Sales Talk for CEOs: A Return to Cold Calling with Chris Beall (S3:E12)

My next guest is Chris Beall, CEO of ConnectAndSell, Inc. who is a case study in drinking your own champagne. He is here to talk about using his own platform to build his business and the breakthroughs that he discovered to make the platform more effective for him and of course the customers that use it.

Chris Beall takes us through his journey building the ConnectAndSell business model starting with his “Wartime” stance to pioneering better pipelines and finally inventing the next generation of technology that cannibalizes his first generation. 

His biggest breakthrough was going from demo to test drive where customers get to experience the thrill of having actual sales success in a day-long, on premise, session. Every CEO can learn how to increase sales team performance by listening to this interview with Chris. 

Highlights:

2:10 So everyone out there who's saying cold calling is dead, cold calling is not dead

2:27 You don't want to pay your reps to be phone jockeys

14:13 "Look, there's two kind of CEOs. There's peacetime CEOs and wartime CEOs, and you better know which one you are."

14:49 We got going pretty fast and started making lots of sales. Then we focused on making a sales machine and finally made the breakthrough “The Test Drive”

18:44 I don't believe that it's possible to figure out what to do until you're doing something and feeling the pain of it not working.

20:41 To me, something that's not done in anger is not done at all. So that's our test drive. We do 500 of them a year.

23:57 So what the question on the table really is, what's it going to be like to work together to solve this

problem? 

25:02 Your competition right now, today, tomorrow, the next day, and forever is to do nothing!

27:01 Well, we need to experience what our customers are experiencing. So let's organize like they're organizing even though we don't like it.

28:05 There is no such thing as a person who talks, listens, reads, writes, and does data who isn't a CEO or a future CEO.

31:14 Rescheduling (missed sales calls) is your number one source of new business.

33:36 The idea of the lone wolf salesperson who's not part of the machine is just not part of our company.

34:41 We establish status alignment with somebody that we're their peer, and then we need to let them feel comfortable that we're an expert, and then we need to give them a piece of advice about what the next thing is to do.

38:27 So once a test drive has happened, the conversion rate is about 37%. 

40:31… the enterprise is not that person you're talking to, it's this big dynamic beast that's going to reorg once a year. 

41:19 Everything's renewals, everything's upsell, everything's the future.

So how do you start in a way that establishes, for sure, that value is being delivered

About Our Guest

For thepast 30 years, Chris Beall has participated in softwarestart-ups as a founder or at a very early stage of development. His belief is that the most powerful part of any software system is the human being that we inappropriately call a “user,” and that thevalue key in software is to let the computer do what it does well —go fast without getting bored —in order to free up human potential. Toward that end, Chris has been involved with Requisite Technology, GXS, Epiance, Qlip Media, Aptara, Cadis, Sun Microsystems, and Unisyn. He is currently CEO of ConnectAndSell, Inc., based in Silicon Valley, and hosts a podcast at MarketDominanceGuys.com.

Show Links

Gerhard Gschwandtner and the Sales 3.0 Conference

Connect with Chris Beall in the links below:

Website: https://connectandsell.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-beall-7859a4/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/chris8649

You can learn more about and connect with Alice Heiman in the links below.

Website: https://AliceHeiman.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aliceheiman/