes extremely easy. Then, it's repeatable because we're not fighting ourselves along the way. And then, that tandem jump occurs where it's a gift to the other person. You're giving them a gift. "Ride along with me and you're going to learn something." And you get to legitimately say, when they're being a little resistant, "I've been setting up meetings like this for a while." It could be zero days. "And not once has somebody come to back and told me it was a waste of their time." If you can say that honestly, it's really easy to get people to take meetings. But without that belief, you think, "I'm trying to get the meeting so I can make my number, so that I get the quota." It's like me, me, me, me, me. You're not going to get anywhere.

Chris Beall (09:14):

So the biggest problem in market dominance is that your intention to dominate the market, which is ego-driven, will keep you from dominating the market because it's ego-driven. As simple as that. And it's not a big transformation. That's what we teach in Flight School, we actually teach people how to experience getting their ego out of the way and serving the other person, with a precise script and certain intonation, that sincerely allows that person to go on a journey with us. From their fear, to trust, then to curiosity, then to commitment, then to action. And if we can make that cycle flow, we can dominate markets. And if we can't, it's a matter of luck.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (09:53):

Yeah. And we need to keep in mind of the role of the salesperson is to identify the opportunity, and also then focus on delivering massive value that's so superior, that nobody can say no.

Chris Beall (10:04):

Exactly.

Chris Beall (10:49):

I'll ask anybody listening to this. If you set meetings or you have people setting meetings for you, can you answer this question? What are the three things that a prospect will learn in that meeting that they will remember as being of value to them, even if they never do business with you? If you can't answer that question, you're not sincerely selling them anything of value. The meeting is the product and the product needs to deliver value, and the value will always be in the form of learning. You're not going to send them a gift card.

Chris Beall (11:18):

People who say, "Oh, come to my meeting and I'll send you gift card," you're just saying, "We have no value, so here's your stupid Starbucks card." What's that about? Can you imagine? I don't even want to go there in human relationships. If I have no value that I know about, I shouldn't be selling.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (11:37):

I want to remind ourselves of the value of time, we have four minutes left.

Chris Beall (11:42):

Any questions? They come along the way.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (11:47):

You have two more slides to go and I wanted to make sure that ...

Chris Beall (11:51):

I didn't know. Let's do another slide. We'll do them in a minute each.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (11:53):

Right.

Chris Beall (11:54):

What can you do about it? We already said what you can do about it. Make a list, hold conversations in which you're trying to get resonance. Make sure that you're setting meetings above a 5% rate. If you're my friend Scott Webb, that would be 72%. His team does about 20. But, set a threshold, know that you're in market. And then, focus and repeat. Get very, very, very comfortable getting that human touch early, to be the thing that creates the trust, that lets this get easier.

Chris Beall (12:24):

And then, the other thing you can do about it is be patient. It turns out, 11/12ths of your market is not in market this quarter, that's a fact of the world. You can't do anything about it except talk to them next quarter. So be patient and keep talking to them.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (12:37):

Yeah. Somebody just said, "Become comfortable with what makes you uncomfortable."

Chris Beall (12:43):

Absolutely. And that's true. This is the whole market of the professional, in every field, including what we're doing. I'm comfortable doing this, you're comfortable doing this. We could have a lot of people, if we said, "Hey, you're going to do a webinar, go," they're not going to be comfortable. You've got to get comfortable because it's uncomfortable. We're talking to people we can't even see, God knows what they think about us. They could be saying, "That Gerhard guy's so good looking. What's this Beall guy even doing on the screen and why is he yapping so much?"

Gerhard Gschwandtner (13:10):

Wow.

Chris Beall (13:10):

I've got to get comfortable.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (13:13):

So how do people reach out to you?

Chris Beall (13:16):

Well, let's see if there's another slide that has that on it.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (13:18):

Here we go.

Chris Beall (13:19):

Look at that, it's a miracle. Yeah. I'm Chris Beall, I'm CEO of ConnectAndSell. We do believe conversations matter. I think best is LinkedIn if you want to LinkedIn to me. It's easy to find. There was that big long thing, who cares about that. Just go look me up on LinkedIn, I'm easy. Shoot me an invite. There's my email address.

Chris Beall (13:40):

I think if you want to really learn about what I believe and what I've been talking about here that you can put into action, there are some episodes of Market Dominance Guys. Go to the one called The Secret of Her Success, in which my colleague, Cherryl Turner, teaches you to love no-shows. You will be amazed. She's also a super high converter, 35% conversion talking to CEOs setting meetings.

Chris Beall (14:06):

And then, for those who are curious about taking their team to the top 5% of confident and competent cold callers, we have Flight School. And you do a test drive, and you take Flight School and magic happens.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (14:20):

Quick question. How was the 5% and above meeting rate determined? Somebody's asking.

Chris Beall (14:27):

It's actually, for most markets, it's just math. You figure that the market consists of these 12 segments, so you have one-twelfth that are in play. If you exceed half of that twelfth, that twelfth is about eight-point-something percent, so about half of that is 4%. So if you exceed that, then you're getting more than 50% of what's in market right now, and 5% is just above half of a twelfth.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (14:56):

Right. Well, a number of people ask if they can get slides and share, and the answer is yes. And, "Did we record this? Because some people could not sit through the entire session, somebody missed the beginning." We recorded this today and we will send everybody an email with the recording. It will be on sellingpower.com so we'll notify you. And this webinar will stay on our website for at least the next 12 months.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (15:26):

Chris, thank you so much. I'm so happy to hear that you had a wonderful vacation. And I took a lot of notes today. I think that I would encourage you to write a book because people need it.

Chris Beall (15:40):

Well, thank you, Gerhard. I am writing a book. That's what the podcast was actually to do, was to get the material for the book. The book is in progress.