Speaker 1 00:00:21 All right, everybody. Thanks for joining me on grinds down. Elevate. This is your house Tyzer Evans, and I’m here as Chris Beall, who is the CEO of connect and sell Chris, thanks for so much for joining me
Speaker 2 00:00:31 Tyzer. It is incredible to be here with you today.
Speaker 1 00:00:35 Hey, I’ve enjoyed our offline conversation so far, so I’m excited to talk to you. Um, for those who may not know you are connecting, sell a, would you mind giving me a quick high-level, uh, intro?
Speaker 2 00:00:46 Sure. I mean, uh, I’m just an old physics math guy. I fell into sales and I saw that. What I learned is there’s not as much science and sales as people think, and there’s not for surely as much as there could be. So that’s kinda, my thing is bringing, uh, you know, uh, sales practitioners, uh, view because I’ve been selling since I was a little kid, but with a kind of a scientific bat, a old programmer built a bunch of systems, stuff like that, and connect and sell is one of the strangest things in the world. It’s, here’s a system. Your head says 10 X here’s. This, this literally gives you 10 times. There’s more conversations with people you want to talk with. That’s all it does in a way, other than keeping you from having to update your stupid CRM. But, but it, uh, it lets you push a button whenever you want and talk to somebody on your list with no effort whatsoever. And it takes, usually you push a button and it takes three, four minutes to get that conversation. And that’s it. It’s always with somebody you want to talk with because you put them on your list and it’s, it’s a go-time Showtime, anytime you want it to be. So that’s what it’s about. So we have, uh, you know, companies from big, big, you know, your, your, uh, SAP’s of the world, IBM stuff like that down to solopreneurs who go out and dominate markets, nobody even knows about
Speaker 1 00:02:02 That’s incredible. And so I was so intrigued to talk to you because, you know, having spent, like I just told you about 17 years in the sales and the majority of my career either, you know, quote-unquote, calling warm leads or, you know, the last really five years, just a cold Colleen. And so I was intrigued to talk to you to find out more about how does the system work for maybe someone like me, that’s used to like building my own lead list, my own prospecting lists, I’ve got to call them, get a gatekeeper and try to get the right person on the phone. And it’s time-consuming a lot more than people think sometimes. And so I want to talk to you through a little bit about how does that work? Like you’re just talking about three to four minutes. You can get connected with somebody you want to talk to. It’s kind of on your prospect list.
Speaker 2 00:02:50 Sure. Well, it’s really simple. I mean, you have a CRM that connects to your share RM, if you don’t or want to do it some other way, you just load a list, just a regular Excel file. All it needs is like a first name, last name, phone number, um, kind of like to have a company and title case is going to do a little differentiation there. And, uh, and then you’d love that in the system. It’s just a browser-based thing. So you log in, it gives you a phone number to call. That’s the only phone number you’re going to call that day. And so you’re kind of in a conference room at that point, and it’s quiet, just you all, all by yourself. And then when you want to talk to somebody, here’s a big gold button at the top, boom, you hit the go button and it goes to work for you in the background.
Speaker 2 00:03:31 And what it’s doing is it’s calling in parallel, usually five or six styles at a time it’s navigating all those dials for you. And when I say it now, it’s like, how could that be? You run the gatekeepers, you’ve got to talk to gatekeepers and you know, phone systems are bizarrely complex and are it doesn’t matter what brand it is or whatever, what software it is. It’s, it’s configured in some crazy way that you can’t even believe. And so we have human beings do that navigation in the background, and we got a lot of them at about 600 of them who are highly trained to navigate your phone calls. So that’s what they do, but here’s what they don’t do. They don’t talk to your target. So they’ll talk to a gatekeeper and asked for a transfer and gatekeepers will transfer great gatekeepers. By the way, I learned this on my first day at connect.
Speaker 2 00:04:18 And so I joined the company five minutes after meeting Sean McLaren. Uh, he said he wasn’t hiring, but I kind of said that I was working for him anyway. And so I went home and, and uh, told my, my wife now my late wife said, like, uh, the, you know, I joined this company. She asked a couple of questions. Um, like, do you have a boss? And I said, yes. And she said, I give it two weeks. And so that was, that was more than 10 years ago. So apparently she was wrong on that one thing. But she said, Hey, we use that thing over at our company and Amanda and our reps love it, but I would never transfer one of those calls to my boss, Chander cat. She is admin for a CEO, Silicon valley CEO. And I said, oh, interesting. Why not? And she said, well, it’s a salesperson. What do you mean kind of transformed to the boss? I mean, he’s, you know, busy CEO. And I said, Hm, interesting. So I went off to the system and found three recordings of her transferring calls to her boss.
Speaker 2 00:05:17 Well, I played one of them and I, because I wanted to know an answer to this question, I wasn’t being neat. I just wanted to know an answer to his question, which is why do transfer? And I figured it jog your memory, especially when you say you didn’t ever do something. And then it turns out you did, you did. Yeah. And she said, oh, well that, that rep whoever it was, I dunno, it was, but they had an admin calling for them. So they must’ve been important. What am I going to do? Hang up on the Redmond. So it’s a really interesting subtlety. And if reps are obsessed with gatekeepers, cause I think they feel like their mom is rejecting them or something. I dunno what. So this keeps you away from all that emotional stuff around gatekeepers and also all the waste around voicemail.
Speaker 2 00:05:57 Cause it’s like 22 out of 23 times you’ll end up in voicemail. So when our dial navigation agent, our expert encounters that voicemail, they just hang up, who cares, nothing happened, right? Except here’s what didn’t happen. You didn’t have to navigate a phone system to voicemail. And then in some companies record that fact somewhere, which is really dumb. It’s like really I have to record the fact that I made a phone call that went nowhere. Like, what am I doing next? Going out and recording the fact that a breeze went through the trees and the leaves fell off. I’m like, what’s my job. I thought it was the salesperson, right? Like a phone operator, recording the facts of the phone calls that didn’t go anywhere. That’s kind of nutty. And it also keeps you from having to leave voicemails, which are notoriously ineffective. So you can just talk to people.
Speaker 2 00:06:47 And like, I could look at one of my customers. I want to show this screen. I’ll just take a look at them. So I’m looking at a leaderboard right now for one of my customers this morning. So they’re just getting gone. It’s nine 20 in the morning. These guys are on the Pacific coast and it’s a team of 12. And so far this morning, they have had 126 conversations in one hour and four minutes of using the system. So on average, each one has had 9.6, nine conversations. And these guys are really, really good. So they’ve set on average 1.2, three meetings during that hour that they’ve been going each right? So they’ve set 16 meetings as a team of 12 so far by nine 20 in the morning. So that’s what it’s all about is you get the conversations now, are you any good? Who knows? We’re going to find out,
Speaker 1 00:07:38 That’s it. That’s incredible. Okay. So that, that opens up a lot of, uh, what I, I was trying to read through the bio and I went to the website and stuff, but that answers a lot of my questions. So you basically have a team of people that are calling for you, but instead of you know, me going through five or six people, they’re calling five or six people at a time. So it’s like a, almost a siloed team calling for you. So it’d be like basically me going out and having, you know, whatever they call them, SDRs or MDRs, kind of like a team of them that are skilled to be able to connect you with the influencer decision maker. You’re trying to get ahold of.
Speaker 2 00:08:19 Yeah, exactly. It’s kind of funny too, because it feels like a dedicated team to you. In fact, it’s a big liquid pool of 600 people who are working for whoever is next. So they work for the dial. They don’t work. They represent you quite correctly. They’re your admin of the moment. They’re just your admin at the moment.
Speaker 1 00:08:39 That’s fine with me. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:08:43 So that’s it. I mean, it’s, it’s so simple. Sometimes I think about it. I think, gosh, you know what, didn’t anybody else think this up, but I think other people have tried things like it, but it’s a delicate balance. You have to cut the problem in exactly the right place. You can’t overstep it. Start talking to the prospects. That’s just a nightmare. Now you have to know what to say and that’s impossible, right? Liquid pool of people. And then you can’t back up all the way to automation because then your, or I’ll call it your good connect rate where it’s accurate. Ours is about 94.8% on a good, on a regular day. I just looked at the numbers for all of 20, 21 yesterday and was tearing them apart. And we do experiments on ourselves, not on our innocent customers, just on ourselves with some stuff that’s fully automated.
Speaker 2 00:09:32 And we have the state-of-the-art and all of that because we do 60 million dials a year. So we, we have a lot to work with, right. We call ourselves just for our own account, just my own reps, just selling connect and sell, talk to 85,000 P piece of sales every year. So we have a lot of places to experiment. And the problem with going full automation is then you end up with all of those problems, right? Gatekeepers are blocking. You can’t have any mix of phone numbers you want blah, blah, blah. So there’s a delicate little like sweet spot in here where you have humans in the loop doing the work technology, doing tons of stuff. It’s amazing what our tech does under the covers. But for you, the user, it’s nothing more than push a button and talk to somebody. And our mobile app is even more hilarious. So Cheryl Turner works for me. You can catch her on my podcast. Sometime there’s a podcast episode called the secrets of the secret of her success. She plays with her daughter, her three-year-old in the park while talking to CEOs. Just think of that mix.
Speaker 1 00:10:38 Yeah. I think the ultimate dream, I think, you know, for me, why I’ve always gotten sales is that, uh, you know, I think, uh, between me and my wife on the side, we’ve had five different businesses over the last, you know, five, seven years. And so it’s like, I like sales because it gives me the freedom to make a healthy amount of money. But to, to also pursue other passions, it’s like, you know, I’m on my own little CEO of my world, right? I’m a work from home employee. So you know, a lot of what you talk about on your, on your site. Um, I sit there and I dial, dial the phone all day long. So I like that type of freedom. I can go work from a coffee shop. I can go to lunch when I want. Right. I can go to a park if I want to do my calls. So I think that that’s exactly right. I I’m, I’m curious though. So when you, when you make the connection with the CEO or CFO, whoever your target is, how does that transition work with and cell?
Speaker 2 00:11:33 Well, what happens is you, the user get a little tone in your ear. It goes, boom. And it pops up on the screen. This was really fast. Like this is 192 milliseconds on average. And it pops up in the screen, shows you who you’re talking with. And even what you’re talking with them about. If you’ve had a previous conversation with them, the system will not only get them on the phone, but it will wait until you wanted to try them again. So, you know, you talked to me and I go a, uh, Tiser, hang on a second. My fiance just dropped her computer. You know, cut her finger that actually happened this morning. I gotta, I gotta go take care of that. You, you put me in the follow-up list and you give me a week just to be a nice guy. And then you say, Hey, Chris, you know, back on the sixth, we had a quick conversation.
Speaker 2 00:12:17 You were taking care of your fiance’s cut. It’s now a better time, man. You’re like it. At that point, you’re a God of sales because you remember everything without having to remember anything. So it’s like, it, it goes fast, bloop. It pops up, you’re in a conversation with them to them, to that target. It’s a normal phone call. All they did was answer the phone and it’s like, you know, I’m your target. I answer, this is Chris. Next thing I hear is you, Hey, Tiser here, Chris. I known interruption. Can I have 27 seconds stay while I call? Well, yeah, go ahead time. It’s like, you know, and then you tell me what your breakthrough is, right? Chris? I believe we’ve discovered a breakthrough that completely eliminates stupid crap. You have to put up with all day in your idiot job that you do. And, uh, you know, the reason I reached out to you is get 15 minutes on your calendar, share this breakthrough with you.
Speaker 2 00:13:09 Do you happen to have your calendar available? I’m going to go, wow, you have a breakthrough. Get gets rid of the stupid crap in my life. I got to hear more. Tell me more. And you say, you know, I don’t know. I’ve just learned the hard way that ambush conversation like this. Isn’t a fair setting to talk about something that’s important. You know, are you a morning person? How’s your Thursday. Yeah. So then we’re, we’re off to the races, right? It’s so for me receiving the call, it’s like normal phone call. Now it’s down to your skill, right? It’s down to your voice. It’s down to your confidence. It’s real simple.
Speaker 1 00:13:42 I love, I love that because that is the hardest part is, uh, is speed. Right? And, and I think that’s where a lot of reps struggle is top of the funnel. And I will, I’ve always said that like, Hey, you don’t necessarily have a sales problem. You have a pipeline problem. And a lot of reps really miss that because they get so caught up in doing busywork, admin work. A lot of that’s called reluctance because they don’t want to get the rejection. So it’s like, you completely eliminate that. And it’s just like, you ping them up for the people that are ready to talk. They’re on the phone. Here we go. Let’s see what you got.
Speaker 2 00:14:21 Yeah, exactly. Our breakthrough is a breakthrough line. Is this, uh, a Tizer I believe we’ve discovered a breakthrough that completely eliminates the waste and the frustration that keeps your best sales reps from being effective on the phone or even using the phone at all. Yeah. That’s it. And that is, yeah. I mean, no, if you don’t care about the phone, if it’s not part of your strategy talking to people, you know, I can imagine there are folks out there who advocate, we never speak to our targets prospects. I don’t know where they came from. And I do know where they’re going. Right. They’re all going to zero. Yeah. Right, right. I know where that destination is. I still don’t know what produces them, by the way, what machine kicks out, people who are experts in sales and marketing who say don’t ever talk to anybody because it’s rude.
Speaker 1 00:15:11 Th that was one of the things I wanted to, I kind of asked you because, you know, it’s, I’ve, I’ve had a lot of different people on, on the, you know, I saw I’ve had Tony, he was on a podcast. He was on a month ago and I know you guys promote his book. And, um, so him and I had a good conversation about his new book tech powered sales. And so we’re talking a lot about like, you know, where is sales going? So I was like, you really get this sediment a lot that, you know, dialing is debt. And I, and I know that Tony is not a believer in that, you know, uh, you know, his book combo prospecting really changed me in a lot of the people I manage their lives within the multichannel, but you know, how do you feel about that sediment that, you know, cold Collin’s dead or something that’s irrelevant in 2022?
Speaker 2 00:15:55 Yeah. It’s well, it’s not, fact-based, that’s how I feel about I’m a scientist by background. It’s like how people feel about stuff as a business itself, yet another set of facts, by the way that cruise ship in the background there, I had a dinner and drinks with Tony in Sydney. Then the night before I saw that in Sydney Harbor. So that’s a great guy. He’s a, he’s a very good friend. And, uh, uh, I had the great, good fortune of getting to spend a whole day in a hotel in Baltimore, Maryland, uh, giving him detailed feedback on the book before it went to the publisher. That’s also on combo prospecting. What a great book. What a fantastic
Speaker 1 00:16:35 Tony last year.
Speaker 2 00:16:37 Yeah. I think read it three times. So it’s like, it’s that good of a book, right? And then go read jet blends objections so that they know what to do with combo prospecting, plus the ability to manage objections allege. And you’re probably good at sales. It’s kind of funny and then use connect. And so I’ll talk to a ton of people and dominate markets. What the heck? Right. So the facts are, people do answer the phone here. W the, the customer is looking at they’re calling CFOs and controllers in sort of, uh, across America, right. But in SMB land. So they’ve got 550,000 targets. And today, if it just look at it today and they do this every single day today at 2,801 dials so far, they’ve had 151 conversations. Well, that’s 151 conversations their competitors didn’t have, and you gotta be first to be trusted, right?
Speaker 2 00:17:31 I mean, that’s all there is in sales. When you really think about it, the business impact of a phone conversation is that you get trust. And Chris Veloce actually taught this to me one evening kindly. I asked him, how long do we have to get trust in a cold call? And he said, seven seconds. And I said, really, because our research says eight. And he said, your research is wrong. It’s seven seconds. And then I asked him, well, what do we have to do in those seven seconds? And he says, oh, it’s easy. All we have to do is show the other person that we see the world through their eyes. We call it tactical empathy, and then demonstrate to them. We’re competent to solve a problem they have right now. And I said, isn’t the problem that I have right now, me.
Speaker 2 00:18:13 And that’s actually the secret to the cold call. The reason cold calling isn’t dead. It’s kind of funny. One. It is hard to reach people. I mean, if it were easy, I wouldn’t have a business. Right, right. What would be the point of a business that works with the amount of time it takes to get a conversation with somebody if it was already easy? So what people are really saying is it got hard to reach people. Yeah. That’s all they’re saying. And the answer is well. Yeah. And you know, it’s hard to commute to a city, 15 miles away to your job unless you have a car and then it’s not so hard. Right. So it all depends on what you have in your arsenal to get you to where you need to go to do the job. And so my view is that all the sentiment about cold calling is driven by two things.
Speaker 2 00:18:58 One is the inconvenience it’s just taking longer. It takes about an hour dialing to get somebody on the phone, you know, target. And then you do all this record-keeping and all this other junk that is of no value whatsoever. Right. And then the other thing that’s interesting is that people come up with other ways of doing things, because it’s all about competition. So all you have to do is be as good as, or better than your competitor. And then they get used to it and they go, well, you know, I, I don’t know. I didn’t even know what to say when I get on the phone, that’s why we have this floodlight school thing. We finally gave up and started teaching people how to talk on the phone, but does it work or not? I have customers who fire senior executives who mentioned they’re using connected. So really? Yeah. So that, that tells you everything. And these are very, very serious, very smart companies. And they’re dominating markets and they’re, they’re not talking about it. So if somebody talks about their tools, you know, they don’t value them as questions. So I don’t know anything else that gets that kind of, uh, appreciation. It’s a payment. Yes. For me. Right. I wish they’d talk about it, but Hey, do you talk about your weapons? Uh, I don’t think so.
Speaker 1 00:20:17 Yeah. No. I mean that, I mean, coming from that perspective, it makes sense. So how does this, I mean, the, one of the things you’ve kind of touched on a little bit though, is the CRM system. And I’ve always been a huge proponent of right. Uh, you know, big into multi-channel LinkedIn, find them on Twitter, meet them, where they’re at, you know, uh, email, cold call texts, whatever, all, I mean, I always call myself, it may not be the best, most appropriate term, but I call myself a professional human hunter, which my wife always finds. Uh, but, um, but how, so I’m a big proponent of taking notes though. What was my last conversation? You know, did I hit a gatekeeper is annoying, but I want to make sure I know how many times I’ve tracked it. I’ve called the person. So how does that enter sync with like HubSpot or Salesforce or, you know, vanilla soft, any of the other things that are out there?
Speaker 2 00:21:09 Yeah. So one of the things is all that record keeping needs to be done and all of the list management needs to be done. So we hook up to those things and let them, you know, your CRM has reports in it that represent calling lists. We hook up automatic synchronization. You don’t even have to think about it just happens. So that’s on the input side, got to get lists, but I don’t want to manage listing connect and sell. I want to manage lists my CRM. Cause I got other things going on, including I want to know if those conversations turned into pipeline, right? I mean, that’s a handy thing to know, right. Which by the way, most CRMs don’t actually properly track that is ask this question. What are the conversations that I had with somebody that led to pipeline and what was my invest spent in making those conversations happen?
Speaker 2 00:21:55 Right? Most important questions, shouldn’t sales, efficiency, and effectiveness. And most CRMs can’t answer the question. Most organizations have no idea. All they can do is say I hired some reps and they either got it done or they did. Right. So we also connect and sell. We pumped the information about the dialing back into the CRM. If you want us to, or we keep it for you so you can analyze. So where did all my calls go? How many went to gatekeepers? Which ones got blocked by gatekeepers. So I can put them on a connect on live voice list and I can talk to the gatekeeper, but still do it. Connect and sell stuff fast. Right? I don’t have to go dial them one at a time. I go talk to them. I can present the caller ID. That’s my cell phone. At that point, I could do all sorts of things.
Speaker 2 00:22:43 Right? So all of that, see, I make it sound super simple because it is, but imagine a 15, 16 year old technology used by the biggest companies in the world who are very sophisticated, it’s got a lot of stuff inside of it to take care of your CRM. The idea is to keep you the rep out of the CRM, keep you in flow because when we’re in flow, we’re good conversationalists. And when we’re going into typing mode, task mode, we lose that conversational, feel that ed. So the ultimate game for a salesperson has set aside some time, do it in a group. If you can, if you have a team, actually, it’s really fun. I call it true social selling, social selling. Isn’t when you send me a LinkedIn invite that your bot has created in order to try to trick me into thinking that you know something about me that you don’t write about my dog or whatever, you know, it turns out my dog that I forgot to mention is dead. And I’m now tragically upset about it. Triggered me.
Speaker 2 00:23:45 Thanks so much, you know? No, no I’m crying and I don’t want to talk to you. Um, so that to me is like kind of weird social selling. It’s not really social. It’s just using social media as advertising or as channel or whatever. Right. But real social selling. We all know from the days of the sales floor, which still exists here and there and we’ll come back and some places as COVID drifts away at some point crashes, but real crucial selling, I think is when you’re together with your team, having a blast. Now the problem is if you’re not talking to anybody, you’re not having fun. So Scott Webb over at, uh, at hub international, he gets his team of top hunters together once a week for an hour. That’s it? And these guys are all over the gals. They’re all over the country. These are top commercial insurance, um, you know, predators, right?
Speaker 2 00:24:34 They’re true producers. And you’re only allowed in if you’re good enough, you have to convert at 10% or more. Or you’re out of the club, it’s fight club. And, uh, you know, you, you gotta push, you start at eight, you end at nine, you push the button, you see how many conversations have any meetings you can set. And it’s really social. And it’s a lot of fun, even though they’re all physically all over the place, it’s still they’re doing something together. So there’s, there’s a lot of elements to this. There’s the CRM element, there’s the team element. And we’ve had a lot of time to put it together. And we’re always under a lot of pressure. Cause we’re not cheap. I mean, you don’t sell 600 people to somebody for nothing. Right. That’s crazy.
Speaker 1 00:25:14 Well, but I think that, you know, um, you know, where am I, 10 X hat? The one thing that I’ve always learned from grant it’s speed is everything. You know, I work with the, um, uh, manic pace and, and I’ll tell ya, just, you know, uh, I started, uh, I started with my, the company I’m with now as an RVP in April, April of last year. And so I came in and I, within three weeks I did my training and I just went full bore phones. I need to get top of line funnel, top of line funnel. Well, following their process. And I doubled the next person who started with me and as far as opportunities and, and it was because it just, I liked to work at that frantic pace because I know if I can, you know, create that top of line funnel, then I can filter out.
Speaker 1 00:26:01 So it’s always super, super, super important. Um, and that’s what I love about the system is that you have people doing that for you, as opposed to one, you have six. And I think that people don’t always appreciate that, that speed in a sense of urgency is everything. When it comes to sales, because like I said, he’s never had a sales problem, usually a pipeline problem. This seems to really solve that. And then it being able to integrate with the CRM is a, is really mind blowing to me because that’s again, where you have a breakdown, usually in a company is you have an MDR and STR they’re not making the proper notes. You don’t know where it left off. You don’t leave notes. You don’t leave until the last time you called the person. If you got a hold of them, you don’t know what you talked about. So starting from you, starting from zero again. And so you have a lot of inefficiencies in the sales process that caused you to lose a lot of money over the course of a year.
Speaker 2 00:26:51 Oh yeah. I mean, speed is everything speed kills. It kills your competitors. Right. And, uh, yeah, I’ll give you so here’s, here’s that same team I was talking, talking about one of their, I think I’m a mix kind of a super SDR. So get this speed. Five hours, eight minutes and 24 seconds of prospecting. Right? So full day, kind of 1058 dials were made for this person. How long would it take you to make 1058 fully navigated dots?
Speaker 1 00:27:21 Seven weeks, maybe.
Speaker 2 00:27:28 So that’s freight to speed, but, but uh, this person, uh, J H is very, very calm, had 43 conversations with decision makers, set six meetings and got 13 followups. Those are those future conversations with the teleprompter in place. That’s customized to say, how do I start this conversation again, got four referrals and was setting 1.17 meetings per hour. So they have a lot of choice and they’re offering that choice to their company. It’s not just to the rep. Now, the company as this big fat pipeline, by the way, these guys are, are dominating a trillion dollar market. And I’m not kidding. Trillion dollar record with an actual tea in front of the Trillium with 12 people. That’s what you can do is speed. I have another company where they had 52 people on board and they had a mandate to grow from 400 million to 1,000,000,004 years because they were acquired. So they were going to hire 400 more people and that’s impossible. So instead we helped them out a little bit and they beat their number by 11% with those 52 people. And at this point we do about $41,000 a day for them. And they’re completely dominating a market. There is no hope of competing with them and nobody knows how,
Speaker 1 00:28:46 Uh, Chris it’s truly, it’s truly incredible. That is this, have you found that this type of system works with any particular verticals better than others? Or is it really industry agnostic?
Speaker 2 00:28:57 It works with any, in any situation where you need to talk to people. I mean, if you have, I don’t know of any, but there must be some, like, some people will say, well, you know, we’re just kind of farming an installed base. And so we don’t need to talk to people, but actually when I’ve encouraged somebody to give it a whirl, it’s like, let’s just try this. Just make a list of your current customers and do this three months before renewal, not three hours before. All right, let’s see what it’s like, that conversation, split them and see what we learn. Yeah. And then always come back and, oh, I had no idea there’s stuff going on out there. Our competitors are nibbling at us where we have opportunity to upsell, to grow. We cross sell opportunities. We have one, one customer for that their chief operating officer put up on the, in a, in an industry you would not think is kind of oriented toward this sort of solid and up on his whiteboard for a whole year.
Speaker 2 00:29:53 It said principle of reorganization, intelligent, cross sell, using connect and sell that sat as the only item on the chief operating officer’s whiteboard, but multi-billion dollar company all year long because they realized call into the base. You’ve been acquiring companies cross sell those products, right? So I don’t know of any bad cases. I’ve got a heavy equipment company sells the biggest cranes in the world of a German air compressor company sells air compressors to folks to use in their factories, got folks who sell to lawyers, folks who sell to hospitals. I mean, you know, we just had a cybersecurity company that sells cybersecurity to protect the devices in your room and the hospital, the equipment in your room. So the folks don’t hack into your room and hold you hostage, right? Can you imagine that ransomware attack, you could target all the way down to the patient and then have their family have to pay up.
Speaker 2 00:30:49 I mean, that’s the kind of thing we should be concerned about. Sure. And they just sold that company for $400 million last week. And during the time, since we engaged with them, they built $42 million of pipeline directly and indirectly because indirectly you talk to somebody, you send them an email, they’re going to open it. You send them an email first and try to talk to them about the email. They’re going to say, what are you talking about? Right. So it’s, it opens up those other channels. It opens up the LinkedIn channel, talking to somebody, send them a LinkedIn invitation, a lot smarter than send them a LinkedIn invitation that they know means you’re going to pitch them.
Speaker 1 00:31:26 It’s all, it’s all fucking day long. Uh, excuse my French. Although I swear on here quite often, the amount of bullshit that I get on LinkedIn every day with people, because you know, my, my title is regional vice president. And so they don’t do any research. They don’t realize it. It’s just a fancy title for a sales rep. Right. And so they’re talking to me about technology and payroll and HR. I’m like, what, what what’s happening? You know, it’s, it’s, it’s so I’m like, man, you didn’t do your homework. And so it’s interesting. I’ll usually will take the time, uh, to, to, to kind of like let them, especially if it’s automation and I can tell that they it’s a bot and I’ll tell them, Hey man, uh, if you’re using this bot, it’s not a good one. You need to take the time to actually hit your target.
Speaker 1 00:32:15 Like give me a call for it. Cause you know, I’m just trying to be courteous. I’m like, cause I respect the profession shares. I’ve made a great living for me and my family. Although I’ve been really siloed in insurance for about 13 years, I still see it apple buckle. And I’ve done a little bit of consulting on the side for a lot of different, small businesses, mostly HVAC, blue collar, you know, plumbing to help people just hit different types of targets. And you have to know who you’re talking to a little bit of research, you know what, and this is where I love that with your company. You don’t have to do that. It’s more about, let me get the personal phone. We do a nice warm transfer. You do your pitch. We tee you up. You can work at speed and scale without having to do it yourself. You basically got a team behind you doing it for you. That’s a well organized and well-oiled machine. Um, I think it’s, I think it’s phenomenal. It’s it’s way better than I thought. Uh, before we talked, to be honest with you.
Speaker 2 00:33:09 Well, that’s why we do these test drives. Thank you for that. It’s kind of funny that we’ve tried to describe this thing in writing and videos and all that kind of stuff. And nobody gets it. It’s like trying to describe it. You know, it’s like, well I got a car, but it got two extra features. One is it flies and the other, it goes 600 miles an hour. It’s like, oh, okay, well what kind of guests does it take? Well, that’s not actually the relevant question. The question is, do you want to go 600 miles an hour? And would you like to be able to go where the roads don’t come? It’s not like what kind of guests? Well, so, um, is it like manual or automatic? No, that’s not the question. The question is, can you, you have something you want to dominate. That’s worth a 600 mile an hour flying car, if not, you know, so we’ve given up in terms of just describing it to the world.
Speaker 2 00:33:58 And what we do is we let people take a test drive and the test drive is truly a test drive, full production, full speed, your targets and free. And it’s one day. So it’s normally four hours because people get tired. This is killing me. And everybody’s scared when they do it because it’s a scary product. You had to push that go button and hands shake and you sweat and stuff like that. But what, what will happen in the test drive is then they know what we’re talking about. Oh, oh, we had a 600 miles an hour and it flies bought it right now. We can start to reason about their business. Does it have business applicability? And you know what we normally discover in our test drives real simple. It’s exactly what you would think. You’d discover there. There’s room for improvement in the reps, the list, the message.
Speaker 2 00:34:47 There’s room for improvement. Okay, well let’s not go too fast. I get it that we have a 600 mile an hour flying car, but let’s use it as a vehicle to get better. So let’s have a little school about getting better. Let’s get your message, right? Psychological framework that works. So the one that Chris bosses believes makes more sense than some, uh, let’s get your list targeted because you actually are going to talk to him. So your bullshit list that you’ve made up for the test drive, cause you thought, oh, I don’t know what’s going to happen. Okay, great. Now let’s go get the good list and let’s get your follow-up list. Let’s get your dormant lead list. Those inbounds you’ve never talked to. Let’s see the ones that a year ago that you never talked to, they’re still waiting for somebody to call them.
Speaker 2 00:35:33 Let’s get those lists, you know, the good list. And then let’s take your reps into a flight school where they can learn in the first two hours, how to master the first seven seconds of conversation, the next two hour session, they learn how to master the value prop part, the part where you’re getting the curiosity about taking the meeting. Third part, they master the cold call objections, which are totally different from all other objections in sales, completely different. And then they, in the fourth session, they learn how to master asking for the meeting, insisting on the meeting and making sure that calendar invite goes out. Even if you’re talking to a CEO, putting gas in their car and a rainstorm, Love it.
Speaker 1 00:36:17 And I, for those, I know you’ve mentioned Chris boss a few times, um, for he’s he was the guy that, uh, wrote the negotiation book. He was an FBI negotiator, never split the difference. Remember the boom. So people check that out. If you haven’t, uh, before, um, Chris, I wanted to kind of, I wanted to ask you a few more questions to kind of wrap this up, you know, where do you see connected and sell going in the next five years? Is there anything that’s going to come in and said advancing or are we just kind of sticking on this path because it’s working so well, we’re just trying to look and expand the horizon to help more people.
Speaker 2 00:36:52 Well, there’s, there’s three areas I think are interesting. One is I’ll call it the world of the top producer. So in, in the top producer world, it insurance and, and uh, uh, real estate, there’s a, you know, wealth management. There are these people who they eat, what they kill. They’re really, really good. And if they go faster, they’re just that much better. And they’re often at a point in their careers where getting some time back would be good. You know, they work hard, they work long, but they’d rather do other things, right? Somebody like you, right? And, and top producers need something a little bit different. Our standard offering feels more like it’s for sales team, even though it’s used by an individual, top producers. So we’re going seriously into that world. I’ve hired somebody. Her name is Cheryl Turner. She’s the one I mentioned before the best cold caller on the planet.
Speaker 2 00:37:41 And she is organizing our efforts around how do we make the life of somebody like Terry Moore, Terry Morrison, top producer in the world of commercial real estate. Multi-family in Southern California. And he’s a guy who wants to retire because his wife wants him to retire. And so, you know, but he loves his stuff. And he said to me, two days ago, he says, you know what? He’s only used connected cell for two weeks. He says, you know what you, your system has given me retirement and work at the same time, I can still enjoy my career. I can make even more money. And I have all the time I need with my wife because I can fill my pipeline with meetings and I can do it with no effort and I’m not frustrated and I’m not tired as a result. And he’s a young guy he’s in, I dunno, you know, older than me a little bit.
Speaker 2 00:38:31 But, um, and so, you know, top producer world is really interesting to me and I think we have, uh, we have a special skew for it now that we just came up with that I think is really dynamite for being easy to, to partake of. And I don’t have to worry about whether they’re any good. So just interesting, right? By the way, the top producers also really like flight school because they’re the most coachable people on earth. Yeah. Interestingly, the best or the most coachable. Definitely. So that’s an area that I think we’re going to do a lot of interesting work in our mobile app, which lets you do stuff from your car. Talk to people while you’re in a car drive, coming to a meeting, you know, that’ll call come back someday. For some, it already has the ability to push a button while you’re driving along, even in real traffic.
Speaker 2 00:39:17 And just talk to somebody on your list, set that, meet that two meetings while you’re going to that one meeting. I mean, that’s, that’s efficiency right there, cause it’s hard to work. So that’s one, two is kind of at the other end of the world, we think that SDR teams run inefficiently because they’re so obsessed with something cheap, which is sending email rather than something effective, which is having conversations. We call this world talk to the sequence. So talk to sequence whether using outreach or SalesLoft or any of these other sequencers, you’ll get a 14 times lift on your investment by starting with the conversation. So that’s going to be kind of a long process because those things are, you know, they’re kind of a big fad like, oh, let’s give our SDR as something that, you know, does it for them. But the problem is the it, as HubSpot’s been telling us is getting less and less effective barraging people with email.
Speaker 2 00:40:11 I don’t care what kind of clever sequence you have a that alligators eat you, blah, blah, blah. Doesn’t make any difference. Right? That’s at some point I call it Gresham’s law. Sheep communication tries to drive out, but it drowns out good communication. I agree. So you’ve got to get the good communication going. So that’s like the second area. And then the third is the world of data. Now we generate more high-quality data about what’s going on than anybody, you know, 60 million dials, 3 million conversations all there to be analyzed without violating anybody’s privacy. So there’s value in that data. And I’ve, I’ve hired a couple people that I actually worked for an hour and a half a day in the data with my data concierge, Thomas Young. And um, it’s really, really interesting. The value that come that’s hiding inside of the traffic analysis, who, what kind of companies are talking to, what kind of company selling, what kind of stuff and how well are they doing that kind of stuff. So those are three areas it’ll occupies for another five years or so.
Speaker 1 00:41:15 I love it. Well, thanks Chris, for being so transparent, you know, um, cause you’ve been very transparent about what you guys are doing. Um, I love it. It’s something that I think that every company could, you know, adopt, you mentioned dubbed international, you know, they’re a huge client of ours. Uh I’ve with them for the last, uh, four or five years and a lot of different facets and small and large group type stuff. Um, I just don’t see. I don’t see how you don’t use this if, if you’re someone who’s down on the phone every day, um, and I’ve been doing it. And I said, since I was 21, so the,
Speaker 2 00:41:53 So you don’t use it if you haven’t been, you know, my favorite customers are the ones who don’t think that the human voice can fit into their strategy because they gave up. Yeah. And that’s where the real, that’s where the competitive advantage comes from. It’s like nobody in our industry does this imagine you’re selling cranes big, heavy, like the kind that will, you know, lift the tunneling equipment out of the tunnel into your city when it gets stuck, those kinds of cranes, would you think that that’s a business that somebody ought to be? Well, most people wouldn’t, but I tell you what the guys who are using it. I wouldn’t want to compete with them a hundred percent.
Speaker 1 00:42:29 Yeah. One of the, one of the guys I’ve actually have had on the podcast twice, his name is his name is Niraj capybara and he’s in Ireland. And um, he wrote a book called everybodys in sales. Everybody works in sales. Right. Cause it’s really true. You know, it’s just like, I, I always joke with everybody. I’m like, you don’t think you’re a salesperson. Even if you were telling me like during new linkage, congratulations, that was a sale. She sold you, you sold her. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing. And because I’m an introvert, I’m not in sales. Yes you are. I don’t care if you’re an HR. I don’t care if you’re in it. There’s some aspect of your life where there’s always sales. You’re not being, it might be like in this type of sales, like you and I are talking about, um, every day, but it’s such a vital component. And the way I always look at sales is just how do you communicate effectively? And in a sales environment, how do you affect it? How do you effectively communicate with speed, a sense of urgency and do it the best way to value to deliver the most value to your customers.
Speaker 2 00:43:28 Yep. And how do you find them? I mean, so I’m an old search guy, right? So I hold, I dunno what 16 patents in the world of search and, um, you know, and cool stuff, right? Like search, like Google-y kind of search, right? Electronic cataloging and stupid stuff like that. And one thing I learned in spending more than a decade immersed in the world of search is more problems are search problems than you think. And sales as a search problem, you’re searching for the fifth, the click that I call it, you know, it’s like tapping a bunch of bells, right? You’re going around and there’s a field full of bells. And your job is to find the ones made of brass, not clay because we want the ones that ring, but you can’t look at them. You can’t weigh them. They all weigh the same.
Speaker 2 00:44:09 You got to go hit them and got to hit him with the conversation. If that resonates, boom, we have something. So you’re searching for those folks worth doing business with today, mutually that you were also conditioning the market for the future by learning about it. And if you can do both of those in the same action which you do when you have a conversation and you can set followups on that, who can stand up against that competitively. Like you’re the one who knows all the real bells, let your competitor go on, tap on all the crappy bells at one 10th as off. And as you do, you know, that’s their problem.
Speaker 1 00:44:43 A hundred percent, uh, beautiful. Chris, thank you so much working people, um, connect with you or, and definitely working people can find connect and sell
Speaker 2 00:44:53 Well, connect and sells, easy connect and sell all one word.com. Our website will be incomprehensible to you. Pay no attention to it. Just go to the little form that says, I want to do a test drive, have the experience, ride the dragon. You know, it’s like, you can talk about Disney world all day long, take the kids. Let’s see what happens. Yeah. So that’s that that’s number one. Number two is I got a fairly big LinkedIn LinkedIn presence. Um, feel free to reach out to me. It might take me a couple of weeks to get back to you. Uh, I have the CEO’s disease. Not everything happens every day. And then a third is I got a podcast called market dominance guys, and it’s about how to systematically dominate markets. 100% of the time using the human voice on a trust. First approach, love that.
Speaker 2 00:45:40 And it’s a, it’s a few people have taken their businesses apart and put them back together. Some of those people have become my guests actually, so I can catch Henry watch the love real source and the very special niche of commercial real estate that he’s in. And he actually took his business apart. When he heard trust first paved, the mark pave your market with trust and then dominate. He thought that’s different. And he listened to all the episodes of the podcast over a weekend, his wife was skiing. And uh, and, and he calls me up and says, I’m going to remake my business around this. You know, it’s like he had a great business, but there’s stuff in there that I think will surprise people.
Speaker 1 00:46:20 Awesome. Well, for anybody listening, uh, to any of them, I don’t know, 50 podcast channels I’m on and oh, and or YouTube scroll right down to the show notes. And I will list all those links to connect and sell, uh, to Chris’s LinkedIn and to Chris’s podcast. You guys can connect, um, anybody that’s in sales, if you’re a CEO or COO, or if you’re a sales manager, I would highly encourage you to check out connecting. So, um, it will be a game-changer for your organization. A 1000%, uh, said I’ve been doing this a long time. Those of you to listen to me, I’ve had, you know, said lots of great, um, thought leaders in the sales industry. This is the best thing that I’ve heard, honestly, Chris in a very long time, uh, to be able to change because the phone’s not dead. The phones are more relevant than ever and ever. I tell people all the time, the one thing that we all have in our hand, in our pocket as our fucking phones. So, um, right. So, you know what I mean? Like people saying phone’s dead, you’re just crazy. So Chris, thank you so much for your time and your knowledge. I’ve, I’ve really enjoyed our conference.
Speaker 2 00:47:21 Tyzer. Awesome. To be on with you.
