1. How to Free Solo Your Pitch:

    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”.
  2. How to Harvest Authentic Trust in your Discovery Calls

    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”
  3. Your Startup Origin Story: Sales is Not the Villain!

    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.
  4. How to Warm Up Cold Communication

    Over the years, how salespeople make initial contact for a sale has changed. In these modern times, it has come down to a choice between making a cold phone call or sending a cold email. It seems to be a matter of choice. However, if you’re trying to break through a prospect’s initial fear of being sold to so that you can engender that level of trust necessary to set a meeting or make a sale, which approach should you put YOUR trust in? The human voice? Or a digital communication? Today, our Market Dominance Guy, Chris Beall, talks with podcast producer Susan Finch about this very question. As CEO of ConnectAndSell, Chris is an impassioned believer in phone conversations first as the most successful tool for setting appointments. Why? Because with your voice, you can employ timbre, tone, pacing, and emotion. In a one-on-one conversation, you can pause for a response, share humor when appropriate, or convey that you understand the other person’s situation. However carefully crafted, an email message can never do as a good a job at interacting with another human being. In pursuing the all-important goal of engendering trust with a prospect, initial phone conversations win, hands down! Listen in to today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode as Chris shares his well-honed opinions on “How to Warm Up a Cold Communication.”
  5. The Best Surfer (or Sales Rep) Out There Is The One Having The Most Fun.

    A lot goes into building a surfboard. In fact, depending on the expertise and the quality of the board, there can be upwards of 39 steps from start to finish. It’s not a fast process and takes a skilled surfer on the shaper to know what a particular board size or shape will do in the water. Take Dick Brewer, the undisputed 83-year-old grandmaster surfboard shaper from Hawaii. Dick has designed boards surfing legends all over the world…the big guys like Laird Hamilton and Garrett McNamara. He says he has made more than 50,000 boards in his lifetime. McNamara says, “He makes the boards that I can trust my life on.” Dick doesn’t take that trust lightly since Garrett regularly hunts waves of 100-feet plus to ride. Today, Dick hand-makes about 200 boards a year, putting his crisp, neat signature on each of them with a pencil and some of his custom wood boards sell for as much as $12,000.Dick’s fundamental innovation was to shape the nose and tail of the board into a teardrop rather than an oval, allowing the board to cut into the water more precisely and help surfers ride inside the tube of the wave…this was revolutionary at the time and is credited with helping explode the skills and confidence of the big wave riders and also help newer folks try their hand at the sport. Tune in for this episode of Market Dominance Guys, “The Best Surfer Out There is the One Having the Most Fun.”
  6. You’d Better Believe It!

    This week, our Market Dominance Guys, Chris and Corey, interview Matthew Forbes, Head of Strategic Accounts at ConnectAndSell, about an epiphany Matt had that increased the meetings he set by almost 400%. Wow! What could possibly change that would explain that kind of increase? Well, it’s actually a simple change, but it’s a very necessary one: Matt came to truly believe — deep in his soul — in the potential value of the discovery meeting for his prospects, even if they were never going to do business with ConnectAndSell. His messaging script didn’t change at all. It was his belief that did. Listen to today’s Market Dominance Guys episode, “You’d Better Believe It!” to learn how Matt came to make this meeting-setting leap.
  7. I’m Not the Salesman Your Mother Warned You About

    The Market Dominance Guys, Chris and Corey, welcome a new guest this week: Jason Beck, Vice President of Sales at Enerex. Or as Corey dubbed him — the Pied Piper of Retail Energy.The topic today? What leads to the adoption of a new product or service.Jason is a big believer in the role of trust in establishing business relationships that will lead to adoption. “Trust is so hard to gain,” he says, “and so easy to lose.” In gaining trust, it’s a two-step program, Jason explains. First, be honest in the claims you make about your product’s value — not as you hope it will one day perform, but as it performs today. And second, find out what your prospects fear most and make sure you and your company are none of those things. If you’re trying to dominate any market, Jason continues, you need to be working toward that tipping point where your initial adopters, whose trust you have successfully gained, will begin vouching for you to your new prospects.Chris, Corey, and Jason end the podcast with a frank discussion about that dirty word “sales.” They talk about the negative reputation sales acquired and why people fear being sold to. You’ll want to listen in for Chris’ insights about how to turn that frown upside down by shining a brighter light on the necessary role of salespeople in the B2B world. Join us for this episode of The Market Dominance Guys: I’m Not the Salesman Your Mother Warned You About.
  8. Messaging Eats Product for Breakfast

    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.
  9. Mr. Miyagi and the Theory of Market Dominance.

    Rocky. The Karate Kid. The Average Joes. Rudy. Underdogs. We love them. They are the people who use their grit combined with their well-coached and newly acquired skills to make waves, cause the odds-makers fits, and run up the score.When you get funded by a VC and finally have the green light to release the Kraken and launch your vaunted sales machine, there is a temptation to run up the bill on the countless tools available in the sales and marketing stack and forget the meager stack from whence you came.“Stand back…I have capital and I’m not afraid to use it!”…you’ll think.Magic beans to make my phone ring?…I’ll take it!
    A love potion to make my prospects swoon into a demo?…Yes, please!
    A virtual dancing Elvis to get folks to download my white paper?…sure, why not?
    You can spend the GDP of a small Caribbean country playing this game and feeling like you also have the perfect Millennial-friendly office, the best cold brew, and the ideal dress code and PTO policy.But the most sophisticated and successful stack and culture in the world can be had right now if you simply have a tight message that works combined with a mechanism to talk to hundreds of thousands of people a year…AND doing it with a small team of sincere and empathetic salespeople.

    But is it realistic?

    In this episode I ask Chris if something like this only exists in the lab…or can it be really be seen in the wild.

    Welcome to the Market Dominance Guys and this week’s episode: “Mr. Miyagi and the Theory of Market Dominance.”

  10. Getting Prospects from Fear to Commitment

    You’re about to make a cold call, hoping to get a commitment out of your prospect. What are you feeling? A little trepidation, perhaps? As all salespeople know, that’s the fear of rejection. But have you ever considered that your prospect is feeling some fear too? It’s true: most prospective customers feel the fear of having to talk to an invisible stranger. That’s a lousy way to start a conversation with someone you’re wanting a commitment from. So, how do you, an invisible stranger, get your prospect, an unknown person, to go quickly from fear to trust, then from trust to curiosity, and, finally, from curiosity to commitment — all in about a half of a minute? And how do you do it so the call doesn’t end with a disappointing outcome? Chris, Corey, and today’s Market Dominance Guys’ guest, Oren Klaff, managing director of Intersection Capital, tackle this challenge with a discussion about trust and how to manufacture it, especially at the speed and scale necessary for startup founders to glean success — before their new venture runs out of money.