Belief in the Meeting

How many cold-call opportunities have you wasted by pushing hard and fast to sell your company’s product? Today’s podcast guest, Bruce Lewolt, Founder of both JoyAI and Blast Learning, talks about a more caring and effective approach to selling. It starts with switching the goal of that initial call from selling your company’s product to offering prospects a helping hand with a problem or goal they have. Imagine for a moment you’re the prospect, and you’ve just been ambushed by a cold call: Who would you be willing to set an appointment with for a discovery meeting? A person blatantly trying to make a sale? Or a caring professional who understands your business’ needs and wants? In this episode, our three well-reasoned and insightful sales professionals share many insights with our listeners about making a successful cold call, but the one you don’t want to miss is this “aha!” moment. Your job is not selling your company’s product: Your job is selling a discovery meeting. That should make the title of this week’s Market Dominance Guys’ podcast very clear: You’re still selling something, but “Your Product Is the Meeting.”
Listen to Bruce Lewolt's previous episodes in this series:
EP137: What Do Your Prospects Really Hear?
Ep138: Don’t Get Lost in Your Rock ’n’ Roll
More episodes on the topic of Believing in the Meeting are here.
About Our Guest
Bruce Lewolt is Founder of Blast Learning, a service that uses Alexa or Google Assistant as an intelligent personal study assistant, resulting in a state-of-the-art study method that is not just effective but makes learning enjoyable. (See BlastLearning.com and BlastStudy.com) He is also the Founder of JOYai, the first emotionally intelligent and sales-savvy artificial intelligence system for salespeople, bringing intelligent automation to prospecting and selling.

On this week’s episode of Market Dominance Guy, Chris Beall continues his conversation with Cherryl Turner, Chief Development Officer of ConnectAndSell’s newest division, Flight School. Together they talk about why it is that of the four sales outcomes — Yes, No, Not me, or Not now — the response that dominates is “Not now.” As Chris explains, “It’s the nature of life.” People are busy. Things come up. Priorities shift. But when a prospect says, “Not now,” what’s a sales rep to do? Push harder and try to squeeze his pitch into the conversation anyway? Or should he relax and bow to the prospect’s protestations that it’s a bad time to talk, by graciously saying, “No problem. I’ll give you a call next week.” It’s an unusual reaction in the high-pressure world of “Make that sale,” but this may be one of the keys to Cherryl’s success in her career: as Chris says, she handles the rigors of cold calling with grace.
It also takes grace to handle the frustration of a no-show. But Chris’s surprising reaction to a cancelled appointment is, “I heart no-shows! They’re my favorite thing in business!” A no-show, he says, makes the relationship more real, because now it’s less perfect. It creates a more-even footing for the next conversation, as well as an opening for a prospect to reveal an insight or two about his business as he explains the why behind his missed appointment. So, when a rep or AE is faced with a no-show and is able to relax and say, “Hey, I understand. I’ll call you back later so we can find a time that will work better for you,” then that improves what Cherryl calls the “trust-o-meter.” She has learned that being persistent with call-backs to “Not now’s” and “No shows” lets her prospects know that she believes in the potential value of what she is selling. And you can believe me when I say, you’re going to want to hear every minute of this week’s episode of Market Dominance Guys, “I Heart No-Shows!”
 

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.

The United States may stake its claim as the first country to land on the moon but Russia can boast that it is the first country to drill the 2nd deepest man-made hole ever recorded here on Earth.
Since the early 1960s, scientists have attempted to drill down to the Earth's mantle. Why the mantle? Because we’re told that scientists only have a "reasonable" understanding of what it's made from, and how it works. 
In 1970, Russia entered the race to dig. But unlike the Moon landing, Russia achieved more than the US. Over the next 20 years, a Russian team of scientists drilled down 40,230 feet into the Earth… That's 7.6 miles. The hole, known as the "Kola superdeep borehole," is only nine inches in diameter. Nearby residents around the dig have said they could hear souls screaming in hell coming from the depths as the team dug deeper and deeper. Take advice from the Market Dominance Guys, if you find yourself in a sales hole, stop digging.

 
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”

There is a universal product that every company has that it needs to better understand and sell more effectively and correctly. And it's a product that can be crafted and messaged just like any other product your team sells. Because it’s a real product, it requires belief in its potential value and worth from the folks that sell it. It’s a product that shouldn’t be short-cut or mis-messaged…or even try to do too much. It needs to be measured for effectiveness. And the ability to get this product in front of your list is also one of the keys to market dominance. That product is the Discovery Meeting or Discovery Call. In the episode, I ask Chris to separate fact from fiction and put some sound data and reasoning behind this misunderstood and much-maligned tool. This episode of Market Dominance Guys is The Right Tool for the Right Job, or as I like to call it, Don’t Make the Spiders Angry.