The Sales Vitamin Podcast Hosted by John Bossong – On-Demand Conversations (2024)

Here’s what we discuss in this episode:

The idea forConnectAndSell
Conversations are the best sales vitamins.
Mitigating voicemail.
How to keep your sales team out of a slump.
Getting time back.
Less is more.
Curiosity, value and patience.
The emotional journey.
One sales book you’ve got to read.
Introducing people to rejection.
One sales vitamin.

Here’s what The Vitamin Podcast is about:

You’re about to learn what they don’t teach you in school. In the Sales Vitamin podcast, host John Bossong deconstructs the playbooks of the most successful B2B sales authors, leaders and field practitioners and discusses their practical strategies, perspectives, and insights. What if you could learn from a leading sales author, thought leader, or top sales performer and soak in their years of knowledge and experience? Now, you’ll have a front-row seat to learn proven practical sales skills, strategies, and systems from the best. The Sales Vitamin Podcast is for anyone who wants to be the best sales professional they can be and take away real, practical sales guidance. My goal is to provide a platform that educates, teaches and helps develop B2B sales professionals at all levels. Each episode is a sales vitamin to enhance your sales development and growth. You will turn each vitamin into actionable advice you can use no matter what industry you are in. Topics will range from prospecting, how to advance deals through the pipeline, how to maintain a positive sales mindset, continuous sales education, using social media, how to utilize all sales channels, negotiating, territory management, managing a sales team, and much more!

Here’s the full transcript from this episode:

John Bossong (00:00):

Hey, what’s up everybody. You’re listening to The Sales Vitamin Podcast. I’m your host, John Bossong. I’ll be deconstructing the playbooks of some of the most successful sales authors, leaders, CEOs, entrepreneurs, field sales professionals. We’re going to discuss their strategies, their perspectives, and their insights. So sit back, relax and get ready to take your vitamins, because here we go.

John Bossong (00:41):

Hey everybody. This is John Bossong, host of The Sales Vitamin Podcast. If you’re looking to build a profitable side hustle that also impacts people, then you need to look at becoming a certified leadership coach with GiANT. If you don’t already know, GiANT has been in the leadership space for over 13 years. They used to own and operate the John Maxwell brands. They ran the Leadercast conferences where Jim Collins, Henry Cloud, Malcolm Gladwell and Simon Sinek were regular speakers. They have over 500 coaches working in over 127 countries. And their coaches are being hired by companies like Google, Chick-fil-A, Pfizer, Delta, and many more. And yes, you can do this too. GiANT literally gives you everything you need to start your own coaching business from scratch.

John Bossong (01:37):

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John Bossong (02:45):

Every episode is going to help you with your professional sales development. It’s going to help you with your team’s professional sales development. And today we have got a pro to help you. Chris Beall, CEO, founder of ConnectAndSell. If you want to talk to more people, if you want to stay away from voicemail, ConnectAndSell is going to help you get there. And today, Chris is going to talk to us about that, and he’s going to give you a lot of sales vitamins just to help you professionally. Chris, thank you for being on the show today.

Chris Beall (03:20):

Hey, exciting to be here, John.

John Bossong (03:24):

When did you have this idea for ConnectAndSell? I know the company started in 2007 and it’s been an iterative process. I don’t even want to use the term auto-dialer, because it’s not that, it’s so much more than that, and it’s better than that. But when did you have this idea that, you know what, I think this is the way to do it?

Chris Beall (03:46):

Well, I stumbled across this company. I was actually about to move to Tucson, Arizona and work with a man named Dr. Roger Angel, who was the guy that builds all the world’s biggest telescopes. He’d come up with a new way of doing solar energy, and I’m a physicist mathematician by background.

John Bossong (04:04):

Wow.

Chris Beall (04:04):

Which is a little weird given what I’ve done with my life. So, I was going to go move to Tucson and do the business side of this new solar energy company. Then I was introduced to Shawn McLaren, who was the CEO of ConnectAndSell at that time, it was 2011, almost exactly 10 years ago this month. I went and met him, heard what he had to say. I was five minutes in and I just said, “wait, you’re telling me that you have reinvented the business telephone to call multiple people at a time, a list, all at once, maybe 5, 6, 7 people. Automate everything on the backend, so I don’t have to do anything. I just push a button and get to talk to Somebody. It increases the rate of flow of conversations with people I want to talk to by 10 times. And you’re telling me I’ve never heard of this before?” He says, “I don’t know what you’ve heard of.”

Chris Beall (04:58):

I said, “okay, that’s a good point.” Is it real? He says, “yeah, it’s real.” I said, “people pay money for this?” He says, “yes.” I’m in. And he says, “what do you mean you’re in?” I said, “I’m in, I’m working for you now.” He says, “what if I’m not hiring?” I said, “well, it’s a free country. I can work for whoever I want, you can even pay me if you want.” So, it must’ve worked somehow, because now 10 years later, and at some point they made me CEO. I was head of product. I’d done a lot of different jobs in the company, but finally it was like, I guess we’ll punish you, you get to be the CEO. What got me is, I’ve built businesses for 40 years. Businesses all fail for the same reason, which is, they don’t talk to enough people. It’s really simple actually.

Chris Beall (05:46):

If you talk to enough people, then you’ll figure it out. But if you don’t talk to enough people outside your company, talking to a bunch of people inside doesn’t help you that much. But how we learn about our product, about whether it has a market, about how we should price it, about what people like now. In COVID, all the people that pulled back and said, “we’re not going to prospect, because nobody wants to be ‘bothered.'” They all got hurt. They got hurt bad. Whereas I got customers that came through COVID with 12% increase in sales, because their competitors stopped talking to people and they kept talking. They learned what was up. You learn what’s going on and you can adapt. To me, the number one sales vitamin in the world is conversations, have more conversations to keep your mind up.

John Bossong (06:40):

That’s pretty neat. High level customers and prospects that come to you and that are interested in ConnectAndSell, or you think ConnectAndSell’s a good fit. What are they struggling with from a sales standpoint? Where you know, hey, ConnectAndSell is really going to help yo? What are they typically struggling with?

Chris Beall (07:01):

Usually it’s that they want their people talking to more folks at the top of the funnel. They feel like they aren’t getting enough discovery calls. They aren’t getting enough meetings with potentially qualified folks. So, they’re trying to figure out what to do. Do we send more emails? Do we go out on LinkedIn do social stuff. Do we go knock on doors, which you can’t do in COVID. What do we do to get a higher flow rate of meetings? That’s the big struggle out there. And the reason for the struggle is, actually phone used to work. I’m old enough to know that. It used to work, because you’d call somebody and you’d get their admin or whatever. That was in the eighties. When I started doing businesses in ’79, the phone was easy, you just call somebody up.

Chris Beall (07:49):

If you leave a message, it’s on a little pink slip and they will call you back, amazingly enough. Because their admin says, “this person called you.” And you get your little stack of pink slips, you look through them and dialed. If you’re a big wig, you say, “Hey, Sally get George here on the phone for me.” Okay, Mr. Beall. Then, I got it. Okay, I’ll transfer him. Remember, that’s how it used to work. That all vanished around 2003, it just went away. Because everybody started using voicemail and letting folks from the outside come in. Sales people started calling and leaving voicemails. Well, the open rate for voicemails went down 30% a year, 2003, 4, 5, and six until it went essentially to zero. And that’s the problem is, the phone went away. We built the 20th century on the phone, the phone vanished in the first decade of the 21st century and nobody noticed.

Chris Beall (08:48):

Then we just brought it back by brute force, but we brought it back by putting humans in the loop. You used to ask your admin make a call for you. Well, I provide you with 500 admins who are at your fingertips. You never meet them. You never talk to them. They never talk to your target. Actually, they just do all the grunt work. They dial by name directory, they navigate phone systems. And they hang up on the voicemail so you don’t have to leave one, which is a stupid play in the general case. There are cases where it makes sense. So, you just sit back and you go click a button, sit back, wait, do something else. Pops in your ear, pops up on your screen. You’re talking to somebody on your list. To them, it’s a normal phone call and you just saved an hour. An hour of your calls frustratingly going through all the rigmarole and then end up in voicemail anyway, which is a dead letter box.

John Bossong (09:48):

You hear, man, that’s too good to be true. Wow, that is amazing. Because eight to 10 times, that’s… In the old days, like you were talking about, if you sat down and you could call… If you called 40 people in a day, that was a lot. That’s a lot of people if you’re calling [inaudible 00:10:05]. You’re doing that in 15, 20 minutes sometimes with ConnectAndSell, right?

Chris Beall (10:13):

Yeah. I’m looking right now. We won’t do a screen share unless… We don’t do that on podcasts. But I’m looking at my reps right now using Connect. Just today, just right now at this instant. And Rob Arnold, who’s one of our very experienced appointment setters who sets meetings for people like [Big Meech Forbes 00:10:31]. One of my big quota-carrying reps. Rob’s used ConnectAndSell today for two hours, 24 minutes and 12 seconds. He’s out in the West Coast. He’s had 36 conversations with decision-makers, set one meeting. And when he’s wanting to talk to somebody, he pushes a button that says, “go”, on it. Two letters, not too hard to remember.

Chris Beall (10:53):

He’s waited for an average of two minutes and 36 seconds. And here’s what he didn’t have to do. Didn’t have to dial the phone or navigate phone system 624 times. So, instead of 40 in whatever, an hour. For most reps that’s 40 in a day. He had 624 calls, not just made for him, but navigated for him by experts. He didn’t have to do anything, but push a button. Today so far, he’s pushed that button 36 times. So, he’s got about… I don’t know, for a regular rep, that’d be maybe a month of work. And it’s happened in two hours and 42 minutes.

John Bossong (11:30):

That’s just phenomenal from a sales stand point in time. What about the no-data entry? ConnectAndSell does a lot of the data entry for you, correct? That also is a big mitigator for you in the time piece of it.

Chris Beall (11:47):

I wouldn’t want to pay my sales reps to be data entry clerks. What’s that all about? That CRM’s basically said, be a data entry clerk. Come on over here, fill in this field. Why do I have to do that field? That’s a required field, because of this other field over here. Everybody knows that, it’s not any fun. When you finish your conversation with ConnectAndSell, if it’s been hooked up to your CRM, it just does it for you. You don’t do any of that. You take your notes in ConnectAndSell. You set a disposition, busy, call back. Interested, send information. Meeting schedule, that’s a good one. You set a followup if you want to talk to them in the future. So, all I want is to try them again in three months. So, you just put that in there. What do I want to say to him?

Chris Beall (12:31):

Hey John, when we spoke back on the 26th of May, you said that you were jumping in the car and headed up to Nashville to go hear a little music. I didn’t want to bother you then, is now a better time? Suddenly I’m a genius. I’m going to get you next time. I’m the guy who remembers what to say, because it pops up on the screen for me. It’s super-simple. Here’s how I look at it. If you’re a sales rep, you’re probably good at talking and listening. You probably were not the kid if he was hand up in class and every question the teacher asked… You weren’t head stuck in a book doing math all day long or whatever. The great sales reps are the ones who their first great deal was talking a D into a C, so they could get through a class. That’s the famous first deal. We’ve got a lot of male, left-handed, colorblind, dyslexic, great, super-smart sales reps in the world. Why we ask them to do data entry is just beyond me. But we’ve got to keep track of stuff, so ConnectAndSell keeps track of it for you.

John Bossong (13:34):

Now, from an industry standpoint or a product standpoint, is there a typical industry that ConnectAndSell is really geared toward? Or is it geared for, or is it… Really any industry or any… It seems like you really want a lot of high volume of calls, but is it a good platform and dialing system for maybe someone that doesn’t need all of that volume? What’s the sweet spot for you?

Chris Beall (14:01):

You always need your time. There’s no such thing as a person who doesn’t need more time. And that’s what we give you back is time. Whether we’re giving you back 10 minutes, because you’re only going to call 25 people a day, that’d be about 10 minutes on ConnectAndSell. It’d be about an hour for most folks with distractions and everything. Whether you want that hour back or whether you are going after higher volume, it’s all the same. Your time is precious. It’s selling time, why are you wasting it dialing and navigating phone systems? It doesn’t really make any difference. We have a company that does heavy cranes, heavy lift cranes. You wouldn’t think that’s not a high volume [inaudible 00:14:40]. Heavy lift cranes…

John Bossong (14:42):

Very high ticket.

Chris Beall (14:43):

Pretty big, they take a while to sell and stuff like that. We’ve got another company, Kaeser Compressors, a German company that sells very high-end, top of the line, highest quality possible industrial air compressors. They operate forever in dirty environments. And these things cost, they cost something. They’re not in the long sales cycle. They sell them to factories. How do you get into a factory anymore? Well, you get locked out, because factories are all concerned now, somebody is going to walk in there with a memory stick. Stick it in one of them computers sitting around, infect the factory and they’ll start shipping that malware on their products. Because most products have software on them now.

Chris Beall (15:25):

So, they all put up fences around and put up guard shacks, and now you’ve got to get a meeting. You can’t just go knock on the door. We’ve got folks in commercial insurance who are knocking it dead, because they can’t drive around as much in COVID. And schmoozing is not quite the thing it used to be. They’re not high volume either, but they’re very focused. They do blitzes and super-focus. Then we have some folks like a company in the Pacific Northwest sells travel and expense software, and they sell to every small, medium sized business in America. They talk to… I don’t know. They do about 30, $40,000 a day.

John Bossong (16:05):

Wow.

Chris Beall (16:05):

With ConnectAndSell.

John Bossong (16:05):

Wow.

Chris Beall (16:07):

So, it ranges.

John Bossong (16:10):

That’s impressive. How about from a setup standpoint? Is this a difficult setup for somebody? Hey, I’m going to start using ConnectAndSell, and the support and training. How long does it really take a user? I know that may be different for the size of the organization and the sales force. But what’s a typical, on average set up time to really get them started and get them going?

Chris Beall (16:36):

That’s a great question. Because enterprise software normally, I’ve been building them my whole life. It’s like, and now six months later… Push the button for the first time. This is the opposite. If you want to use ConnectAndSell, want to try it, we do this thing called an intensive test drive. It’s like test driving a car. That setups’ about the same. We want to make sure that you’ve got a destination, that’s your list. You bring your list, we load it up for you. We’ll actually build a list for you if you want, we’ve got some pretty awesome list-building capabilities, but most people have their own list. So, we just load it into the system, then you get the users together online in a Zoom, just like this one that we’re in, except it’s a bunch of people. It could be one person doing a test drive, but we’ve done them with 70, 80 people in them. They’re pretty fun.

John Bossong (17:24):

Wow.

Chris Beall (17:26):

Then we teach them to use it. Here’s the training. See the go button? Press the go button when you want to talk to somebody. That’s right. It’s not very hard, it’s like calling an Uber. How hard is it to call an Uber? Press the button and wait. Now, when it goes beep in your ear, pops on the screen, shows you who you’re talking with. You’ve got to talk.

John Bossong (17:45):

Got you.

Chris Beall (17:45):

Now, the first time it happens, your hands shake. I’ve measured heart rates 160 beats a minute [inaudible 00:17:51] carotid artery [inaudible 00:17:54]. It’s pretty scary, because you know you’re going to talk to somebody. You don’t know who it is, you’re going to ambush them. It’s like, they’re on your list. You know they’re on your list, people on your list you don’t want to talk to. But after a couple of button presses, you have a couple of conversations. Heart rate comes down, you wipe your hands off and your pants, get the sweat off them. Then it’s just the opposite. Then people are hooked, just utterly hooked. It’s like, wow, this is really fun. I get to talk to people on my list as if… Then some people get to use our mobile app. We just got a patent for it last Friday. I think it’s my 18th patent. I think I’m…

John Bossong (18:37):

Wow.

Chris Beall (18:38):

If my mom were still alive, I’d be sending her another patent [inaudible 00:18:41]. I don’t have anybody to send them to anymore, so I just won’t get one of them, thanks. But it lets you actually do it. It lets you go… [Cheryl Turner 00:18:53] works for us, she has a toddler. She has an older kid in the early just preteens and she has a nephew at home. She’s got to take care of a family, and yet she wants to make on the order of maybe three or 400 cold calls a day. How does she do that? She takes our mobile version on her iPhone and she goes and plays with her kid at the park. She pushes the button, and when it goes, beep, it’s all voice managed. She just talks to somebody. So, she can have conversations while pushing her daughter on the swing. It’s really that easy. It is just that easy.

John Bossong (19:33):

That’s a great point that, you had to pivot your message a little bit back when the pandemic hit. How has ConnectAndSell adapted to the work-at-home workforce? I would think it’s fantastic the way it’s set up, but what’s been the experience there?

Chris Beall (19:49):

We had a soft April last year as folks started to figure out what they could do, and they were doing their own go-to-home thing. But I got to watch our customers, this is really fun. I got to watch them day before and day after they went to work from home. I have a catalog of the work-from-home day of every single one of our customers, 260 companies. They didn’t lose a beat. Everybody kept going, and it’s really cool to see. It’s one of those charts, I have it all lined up in one place. It’s like before and after if they were on different days. I get to see number of dials, number of conversations, number of meetings on a per-user basis, on a per-user, per-hour basis. All that stuff’s at my fingertips.

Chris Beall (20:30):

It’s cool looking. It’s really cool. For us, it was good. I hate to say it, because it’s been hard for so many people. But from a business standpoint… Shoot, we’ve been doing work-from-home since 2014. So, it was no big deal for us. But when we show somebody, Hey, you can manage your sales team without being intrusive, but see exactly what they’re doing. Like right now, I can see… I’m over here looking at a screen. It’s our leaderboard. My team today has had 174 conversations, set nine meetings so far. They’re not converting very well, 5.17%. The dial, the conversation ratio is 23.13 to one. The dialed [inaudible 00:21:13] ratio is 447 to one, and they set to 80 follow-up some $4,024. Now, I can drill into that and see who needs help. Who’s voice maybe is not up to stuff. So, I can go into a report that basically shows me, who’s getting a lot of busy call backs and I can click through and listen to them.

Chris Beall (21:31):

I can listen to recordings that they’ve made today and keep them from getting in a slump. Here’s another sales vitamin for everybody, if you’re a manager, don’t ever let your people get in a slump. They’re so hard to get out of. Intervene today. Don’t coach them once a week, intervene today and keep them out of a slump, because it’s so hard to get them out. Because once their mindset goes bad, then the voice goes bad. When the confidence goes, it’s hard to get it back. But if you can intervene today, and that’s, I think the biggest thing we provide is the ability for a manager to listen, jump in and offer a little friendly coaching. Your voice went up when you said, “I know I’m an interruption.” You didn’t say it like that. You said, “I know I’m an interruption.” You sounded uncertain, and that’s why they’re hanging up on you. [crosstalk 00:22:19].

John Bossong (22:18):

Wow. That’s cool. You’ve got obviously some dialed in metrics and reports for the management team and for the individual. Can those be customized? Can someone customize that, or do you just have a template of a metrics? How does the KPI work on ConnectAndSell?

Chris Beall (22:38):

We’ve got a bunch of standardized reports and dashboards around dials, around connects, around meetings, around time. How long did they wait? How many meetings per hour are they setting? All that kind of stuff. It’s all customized around the dispositions, they’re your dispositions. If you don’t like busy call back, interested, send information, whatever, we provide you with those out of the box. But we’ll actually gobble up the ones that are in your CRM and use those instead, or you can set a custom set of them. Then you can export anything, conversation, history, dial history, whatever, you can export it to Excel if you want to get really fancy. Some people use Power BI or some of those other tools, in order to do really cool analysis. Because they want to blend it together with their CRM data. Whatever stuff, we could think it up, but what would be the point.

John Bossong (23:32):

Absolutely. You had said before, I had heard on another show you were on that at McCormick Ranch, you worked for a guy there that really taught you a lesson, less is more. I’d like to get your thoughts on that, on how that’s really been… From a ConnectAndSell standpoint, how you’ve developed the company and the iterations. Then for the listeners, from a professional sales standpoint, less is more, what does that mean?

Chris Beall (24:02):

For me, I started at McCormick Ranch, I was a landscape laborer. And I’m working in the summer in Arizona down there, a shovel, a pick, a rake and stuff like that. We became a union shop overnight. We were the last group to get unionized. There were 22 of us. So, the shop we were working for out of Canada, they said, “well, if we’re going to have to pay union wages, we’re going to shrink the teams.” They shrunk the team from 22 down to seven. Now, we’re doing the most boring work in the world. We’re shaving down the dirt on Indian Bend Wash, which runs through McCormick Ranch. I mean, really, it doesn’t get much more prison labor style than this. We’re out there, pulling the weeds down, scraping and doing this and that. We went from 22 to seven and we increased our overall rate of production. Not per person, but the team produced more as seven people than 22 people.

Chris Beall (24:58):

I started analyzing it, because I like to do that. And I realized we were going as fast as the fastest person when we were seven. When we were 22, we were going to slow as the slowest person. I think that happens a lot. When your teams are too big, then there’s kind of a let’s not make anybody look bad kind of thing. If you get the right size and you run regular competitions… At ConnectAndSell, twice a week, our entire sales team competes in a blitz, a call blitz. And with our stuff, that’s fast. They’re having fun. These are big quota-carrying sales reps. They don’t need the prize. A hundred dollar prize doesn’t mean anything to them, but they have fun competing. And they’re about that size.

Chris Beall (25:43):

There’s eight of them. We’re reminding them, Hey, we’re a small team. We’re big in terms of horsepower. We’ve got a lot of firepower in this ConnectAndSell thing, but let’s also remind ourselves, we’ve got to try. We’ve got to have high energy. We’ve got to stay in there and have fun. I think that happens a lot on teams where the team… Like when you’re growing a company, you get too big, then everything slows down and then people start to go, we’ve got to have more meetings to figure out how to speed it up. So, one thing I’ve done as a CEO, when I became CEO, I just outlawed meetings. You can’t have any. You can’t have an internal meeting at ConnectAndSell that stands on the calendar every week, or something like that.

Chris Beall (26:25):

I made a couple of exceptions. Now, probably I’m getting soft in my old age. But when you’re engaging with customers, that’s small. Think about that. That’s a less is more. Less everything else is just more customer engagement, more conversations. Your conversation should be less. They should be focused on one thing. Don’t try to sell the product if you’re selling a meeting, just sell the meeting. They should be focused on one emotion. Sell meetings based on curiosity, not on value, because you haven’t gotten to the value part yet. That’s in the meetings. So.

John Bossong (26:56):

Got you.

Chris Beall (26:57):

Part of it also is just patience. If you want to go really fast… I remember when I was taught to drive a race car, I didn’t know anything about driving race cars. I get put in this thing and I’ve got a guy in the right seat. He’s one third my age and knows 50 times as much as I do about race cars. The whole trick is you have to be really patient going into those turns. Wait the last possible millisecond, man, as he said to me many times. Brake hard, but he said it really loud.

Chris Beall (27:30):

Then you’re executing this minimalist thing. It’s like, break hard and go for the apex. Just one thing. I think it’s the same thing in sales. It’s like, we have to wait for the right moment. We have to do the right thing, and we have to focus on one goal, not a whole bunch of goals. To me, that goal is always an emotional change in that individual. Talking to a very specific emotion we want to elicit, and when we get it, don’t keep talking. You got it, now go to the next step. You’ve got the emotion, go to the next step. Because sales is just taking somebody on an emotional journey, and I think salespeople sometime try to give themselves the crutch of saying a lot of stuff, a lot of facts.

Chris Beall (28:16):

Now, you can do a thing called… Oren Klaff calls it flash role. I did one in this… Here, when I went through… Here’s Rob Arnold, he use ConnectAndSell for this… You’re trying to keep up. Well, at the end of that, you go, Hey, that crispy, old guy’s an expert. That’s all I’m trying to get you to do, is have this emotion that says, “I can relax, this guy’s an expert. I can put myself in his hands.” I didn’t try to teach you anything. So, I think that… By the way, if there’s one book that everybody ought to read, read Oren Klaff, O-R-E-N K-L-A-F-F. A couple of books, but one is called Flip The Script and it’s amazing.

Chris Beall (28:56):

This guy breaks down sales into such simple executable steps. I had him on my podcast and then read it about a year ago, changed me as a salesperson. To where I’m more about less. He taught me, just do this, then do this. Don’t ever mix these things up. And when you get done, go to the next step and it’s got to be on somebody’s calendar. Just do that and it’s like… Probably saves me… I still sell a little bit. I sell about 6 million a year of ConnectAndSell in my spare time. It has become my spare time, because I become more efficient from reading that book and applying the principles.

John Bossong (29:41):

Awesome. You listeners, make sure you check that book out. Oren Klaff, Flip The Script, right?

Chris Beall (29:48):

Yeah.

John Bossong (29:52):

Two-part question here for you. ConnectAndSell, I heard you say that it really introduces people to rejection. I thought that was pretty cool when I heard you say that. It introduces people to rejection. What are the key things that you think the sales professionals coming up today need to get better at? What do they need to learn? Where would you say that they spend their lesses more time? And how does ConnectAndSell help them do that when they’re using it?

Chris Beall (30:25):

Well, I think the one thing everybody who wants to be in business needs to learn to do is have a good conversation, a confident conversation with a stranger. And do it in the hardest circ*mstance, which is as an invisible stranger. As an invisible stranger, that’s calling somebody on the phone, we’re the scariest thing in the world. Everybody is afraid of invisible strangers. So, put yourself in that situation… This is how it connects, this is how it helps. I’ll go back to my guys today. What has Rob Arnold learned today? I’m not sure, he’s one of the most experienced sales development representatives in the world. But he’s had 40 conversations today. That’s 40 opportunities to experience the emotional range that you experience. Because I think emotional control in a conversation, you can only get it by having conversations and being coached around the precise things to say, the precise tone of voice.

Chris Beall (31:22):

If you’re going to go out on stage, it’s like, nobody’s here, big deal. A few people are in the audience, bigger deal. You’re going to go out in Broadway in front of everybody, maybe you want a little voice coaching. You want to know where to stand or what to say. You’ve got to prep a little bit more. And I think that learning how to prepare to be natural is really important. If you want to be a CEO, my friend Corey Frank, podcast cohost, he runs a company called Youngblood Works. And Youngblood Works takes young people out of Grand Canyon University and lets them learn to cold call using ConnectAndSell. We call it finishing school for future CEOs, because that’s what it is. If you want to be a CEO, man, you’ve got to learn to have conversations with strangers. And the way to do it is to practice and be coached. So, that’s number one. Number two is, emotional control starts with handling rejection. Objections, and Jeb Blount has a whole book on this. Jeb B-L-O-U-N-T. Everybody go get Jeb’s book.

John Bossong (32:34):

It’s a great book.

Chris Beall (32:35):

A close friend, one of my favorite [inaudible 00:32:37]. Yeah, the thing’s awesome. And he’s got a conference called OutBound coming up. I’ll be speaking at it. I’m actually going to travel to Atlanta and speak at that thing. We’re a big sponsor of theirs. So, Jeb wrote a book, the idea in that book that I carry with me every day is, when somebody has an objection… I had yesterday a really interesting call, Cheryl Turner set it up for me. And it started out like, Hey, you’ve only got 15 minutes, you just used seven of them, what are you going to do?

Chris Beall (33:05):

It was really aggressive on the part of the other person. I went to what’s called my ledge. So, Jeb teaches us when you experience the emotion of rejection from an objection, because we experience all objections as rejection. What do you do? And he says, “you’ve got to have a go-to move. The go-to move is a word that you use, like your own safe word. Mine is fantastic. So, if you say, “Chris, that’s the stupidest thing I ever heard.” Fantastic, because it gives me emotional space and a little bit of time to consider what I’m going to do next. Now, I’ve gone to an emotionally safe place. Some people might say of me, “good God, how many sales conversations and other conversations you’ve been in. You’ve raised hundreds of millions of dollars over time, you’ve done this and that.” I don’t care. I’m just a regular person. Somebody objects to what I say, I feel it as rejection, whether I know it or not. And I go to fantastic.

Chris Beall (34:07):

When I say fantastic, I feel a little more in control. You’ve got to practice your ledge. You have to do it a hundred percent of the time. It can’t be like, this time I think I’ll say, “oh, that’s wonderful.” The emotions are conditioned by your own voice. There’s a feedback loop for sales reps, for everybody, where we hear our own voice and it makes us feel different. So, say the thing that makes us feel like we want a deal so the people can follow us. Because as a salesperson, you’re a leader. You’re always leading the prospect. The prospect won’t follow you if you don’t sound like you’re confident in leading them. So, say something that reminds you that you are confident in leading them, because you’re an expert. And do it under the toughest circ*mstance, which is rejection.

John Bossong (35:00):

That’s fantastic. And Jeb’s excellent. I think I’ve read Fanatical Prospecting, Objections, Inked. And I just read his… He’s got his new Virtual Selling, which is out, which is good. But that ledger bridge you’re talking about, that takes practice like you’re talking about, but that’s great.

Chris Beall (35:16):

It does.

John Bossong (35:18):

What is the best way for people… Let’s say someone wants to demo your product or they want to… You’ve got the new product coming out, the lightning from a training standpoint. What’s the best way for people or organizations to get in touch with you or ConnectAndSell?

Chris Beall (35:37):

Well, we’ve got [inaudible 00:35:38] a little boring inquiry on the websites. You can do that, we’ll call you. That one works pretty well. I’m chris.beall@ConnectAndSell.com, that’s pretty easy. B-E-A-L-L, dot in between. Chris, spelled the normal way. Reaching out to me on LinkedIn tends to work. I’m not that hard to find. I’m a little noisy out there. It’s like, how much more data are you going to publish? And the answer is, as long as new data is coming out of the system, I’m going to keep publishing it. So, hang on to your hats. I’ve got a podcast called Market Dominance Guys.

John Bossong (36:15):

I saw that.

Chris Beall (36:16):

There’s a gentleman… This guy, I won’t name him yet until he’s on the podcast. But he actually had the whole thing professionally transcribed, printed and organized as the prospecting bible for his company.

John Bossong (36:31):

Wow.

Chris Beall (36:31):

And they’re prospecting intensive. I was blown away. I just got a copy of it yesterday, just showed up in the mail.

John Bossong (36:38):

Wow.

Chris Beall (36:39):

I was sitting around last night reading it to my fiance. So, check out Market Dominance Guys, 80 something episodes now. It’s about what we call a conversation-first approach to dominating markets. Because sales… Here’s a big deal for salespeople to remember, you’re important now. It used to be, you’re important for disposing of finished goods inventory, that was the job. So, you had a territory, there was stuff to sell. Maybe discounted or whatever to get that to happen. Now, you’re responsible for taking markets, which is the very survival of your company. Your job is to actually take that hill. And that’s a different job. It used to be, we buy companies to do that. We can’t buy companies so easily anymore. Private equity got in there and made that hard. So, now we’ve got to sell our way into new markets. I tell you, market dominance is a tricky thing. So, you’ve got to learn that how to do it.

John Bossong (37:33):

That’s awesome. Make sure you listeners check out that podcast, get to their website, get in touch with Chris so that you can start having live conversations, get comfortable on the phone. And you’re going to free up a ton of time, less is more. One last question for you, Chris. If you had one sales vitamin to dish out today that would help the sales team or an individual sales performance for somebody, what’s that one sales vitamin you want to leave everybody with today?

Chris Beall (38:04):

It has to do with your body, I think we sit too much. I think we sit way too much, and COVID has got us sitting more, virtual has got us sitting more. I’m old, I’m 66. That’s not really old, but I don’t feel old. I do about five hours of cardio a day-

John Bossong (38:23):

Wow.

Chris Beall (38:24):

… in the house usually. Just trotting around while I talk to people. And I think if we’re going to be great at sales, we’ve got to be in our whole person, because that’s really what we’re bringing. I think there’s been a tendency to neglect the exercise part of our health. I recommend it to all my people. It’s like, you’ve got to be able to bring it at any time, and you can’t bring it if you don’t have it inside.

John Bossong (38:53):

That’s a great a sales vitamin, and really a life vitamin. But that goes with today’s show. Chris has dished out a… You’ve gotten a whole jar full of vitamins today, folks, with ConnectAndSell Chris Beall. He is the CEO of that organization. So, you’ve heard a ton today. You’re going to be able to… And the good thing about it is, it’s all practical. So, make sure that you reach out to Chris, you reach out to his organization. Chris, thank you for all you do for the sales profession. Just want to tell you, thank you for that. And thanks for coming on the show today. I’m excited for the listeners when we release this, just to be able to gain from your knowledge.

Chris Beall (39:35):

Thank you, John. It’s an honor.

Announcer (39:37):

This episode is brought to you by Kitcaster. Kitcaster books you on top podcast. How do funded startup founders attract prospects and talent? Podcast interviews. How do entrepreneurs with exits find new deals? Podcast interviews. How do C-suite execs differentiate in crowded markets? Podcast interviews. Kitcaster books you on top podcasts, click the link in the show notes for a special offer. Celebrate good conversation.

John Bossong (40:08):

That’s it for today’s Sales Vitamin. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed the show, make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss any episodes. And please leave a review, it’ll mean a lot. Whatever platform you listen on, hit the subscribe button. Have a great day, and remember, take your sales vitamin.

The Sales Vitamin Podcast Hosted by John Bossong – On-Demand Conversations (2024)

References