Market Dominance Guys

Ask 50 bartenders how to make the best Tom Collins and 48 out 50 will tell you: Pour 1 oz Freshly squeezed lemon juice, 1 1/2 oz Gin, 2 oz Carbonated water and 1/2 oz Sugar syrup and shake. Now ask 50 sales professionals how to “make” the best Discovery call and you’ll get 50 different answers. Have an agenda. Build rapport. Establish time frames. Set a power frame. Identify a budget upfront or don’t do the call at all. Do a question stack. Talk a lot. Talk a little. It seems that everyone has their own recipe, and yet they are still calling it by the same name. Now sales discovery calls have been around at least as long as the vaunted and debonair Tom Collins. So why do they differ so broadly, and what ARE the necessary ingredients for creating a great Discovery session? In this session of the Market Dominance Guys, I ask Chris – a master mixologist in his own right – for the best additives – including trust, tone, and pace to earn a true confession in a Discovery. This is “The Confessional is Now Open – How to Harvest Authentic Trust in your Discovery Calls” ----more---- ConnectAndSell. ConnectAndSell allows your sales reps to talk to more decision-makers in 90 minutes than they would in a week or more of conventional dialing. Your reps can finally be 100% focused on selling since all of their CRM data entry and follow-up scheduling is fully automated within ConnectAndSell’s powerful platform. Your team’s effectiveness will skyrocket by using ConnectAndSell’s teleprompter capability as they’ll know exactly what to say during critical conversations. Visit, ConnectAndSell.com Uncommon Pro - Selling a big idea to a skeptical customer, investor, or partner is one of the hardest jobs in business, so when it’s time to really Go Big, you need to use an Uncommon methodology to gain attention, frame your thoughts, and employ a sequencing that is familiar to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world. Through Uncommon Pro’s modern and innovative sales, scripting, and coaching toolset, we offer a guiding hand to ambitious Sales Leaders and their determined teams in their quest to reach market dominance. Today is the day things change. It’s time to get “uncommon” with uncommonpro.com. The complete transcript of this episode is below: Product is, how do I go about navigating putting the right steps, the mood lighting if you will, for a good discovery call to get them to feel ... confession isn't out in the open in church, right? The music's in the background and the curtain and there's the screen and I feel safe to talk about some of these issues because you are a white-jacketed professional who's already demonstrated to me that you've solved problems like this in the past. And, "I've never told anybody this, but here's the problem that I have. Maybe you can help." It rarely gets to that point of trust in most discovery calls I find. How do you get that spark going? Chris Beall (03:22): Yeah. So first is the very thing that you talked about. At the very top of the funnel we have to believe, truly believe, in the potential value of the meeting for this human being. And that's what we're selling. Now we're having the discovery meeting. So the very first thing we have to do, remember we don't have rapport yet with this individual. They've simply decided to take the meeting, so step one is to take that as sufficient trust for you to approach me and turn that into an opportunity for rapport. There are tons of ways of doing this. There are a lot of people who are expert at it. I have my own way of doing it. I simply ask the person I say, "It really helps me to know where somebody is when I'm talking to them in this world where we're all removed from each other, where are you on the face of our blue, whirling planet right now?" And the reason I ask it like that is twofold. One is I want them to have a picture, that classic picture of the earth from space, the one in which we're all together, because I want to bring us closer together. So the farther away the view, the closer together folks in the picture. So we're both in the same boat. Here we are. We're on this blue whirling planet. I want to see that Earthrise over the moon planet, that picture, right? That famous picture. I'm trying to get at that in their head because it takes this where you're over here and I'm over here and it pulls us together. And we're both in here. And that's why I say blue, because when you look at the earth from far away, it just looks blue, right? Because it's mostly ocean. And the fact that it's whirling, time is going by, we're spending our precious time together. So, where are you on the face of our blue, whirling planet? And then they'll talk about where they are usually with pride. Almost everyone is proud of where they live. So they have an opportunity to express something that's a value to them, which is pride. That's why don't ask about the weather, because people aren't proud of their weather, they're proud of where

Alex Honnold, one of the most talented mountain climbers in the world – who is the only man to ever successfully summit El Capitan free solo – and that means no ropes - by the way – had a strategy. And his strategy did not reach the top of the mountain. That was his ultimate destination. His strategy was to map the 30 sections – or “pitches” as they are called in climbing parlance - and practice the necessary and wide variety of different skills needed to manage each of these 30 precarious steps. Now as a sales professional, I find it fascinating that climbers call each section of a mountain a pitch…especially because, in this episode of the market dominance guys, Chris talks about strategy in much the same way Alex attacks a mountain…as simply a list of necessary and intermediate destinations leading to the summit or close. And each of these strategies needs to employ the proper tactic – or in this case – the proper pitch. This episode of Market Dominance Guys is “How to Free Solo your Pitch”. ----more---- ConnectAndSell. ConnectAndSell allows your sales reps to talk to more decision-makers in 90 minutes than they would in a week or more of conventional dialing. Your reps can finally be 100% focused on selling since all of their CRM data entry and follow-up scheduling is fully automated within ConnectAndSell’s powerful platform. Your team’s effectiveness will skyrocket by using ConnectAndSell’s teleprompter capability as they’ll know exactly what to say during critical conversations. Visit, ConnectAndSell.com Uncommon Pro - Selling a big idea to a skeptical customer, investor, or partner is one of the hardest jobs in business, so when it’s time to really Go Big, you need to use an Uncommon methodology to gain attention, frame your thoughts, and employ a sequencing that is familiar to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world. Through Uncommon Pro’s modern and innovative sales, scripting, and coaching toolset, we offer a guiding hand to ambitious Sales Leaders and their determined teams in their quest to reach market dominance. Today is the day things change. It’s time to get “uncommon” with uncommonpro.com. The complete transcript of this episode is below: You were saying that we are experts at strangers. We see, sense, can feel the seismic disruption in the force of strangers when they come into our life, albeit via phone or for a conference call or what have you. And so we're pre-wired to know that strangers, these invisible strangers, are inherently never a good thing. And so by understanding that, it's like I've seen the problem in the world and it's me. By starting from that very self aware versus being self-absorbed perspective, I think that's going to step one, chapter one of how a sales rep can have a successful discovery call. And so I think that's what we wanted to chat about today a little bit, is that this breakthrough that I really liked you talking about last time, is that the discovery call is the product, should be a product in and of itself, separate from the product. And that if your discovery call is all about an inquisition, all about questions that the prospect can see a mile away is only going to be used to box me into a corner with some fancy alternate choice questioning technique, then that's not a successful discovery call because it doesn't lead with value. It doesn't have any value separate from the product itself. And if you do that and you do the example you used with the black widows in the garage with the Raid, it only makes them angry. So you have to have the right repellent or attractant, otherwise you're only going to piss off the person that you were intent on. You can't be like Evel Knievel and jump over discovery into the close, into the product demo. It has to be something that has much more of a nutritional value, much meatier in this case. So I think that's probably a good place to start for today, is the discovery call. And how it has value, how it doesn't become successful, how you screw it up. Maybe a little bit of the biophysiology of why we need a good discovery call anyway and why it's the surest path, even though it takes a little bit more time and reps want to jump it, they want that Candyland shortcut, but it truly is the best way to get to a sale and then ultimately market dominance. Chris Beall (04:52): And number one is that the discovery call is a destination. You're not trying to get to a deal. The destination, and this is true of any strategy, by the way. It's kind of funny, when people talk strategy, so I'll back up into strategy just a little bit. They often are talking about the equivalent of standing at the bottom of the mountain and looking at the summit and saying my strategy is to get to the summit. But that's not a strategy. The strategy would be, looks to me like this crack right here on the northwest ridge is a good place to start. And there's a ledge up there that I see. And from there, it looks like we can traverse 50, 6

There is a universal product that every company has that it needs to better understand and sell more effectively and correctly. And it's a product that can be crafted and messaged just like any other product your team sells. Because it’s a real product, it requires belief in its potential value and worth from the folks that sell it. It’s a product that shouldn’t be short-cut or mis-messaged…or even try to do too much. It needs to be measured for effectiveness. And the ability to get this product in front of your list is also one of the keys to market dominance. That product is the Discovery Meeting or Discovery Call. In the episode, I ask Chris to separate fact from fiction and put some sound data and reasoning behind this misunderstood and much-maligned tool. This episode of Market Dominance Guys is The Right Tool for the Right Job, or as I like to call it, Don’t Make the Spiders Angry. ----more---- ConnectAndSell. ConnectAndSell allows your sales reps to talk to more decision-makers in 90 minutes than they would in a week or more of conventional dialing. Your reps can finally be 100% focused on selling since all of their CRM data entry and follow-up scheduling is fully automated within ConnectAndSell’s powerful platform. Your team’s effectiveness will skyrocket by using ConnectAndSell’s teleprompter capability as they’ll know exactly what to say during critical conversations. Visit, ConnectAndSell.com Uncommon Pro - Selling a big idea to a skeptical customer, investor, or partner is one of the hardest jobs in business, so when it’s time to really Go Big, you need to use an Uncommon methodology to gain attention, frame your thoughts, and employ a sequencing that is familiar to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world. Through Uncommon Pro’s modern and innovative sales, scripting, and coaching toolset, we offer a guiding hand to ambitious Sales Leaders and their determined teams in their quest to reach market dominance. Today is the day things change. It’s time to get “uncommon” with uncommonpro.com. The complete transcript of this episode is below: Chris Beall (02:11): It's subtle as can be, and when people want to change it, it's really fun to listen to them because they want to change it to eliminate the taboos. They want to run from the taboos into the conventional, where they can ask some normal questions. Did I catch you at a bad time? All those kinds of questions feel... Corey Frank (02:32): Why is that, Chris? They don't want to express vulnerability, they have an inner governor that says, I don't feel confident enough, vulnerable enough, to go there. And so, it's really on them, not necessarily, they're not ready emotionally to commit themselves to that level of vulnerability in our profession. Chris Beall (02:58): Yes. And [inaudible 00:03:01] puts it perfectly, which is, every objection I ever heard was felt as a rejection and went into the banks, the memory banks of, oh my God, I'm going to be rejected again so I'm going to take actions to avoid rejection. And the objection would be, no, I don't have time. To hear that in somebody's voice is actually not to hear, I don't have time but I don't like you, I won't even give you 27 seconds. And that'll happen. There are people who can say no, there are people who'd slam the phone down, there's people who will bark at you. All these things will happen and they accumulate so the emotional courage that it takes to be a cold caller is substantial, even with only two sentences. Even two sentences you can learn, and if you get the emotions right in your voice, you're good. Now that the cure for it actually is not to go get [inaudible 00:03:55]. The cure is to have a belief. And the belief is in the potential goodness of what you have on offer for the other person, which is never your product. So this is the other huge problem with this approach is there's a desire to skip the step of selling the meeting, which as an object of independent value for this individual, regardless of what is ever going to happen and to jump to selling the product to the company. And that error is the standard error. Once you get past the courage question, then the question is, what do you really sound like? Are you sincere, or you're not sincere? So you need to sincerely believe something to make all of this even- Corey Frank (04:42): So a one call close, even if it can be done, shouldn't be done because you rob the prospect of an opportunity to have this trust journey with you. You're really manipulating at that point. So even as a fuller brush sales person, even though they probably hit you over the head, there should be a one call, one door close, you would set the meeting. And that aspect of the meeting is the prize for that instance. That is the objective, that should be the only objective on a cold call at this point. Chris Beall (05:25): Yes. And therefore you must believe in your product, your product is the meeting. So you must know what they're lik

Growing up, your mom probably told you to never talk to strangers. She also said never ask anyone for money. So…fast forward 20 years and find yourself at your desk, a newly minted college grad and a fresh-faced and newly hired sales professional at a great company. And what does your boss tell you to do on your first day? “Um…Josh, I need you to take this list of leads and I need you to call them (i.e. talk to strangers)…oh and then, if they’re really friendly, I need you to ask them to buy something (i.e. ask them for money…or even tougher, ask them for time). Um...ok?” So how do you step up and actually tackle these taboos and address the social baggage that we all have been taught? How do you reduce fear and build trust…especially since you are even worse than a typical stranger…you are an invisible stranger! In this episode, Chris and I have a little fun in this episode of Market Dominance Guys and discuss “Stranger” Things. ----more---- ConnectAndSell – Welcome to the end of dialing as you know it! ConnectAndSell’s Patented Technology loads your Best Sales folks up with 8-10x more Live qualified Conversations every day….and when we say qualified, we’re talking about really Qualified…like knowing what kind of cheese they like on their impossible whopper - kind of qualified. Learn more at ConnectAndSell.com Uncommon Pro - Selling a big idea to a skeptical customer, investor, or partner is one of the hardest jobs in business, so when it’s time to really Go Big, you need to use an Uncommon methodology to gain attention, frame your thoughts, and employ a sequencing that is familiar to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world. Through Uncommon Pro’s modern and innovative sales, scripting, and coaching toolset, we offer a guiding hand to ambitious Sales Leaders and their determined teams in their quest to reach market dominance. Today is the day things change. It’s time to get “uncommon” with uncommonpro.com. The complete transcript of this episode is below: Chris Beall (02:06): In cold calling is "how do you step up"? And it turns out there was a very powerful way to do it, which is to break the taboo against being the problem and be straight up, just admit, in fact, proactively declaim, you are the problem. I know I'm an interruption. And that's why the phrase is said like that. I know I'm an interruption. I agree with you. You know, I'm an interruption. I don't have to tell you that, but I'm telling you, I know I'm an interruption. So not only have I broken the taboo, which gets everybody's attention, right? It's like blood, it gets everybody's attention. You can't open a cold call with blood and that one doesn't work. And you could, somebody answers the phone. You say: "Hey, Corey, you know, I've got a lot of blood right here. That's kind of pouring out of this side of my arm." Chris Beall (02:54): You'd probably go: "Oh my God, I might get your attention. But I think it might be a little difficult to the conversation." But if I say: "I know I'm an interruption and I break that taboo against being the problem." Then suddenly you've got to deal with the fact that I've done that. And this is by the way, how I was successful as a brush man in Phoenix. I would knock on the door and imagine your kid has never sold in his life. You're selling under pressure, real pressure. I've got to make money in order to deal with the financial consequences of a miscarriage said, miscarriage, by the way happened, just on the other side of this counter, in the middle of that kitchen, that's 10 feet away from me. It happened. And guess what it was: it was pool of blood on the floor. Chris Beall (03:41): So, I mean, imagine a pool of blood spreading across the floor, underneath my wife. So that's how, that's what I came to as this miscarriage is watching somebody in her, in her house, coat standing in a pool of blood. Right? So now I've got to deal with this and we're about to move the next day. We're going to move to Colorado. Well, now I can't move to Colorado. There was a hospital visit. There's... Corey Frank (04:07): And you're selling Fuller brushes? Chris Beall (04:08): And not, yet, I'm moving and now I need a job and I need a job in one day. And the only job I could find in one day was to be a Fuller-brush-man. And I met the Fuller-brush people at Denny's, the boss, you know, the district manager or whatever he was. And the training was almost non-existent. It's like: "here's the bag? Chris Beall (04:31): Here's the stuff. Here's what you do. Here's how you fill out the order, your territory dude go." Right? So I thought about it and I said: "Hey, this is what they said to do is knock on the door and then try to sell them something." And I thought that's impossible. Chris Beall (04:44): Why would somebody buy something from a stranger knocking on their door when it's 114 degrees out? That's just nutty. They have a perfect excuse to close the door, you're costing me a dollar, a minute of air condit

Explaining the decision to employ the newly developed and yet far-from-perfect radar system used to protect England from the stifling Nazi blitz in World War II, the esteemed scientist Robert Alexander Watson-Watt said, “Always strive to give the military the third-best because the best is impossible and second best is always too late.” This attitude of being good enough, and not perfect, has been dubbed ‘the cult of the imperfect.’ The French philosopher Voltaire summed this attitude nearly two hundred years earlier when he wrote, “The best is the enemy of the good.” Certainly, when creating a call campaign or lead list, trying for perfection in our initial query is also very much our enemy. In this episode of Market Dominance Guys, Chris explains why what you are doing when you create a list is already wrong! This is Market List Creation…Know your enemy! ----more---- ConnectAndSell – welcome to the end of dialing as you know it! Give your fingers a rest. With ConnectAndSell’s Patented Technology, you’ll load your Best Sales folks up with 8-10x More Live qualified Conversations every day… and when we say qualified, we’re talking about really Qualified… like knowing how many tears they shed while watching the end of Toy Story - kind of qualified. Visit ConnectandSell.com Uncommon Pro - Selling a big idea to a skeptical customer, investor, or partner is one of the hardest jobs in business, so when it’s time to really Go Big, you need to use an Uncommon methodology to gain attention, frame your thoughts, and employ a sequencing that is familiar to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world. Through Uncommon Pro’s modern and innovative sales, scripting, and coaching toolset, we offer a guiding hand to ambitious Sales Leaders and their determined teams in their quest to reach market dominance. Today is the day things change. It’s time to get “uncommon” with uncommonpro.com. The complete transcript of this episode is below: Your advice then if I may, we have a hypothetical software company that it's an HR persona software that helps me identify unhappy employees and it calls their social media and their credit score and their kid's college tuition and puts this all into an algorithm that spits out a score that says, "Even though Chris Beall is a good employee today, he has all these external pressures, positive or negative, that would make him an unhappy employee." Let's just say we have a product like that. And I want to focus on certain people in a company. The traditional way is to say, "Hey, listen, this fits HR people in an organization." What I hear you saying is, "It's more or less of who has the most, where is a potential area of pain from an organization that is suffering from turnover that needs to stem that turnover or that the cost of acquisition is so high in getting an employee that you want to make sure that when they find an employee, they keep that employee." And so as I'm going through this thought process of creating this list for this fictitious HR software company, what are some of the steps I should think about when I create my list from how most people do it, to how it should be done? Because I have a product that fits every HR person in America and every organization that has employees should care about this product, because you don't want those employees to leave. Chris Beall (03:43): So the trick to all of this is actually pretty simple. It is first to recognize that it's a hypothesis. Your list is a hypothesis about the market. It's not the definition of a market. And as a hypothesis, it's worth about as much effort and time that it would take to come up with a hypothesis for, gosh, I wonder if this pork chop would taste better with more salt on it? Really, you don't want to sit around for four or five days thinking about this, arguing about it. So thing number one is, cut it with the internal meetings that are full of everybody's opinions. All you're going to do is reduce the darn thing to a list anyway. Until you're actually talking to folks you don't know very much, get a cycle time for building a list down to as fast as possible because the cycle time to discovering if the list is any good is about a week. Done right, it's about a week. So don't spend five weeks talking about something that's going to take one week to determine if it made any sense, because I guarantee you you're wrong. So you missed, number one, admit you're wrong in advance, and then be bold in your hypothesis. Second, be very, very specific. So whatever your hypothesis is, don't hedge within the hypothesis. The goal isn't to see whether you can settle at a meeting. The goal is to see whether you'll learn something from having set those meetings. So be specific. Target a role, target an industry. If you're really in a frisky mood, target a geography for a funny reason, which is there are always differences in geographies that are not manifested in the data. Corey Frank (05:19): Really? Chris Be

Startups that begin their journey without a primary mission and focus on getting to true market dominance causes many teams to instead lead their new company into conditions that are ripe with extreme uncertainty and essentially abandoning all process. They often jump head-on into the product development cycle in order to execute on their “idea” and get to “market” as quickly as possible…so they can start selling and bringing in revenue. Understandable for sure. But this is not the only option…nor is it even close to the ideal one. Eric Ries’ fantastic work, The Lean Startup, demonstrates that companies CAN create order and reduce chaos by providing tools and processes to test their vision not once, but continuously. That’s the key here…continuously. In this Market Dominance Guys episode, entitled “Messaging Eats Product for Breakfast” Chris and I also discuss when is sales really sales, and when a product pivot should really simply be a messaging pivot. ----more---- ConnectAndSell –With ConnectAndSell’s Patented Technology, you’ll load your Best Sales folks up with 8-10x More Live qualified Conversations every single day….and when we say qualified, we’re talking about really Qualified…like knowing how many tears were shed while watching Titanic kind of qualified. Visit, ConnectAndSell.com Uncommon Pro - Selling a big idea to a skeptical customer, investor, or partner is one of the hardest jobs in business, so when it’s time to really Go Big, you need to use an Uncommon methodology to gain attention, frame your thoughts, and employ a sequencing that is familiar to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world. Through Uncommon Pro’s modern and innovative sales, scripting, and coaching toolset, we offer a guiding hand to ambitious Sales Leaders and their determined teams in their quest to reach market dominance. Today is the day things change. It’s time to get “uncommon” with uncommonpro.com. The complete transcript of this episode is below: We had left off last time with this concept of do something that looks like sales or do you actually do sales. Whereas the goal was to actually do something that looks like sales from our friend VenCat and his concept of trying to get to these pivot points as quickly as possible. Chris Beall (02:25): That's a very interesting point. I think it's funny that when you think about it, the looks like sales part actually is sales, but it has this subtlety, this subtle difference, which is that rather than it being an activity that is, I'll say, thrown to the sales department and we measure, "Did you sell something?" We do something that looks exactly like what we would do if the sales department were very mature and well run, which is they handle the top of their funnel with great discipline. That's what great sales departments do is that when you look at the top of their funnel, it looks very smooth. The flow is smooth. And instead of desperately lunging for the deal at the end of the month, the quarter, the whatever in order to quote unquote, make their number, their goaled the same way but the flow is so smooth that they actually make things happen all along the way. And I mean, that's I think the greatest distinction between a well-run sales organization and sort an average sales organization is a well-run sales organization, even if the deals will tend to close toward the end of the period because that's how their buyers are trained to behave and it's just easier to do that way, their top of the funnel on there and as a result, their pipeline, they call it strong, but it's really smooth. It's just, it flows. There are opportunities that flow in, they have consistent false positive rates. If you were to investigate them carefully, they'd have very low false negative rates, that is they'd be catching most of the opportunities out there before their competitors do. That's the essence. And what we're really talking about here is market dominance and therefore we're talking about competition. So, the key isn't just to survive and thrive in the venture capitalist eyes, it's to actually win the market. So, even if you weren't funded at all by external funding, core dynamic is you want to be there before your competition is there. I think what really happens done right is you build the top of the sales organization, that is the top of the funnel, exactly like you would have it at maturity and you simply do it faster and you run it faster. Down funnel, your activities are very similar but they're subtly different. So, discovery actually a great discovery is real discovery. That is it's not a drive to a deal. Because once the top of your funnel is in good shape and is flowing well, you can afford to do true discovery. That you can afford to have a conversation with somebody in which you discover whether your idea of your offering and their current concept of their problem as it evolves in the conversation that you have together, turns out to be a fit sufficiently to

I know many veteran entrepreneurs would agree that “Raising venture capital is the easiest thing that a startup founder is probably ever going to do.” Marc Andreessen said that the venture capital business is a 100% game of outliers- it’s all about extreme exceptions.” “…think about it…there are on the order of 4-5000 ‘fundable’ companies a year, that want to raise venture capital.” “…and about 300 of those will get funded by what’s considered a ’top tier VC’; about 25 of those will someday get to a 100M in revenue…” “…and those 25 from that year, will generate something on the order of 97% of all the returns for the entire category of VC in that year.” In this episode of Market Dominance Guys, Corey asked Chris to tackle the mindset around this Venture Capital seduction process and break it down with eyes fully open to its true purpose and function. Who should you have on your team to really give you the brutally honest feedback you need…before the VC enters the picture? And most importantly, how can you ensure that your VCs goals and YOUR goals are properly in alignment? This is the Market Dominance Guys: “The Hard Truths about Taking VC Funding” ----more---- ConnectAndSell – With ConnectAndSell’s Patented Technology, you’ll load your Best Sales folks up with 8-10x More Live qualified Conversations every day….and when we say qualified, we’re talking about really Qualified…like knowing how many tears they shed while watching the end of Toy Story - kind of qualified. Visit ConnectandSell.com Uncommon Pro - Selling a big idea to a skeptical customer, investor, or partner is one of the hardest jobs in business, so when it’s time to really Go Big, you need to use an Uncommon methodology to gain attention, frame your thoughts, and employ a sequencing that is familiar to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world. Through Uncommon Pro’s modern and innovative sales, scripting, and coaching toolset, we offer a guiding hand to ambitious Sales Leaders and their determined teams in their quest to reach market dominance. Today is the day things change. It’s time to get “uncommon” with uncommonpro.com. The complete transcript of this episode is below: Corey Frank (02:34): I just find that [inaudible 00:02:35] entrepreneurs, especially if they go into a traditional VC, they're not getting that to be true to the process. Maybe a list of ventures with their book seems to have that template on the process. And I think a lot of VCs and financial institutions are following that model from that PE firm. But the vast majority, they're not clinging or adhering to maybe financial process controls. But nothing outside the realm of doing what you're talking about, which is validating, vetting the customer persona profile, finding the three pieces of information, trying to get it done in quick cycles, not 500 days, not 50 days, but trying to get it done in a couple of weeks, to then rinse, lather, repeat. So where is that disconnect where they're unaware that that is helpful? It seems contrarian to how a traditional VC operates giving guidance to an entrepreneur today. Chris Beall (03:37): It's actually competitive without a traditional VC operates, which is why you don't see VC encouraging them. Because the VC is actually interested in putting money to work, and then maybe having a win and having high salvage value on the losses. So the three things you've got to do as a VC is you've got to fund with too much money. You have to put the money to work. So that means you want to invest in companies that need more money later. You certainly don't want to invest in the ones that don't need more money, right? Because you have this other problem. If you were running a venture firm that had a very small fund or sort of an on demand fund with limiteds that were quite happy to have their money not invested, unless it's going to be a win, then you might run a process that emphasizes early on making sure that we have a product before we build the product. Chris Beall (04:28): I mean, a VC that focused on that would actually just have to restructure their portfolio to say, we're always going to win, but we're never going to own as much because we don't get to put as much money to work, but we'll be happy doing that. We'll end up owning 8.7% instead of 87%, but we're going to win a hundred percent of the time. And we're still going to have the same unicorn ratios, so to speak. We'll still have the same big home run ratios, but instead of salvage value, we're going to eliminate salvage entirely and always build companies that work. It's actually impossible to build a company that doesn't work. If you go through the initial process of making sure that somebody wants your product and will buy enough to cover the cost of developing the darn thing and taking it to market, that's a working company a hundred percent of the time. Chris Beall (05:19): It may not be huge already, but you can actually repeat the process over and over. Y

In our journey to Market Dominance, Hope springs eternal…it does in sales forecasts…in product rollouts…and especially in venture fundraising. “But Hope is not a strategy. And Luck is not a factor. And fear is not an option.” In this episode, I ask Chris about the key features and strategies every startup must-have. I brought extra paper expecting a long list…but to Chris, things are simplified…there are only three. So arm yourself! Tune in to this episode of Market Dominance Guys to hear Corey and Chris and let’s now dive into the 3 Features & 3 Strategies Every Startup Must Have. ----more---- ConnectAndSell – With ConnectAndSell’s Patented Technology, you’ll load your Best Sales folks up with 8-10x More Live qualified Conversations every single day….and when we say qualified, we’re talking about really Qualified, like knowing how many tears were shed while watching Titanic kind of qualified. Visit ConnectAndSell.com Uncommon Pro - Selling a big idea to a skeptical customer, investor, or partner is one of the hardest jobs in business, so when it’s time to really Go Big, you need to use an Uncommon methodology to gain attention, frame your thoughts, and employ a sequencing that is familiar to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world. Through Uncommon Pro’s modern and innovative sales, scripting, and coaching toolset, we offer a guiding hand to ambitious Sales Leaders and their determined teams in their quest to reach market dominance. Today is the day things change. It’s time to get “uncommon” with uncommonpro.com. The complete transcript of this episode is below: Chris Beal (01:40): This is the work that has to be done before the product is built. This is the key to the whole thing is, know that the product is going to succeed in the marketplace before you build the product. I hate to say it, but it sounds like an art of war thing. This is where you win the battle and you actually win the war before you begin fighting, because you're going to lay out the intelligence that you have in a way that guarantees that before your enemy starts to maneuver, you've already won. So the whole idea of this approach is to always win before building the product because you build the product that is going to not only win, that is you can set appointments for it, but that has such a headstart and such velocity going into the market, that you have the luxury of a full pipeline all the time, and you can be selective and choose the best customers. And the issue is always customer quality, not customer quantity. And I don't mean this BS that people say about if I totally talked to one person a day, that's high quality. What I mean is your targeting needs to be as much as possible, like that hypothetical person in the bar. So think of it as I go in and I look at that person, but they look kind of fuzzy. Every time I try to focus on them sometimes they're tall, sometimes they're short, sometimes male, sometimes female, sometimes the drinking with the right hand, sometimes it's the left, sometimes it's whiskey, sometimes it's beer, that's not good. I want that shimmering image to come down to a single human being. That thing that they call a persona because that's all I've got. And then I'm going to make a list that I think contains them. But of course it's got to be a little broad. Good queries always delivered too much data. Therefore good queries have always got to be winnowed against the obvious false negatives. Obvious false negatives must be removed because they're pure pollution and they can only be removed by inspection. And a huge mistake people make is they diddle around with the query to try to get the perfect list. If the process is due to query, inspect not one at a time, but in chunks of titles. Wipe out titles you know are bad, that you just know they're bad. If you're going after CEOs and you see somebody's title is assistant to the CEO and out of a list of 10,000, you have 2,337 of those, wipe them out. Don't go about making a better query, just get rid of them. Corey Frank (04:07): But why do people leave them in? Is it the security of the numbers? Is it the hope that maybe my persona could be saying, "Hey, it's a beer drinker and maybe he also could be a whiskey drinker and maybe he also drinks wine." And trying to take it from the backend of the dog versus having the empirical data stare at me in the face here. Chris Beal (04:30): Entrepreneurs make the mistake repeatedly encouraged by venture investors, by the way. To describe their market, their total addressable market is vast. As though that's an advantage, it's a huge disadvantage. The tighter your first market, the better off you are because the better your chance of your product actually solving the problem that that market has. If you're making shoes for people that have a left foot that's much larger than the right foot, that may be a small market, but every one of those pair of shoes has a chance of selling because those people wh

Welcome to Market Dominance Guys. There’s a common storyline for newly minted entrepreneurs…it goes like this: I have a product… a widget…a service. It works…I think it works pretty well. And so now I'm going to hire a bunch of sales folks…probably a VP of Sales and he’s going to do the hiring…and then we're going to launch and then we’re going to get working and execute on that hockey stick picture I have in my investment deck. Oh, and we're also going to do the market launch, some PR about our funding, and spend a few bucks updating the website. Now every superhero has their origin story…and in this episode, I’m going to ask Chris to dive in and talk about Startup Origin Stories: Is Sales the villain if something goes awry? Is sales the hero? Where’s the kryptonite in today’s VC funded startups and businesses? Tune in to this episode of Market Dominance Guys to hear Corey and Chris explain sales isn't to blame. ----more---- ConnectAndSell – ConnectAndSell’s Patented Technology loads your Best Sales folks up with 8-10x more Live qualified Conversations every day….and when we say qualified, we’re talking about really Qualified…like knowing what kind of cheese they like on their impossible whopper - kind of qualified. Visit ConnectAndSell.com Uncommon Pro - Selling a big idea to a skeptical customer, investor, or partner is one of the hardest jobs in business, so when it’s time to really Go Big, you need to use an Uncommon methodology to gain attention, frame your thoughts, and employ a sequencing that is familiar to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world. Through Uncommon Pro’s modern and innovative sales, scripting, and coaching toolset, we offer a guiding hand to ambitious Sales Leaders and their determined teams in their quest to reach market dominance. Today is the day things change. It’s time to get “uncommon” with uncommonpro.com. TRANSCRIPT FROM THIS EPISODE: Chris Beall (02:11): Take our beliefs as an entrepreneur. The belief that we have inside that we can solve a problem that's out there in the world. We need to turn that belief into two things. Thing number one is a message that is designed to cause somebody to take a meeting in order to learn more about this great insight that we have. And the number two thing is a list of people that we believe have a problem in their day that frustrates them. That feels wasteful to them. That keeps them from going where they want to go. We need to make a list of those people. And then we have just a very simple next step in the recipe, which is hold conversations with those people to set appointments, to have this meeting, that what we'll call this discovery meeting and the number one way that we know we should stop. Stop moving forward. And pivot is when we cannot get that meeting flow rate or that meeting ratio conversation and meeting ratio above 5%. until we do that, we don't really know enough to hold those discovery meetings. We hold them anyway, but we're holding them without knowing how to get them. There's no point in having something downstream, that's very desirable that we don't know how to get. We need to be able to get those discovery meetings and we need to get them at a known cost and a known flow rate. Costs because money's important flow rate because time is important. We run out of money. We run out of market opportunity if we don't move fast. So what are those flow rates? The ratio is turns out a 5% conversations turning into meetings is one of them. It turns out another one is about 20 conversations per day. That's a 100 a week. That means each week we exhaust statistically the information that we can get for a market of 10,000. 10,000 square root of 10,000 is 100. We've sampled the 10,000 sufficiently after 100 conversations. Corey Frank (04:07): After a week. Chris Beall (04:08): After a week, if 100 conversations in a week lead us to five meetings, then we know we're on a path where we can go and amp that up and say, let's hold those five meetings in the following week or whenever the next week or two. And let's go get another 100. At the end of the first month, we have 400 [crosstalk 00:04:25]. The problem is if it takes you 50 days to do a cycle instead of five days to do a cycle. And by the time you've done the average number of cycles, unless you just get lucky, right? Luck is wonderful. You get lucky, you get a hit on the first one. It's 5%. You hold those discovery meetings. They say, "Oh my goodness. I just can't believe that we're talking about this. I'd buy that. I'd buy that for twice as much as you're talking about." If that happens, great, boom done. Don't keep doing this process. Don't tune it any further. Make that list. You got the list, go sell. So make the product, fill it in with services. Do all that stuff. Unfortunately, normally it's five, six pivots to get there. Why? Because there were subtleties that you missed when you formulate the problem in your head and those subtleties come back as fe