Season 3

Sales used to be considered a trick done by salespeople, but success in sales today relies more and more on collecting information, analyzing the resulting data, and then using it to finetune your sales department’s approach to prospects. Santosh Sharan, president and COO of Apollo.io joins our Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall, and Corey Frank, in this first of three conversations about instrumentation that collects data and how careful analysis can help make sense of that data in order to provide guided intelligence to sales teams. Join these three sales-minded experts as they walk you through what to do with all the data you collect in this week’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “The Increasing Atomic Weight of Data.”
About Our Guest
Santosh Sharan, president and COO at Apollo.io, a leading data intelligence and sales engagement platform. Previously, Santosh was COO at LeadGenius, COO at Aberdeen, and VP at ZoomInfo.

Is the goal of each member of your sales team to dominate your company’s market? Or is their goal to make their sales quotas? According to our Market Dominance Guy, Chris Beall, it should be “Dominate or die!” This week, Chris shares with our podcast audience a Selling Power webinar he calls “How to Achieve Market Dominance,” in which he details the steps necessary to do just that: dominate your market! In this first part of a three-part series, Chris defines the terms “market” and “addressable market,” and then goes on to explain precisely what information you need to obtain from your addressable market prospects when you have a conversation with them. Using a clear and organized approach, Chris will lead you to an understanding of this week’s Market Dominance Guys’ topic, “What Do You Do With an Addressable Market?” As usual, you’ll walk away from this how-to guide with insights and strategies to help your company on its way to dominating its market.

Driving revenue is what keeps a startup company in the hands of its founders, instead of in the grasp of a venture capital firm. That’s what Canyon Ventures Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship is all about: teaching founders how to sell their own product or service to get that revenue rolling in. Robert Vera, founding director of this Grand Canyon University center, is proud of the success of the founders he has been mentoring. During this second part of their two-part conversation, our Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall, and Corey Frank talk with Robert about the importance of his program. “It’s only by selling that we learn how our business is really working,” explains Chris. Those selling conversations with prospects give startup founders the information necessary to fine-tune their products and services so they can dominate their market. Here on Market Dominance Guys, we try to do much the same thing: For 100 episodes now, Chris, Corey, and their guests have helped our listeners finetune their businesses so they can dominate their markets. At the end of today’s episode, Chris and Corey applaud a couple of stand-out guests who have generously shared their insights on this podcast. Like Robert Vera’s program, Market Dominance Guys is also — just as the title of this episode states — “A Finishing School for Future CEOs.”
Episodes mentioned by Chris and Corey as two of their favorites:
EP7: Don‘t Make the Spiders Angry
EP75: The Secret of Her Success
EP76: I Heart No Shows!
About Our Guest
Robert Vera is a bestselling author and the founding director of Canyon Ventures Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Grand Canyon University in Phoenix, Arizona.

One of the major challenges of getting a startup up and running is doing a lot of things you don't know how to do. How are you going to learn to do them? Enter Robert Vera, founding director of Canyon Ventures Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Grand Canyon University, and today’s guest on Market Dominance Guys. Mentoring a portfolio of 32 startup companies that are beyond the ideation stage, the Center's goal is to accelerate the growth of each company by coaching them, at no cost, in selling their product and generating cash flow. The program’s one caveat? Each company must hire Grand Canyon University students and give them professional sales experience prior to graduation. Our own Market Dominance Guy, Corey Frank, helps to provide that successful selling experience with his company, Branch 49, a sales acceleration software and service that uses AI to score leads, dramatically increasing conversations-to-meeting rates. Intrigued? Find out more about how to grow your startup on today's Market Dominance Guys' episode, "Taking a Leaf Out of Branch 49' book."

Are you providing your reps with excellent sales training only to find that most of them drift slowly back to their old behavior? In today’s podcast, Gerry Hill, Regional VP/EMEA of ConnectAndSell, and Shane Mahi, Founder and CEO of SalesDRIIVN, join our Market Dominance Guy, Chris Beall, to discuss the solution to sales rep drift. Using the analogy of machinery that drifts out of tolerance and requires maintenance for necessary adjustments, the guys discuss the necessity and effectiveness of sales coaching in real-time. The solution’s success hinges on catching and correcting those little (or big) errors in message, tone, and pacing before your reps run through your lists and have nothing to show for it. Vigilance and just-in-time coaching: All that and more on today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Do You Catch Their Drift?”

What’s the most efficient, most secure method of growing your company? Shane Mahi, Founder and CEO of SalesDRIIVN, and Gerry Hill, EMEA Regional Vice President of ConnectAndSell, explore this question with Chris Beall in today’s Market Dominance Guys’ podcast. “Overhead is like a racehorse,” Chris says. “It eats while we sleep.” He offers the following advice to Shane and to our loyal listeners: Forget taking money from VCs. Instead, work on shortening your pitch-to-value cycle time and build your business that way. “The faster your company can cycle and produce value,” he explains, “the lower your risk of losing your business.” Gerry chimes in with his own great advice: “Be sure to take a scientific approach to the experiment, not an emotional approach.” And, as always, Chris reminds those pursuing success in business that “Market dominance is a risk-reduction program: in order to reduce the risk of losing your company, you need to dominate one market. Then go dominate another.” That’s the way we roll on Market Dominance Guys every day: lots of valuable advice and helpful reminders. Listen in for more of it on today’s episode, “Overhead Is Like a Racehorse.”

How did you get started in sales? And what led you to the position you now hold and the company you are currently involved with? Shane Mahi, Founder and CEO of SalesDRIIVN, and Gerry Hill, EMEA Regional Vice President of ConnectAndSell, are asked these very questions by our Market Dominance Guy Chris Beall in today’s podcast. Surprisingly, a common answer emerges to the first question: both guests, as well as our host, took their first step into the sales world by selling products door to door — and doing so successfully. Our guests describe the steps that subsequently led them to where they are today, and this leads to a discussion with Chris about funding new companies and the temptation and possible pitfalls of taking venture money to facilitate growth. Follow their conversation in this first of three meetings of the minds on today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Is Venture Capital for You?”

Could you name that one all-important thing that makes your relationship with your customers successful? Rahul Maniktala, Microsoft’s Strategic Account Director of Semi/Hi-Tech Manufacturing, can: As he tells our Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall and Corey Frank, that all-important thing is “doing the day-to-day right.” Why? Because it daily reinforces the trust your customers feel for you and your company, which incrementally builds the credibility of your services and products. And with that credibility in place, you have a decent shot at an agreement with your customer when you propose bigger, more important initiatives. Take a listen to more insights shared by Rahul, who has been a Microsoft employee for eight years, as he explains the culture of collaboration at his company, whether he stands with human intelligence predictions or artificial intelligence predictions, and what job he wanted to do when he was a 10-year-old, on today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Doing the Day-to-Day Right.”
Listen to the first half of this two-part interview:
Empathy, Goals, and Alignment of Purpose

What if you only had one account to sell to? One with a $100-million budget and a quarter of a million employees? Rahul Maniktala, Microsoft’s Strategic Account Director of Semi/Hi-Tech Manufacturing has that very job. He’s today’s guest on Market Dominance Guys, and Chris Beall and Corey Frank are curious about how Rahul goes about dominating his market of one. “Behind me is the might of Microsoft,” he explains, and the culture there lends itself very well to support for their customers. In addition, Rahul’s background in technical expertise and an understanding of high-tech products, which is the basis of his customer’s business, helps him gain an understanding of what his customer wants to accomplish. After that, “[t]here are a lot of people you have to align,” Rahul explains to Chris and Corey. He always starts with the customer, employing empathy in order to understand their goals, and then works with the people at Microsoft to create an alignment of purpose between the goals of this company he works for and the goals of the customer he serves. It’s a balancing act, and one that Rahul is very adept at, as you’ll learn in today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Empathy, Goals, and an Alignment of Purpose.”

How do you improve your cold calling skills if your present company isn’t providing any sales training? Train yourself! Until you can get with the right company, borrow ideas from the best sales experts you can find (many have been guests on this podcast), take improv classes, join Toastmasters, and keep your mind open to absorb what works. Our Market Dominance Guy Corey Frank is talking in more depth about training yourself during this second part of his conversation with Susan Finch, president of Funnel Media and Funnel Radio. He advises listeners that salespeople should fall in love with their craft — not the product they’re selling. How do you do that? Care about the potential value of the meeting for your prospect and remember the “why” of what you’re doing. And what skills should you hone? Learn what moves prospects to make a decision, create a well-written script and adhere exactly to it, use the tone of voice that elicits the response you want, and most importantly, leave your own mood and ego behind when you make a cold call. Train yourself to remember that it’s not about you. When you place a call, it’s showtime!
Listen to the first half of this interview here:
Are You Laying Brick, or Making $12 an Hour?