EP90: Lead That Cold Call With Trust, Not Value

Market Dominance Guys

This week, our Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall, and Corey Frank are into part two of their three-part conversation with Henry Wojdyla, Founder and Principal of RealSource Group. And what a conversation it is! Chris was surprised to discover Henry had binge-listened to every Market Dominance Guys’ podcast in one weekend. You might wonder why the rush until you hear the questions Henry was wrestling with while attempting to finetune his business: “How can I systematize what I’m doing?” “How can I maximize the efficacy of the sales practitioner?” “How can we create systems that are somehow universal?” Right here on Market Dominance Guys, Henry found what he was looking for!

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One answer came from Chris’ advice about what you lead with when you are that invisible stranger calling a prospect: Do you immediately trot out your company’s value? Or do you attempt to establish trust first? Henry confesses, “I was obsessed with the idea of leading with value.” He says his approach was data-driven, data-forward. But as Chris has repeated in his discussions with other guests, “Trust always has to precede presenting your value.” Henry is a true believer now in establishing trust first and restates it this way: “You create trust by essentially alleviating the pain of who you are as the attacking entity.” Join Henry, Corey, and Chris as they explore more about calming a prospect’s fear of cold callers on today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Lead That Cold Call With Trust, Not Value.”

About Our Guest

Henry Wojdyla is Founder and Principal of RealSource Group. RealSource Group is retained by institutional real estate investors, enhancing their speed and surety of execution through “off-market” acquisitions of medical office buildings and surgical centers.

Here is the full transcript from this episode:

Corey Frank (02:07):

Well, we talk a lot about, there's only really three things you can do in business from a strategy perspective. You can do something with your current situation and move it from a position to a better position. You can see who you have together as team members or board members or capital and do something different with those people. Or it sounds like what you've done clearly is take what you have and make it run better, faster, cheaper, which is expanded the bottleneck in some way with your ability to kind of replicate in this iron man concept that [inaudible 00:02:40] talks about.

Henry Wojdyla (02:40):

Mm-hmm (affirmative) I think that's an interesting way to parse that earlier question. And to your point, a hundred percent. I think I've been an absolutely obsessed with figuring out what are best practices and putting best practices on top of each other, in a way that's cohesive. You can't just apply maybe one system that doesn't necessarily align with another, but we've been very judicious in the way we look at things. I'd say from a business perspective, if I was going to really simplify it, one of my theories I'm trying to play out over a period of years is how can I shift from opex to capex or operating expenses to capital expenses. And the way I'm doing that is by really heavily investing in systems, which can both be literal systems in terms of technological systems, but also systems of practice and systematizing the way in which I operate.

Henry Wojdyla (03:26):

And I think one of the things I'm really keenly desirous to prove out here in the coming years, I think with Chris, it's going to be very interesting ride here over the next 12 to 18 months with ConnectAndSell is how can we really maximize the efficacy of the sales practitioner. And to your point earlier, Corey, about the way to apply and readapt business models into other either industries, another way that's something too that I've kind of been always cognizant of in the back of my mind that we could templatize this approach. On the one hand, you're hearing me talk very, very specifically about the dynamics and the realities of the TAM that I focus on, but the systems in which we get there are largely replicable to entirely different industries or sectors.

Corey Frank (04:12):

Sure. Certainly the industries. When you dominate and as you continue to dominate the medical space for the asset class for real estate to medical buildings, again, this is part of what you do in your business, but are there designs the same template can be applied to other kinds of broader types of commercial real estate as well, correct?

Henry Wojdyla (04:32):

Absolutely. In many ways, there's a broader, theoretical discussion that I think Chris has had been [inaudible 00:04:38] on that just recently on LinkedIn, but we've had some conversations about other property types that we've been picking particularly on commercial office. That's a different topic for probably a different podcast. Suffice to say, yes, it absolutely can be applied to different industries. And that's been something that I've been, like I said earlier, I'm cognizant about, how can we create systems that are really somewhat universal in their nature.

Henry Wojdyla (05:02):

And one of the things that's been floating around the back of my mind is wouldn't it be interesting to not just harvest the physical assets, the physical real estate, the bricks and mortar, but actually go out and acquire these local and regional ownership groups at the corporate level, because then you can actually get some of the other services that you need to really operate a portfolio of assets, things like asset management, property management, leasing. These are terms obviously in our world, but you can go out and harvest companies in the exact same strategy that we're doing it. So there's broader principles at play. And like I said earlier, I think really one of the theories I have is that I think you can go a long ways with capital investment as opposed to operating expense investment in terms of necessarily growing headcount. I've always said from day one, when I start this business, I will never consider the success of this business based on a head count. Ever

Corey Frank (05:54):

Absolutely. And I think with ConnectAndSell and certainly the marketing that they have that's part of what I want to focus on is that leverage and ConnectAndSell what's been able to do for you. But you bring up an interesting point. And maybe this is a good segue too, because Chris, we have seen now with the economy on the uptick a little bit, and certainly the announcement from Apple, that they're requiring their folks in the office, what, Monday, Tuesday and Thursday, I think it was. Kind of an odd amount of days. It's like why not just make it three concurrent days, if you're going to do something, maybe there's a method to that madness.

Chris Beall (06:29):

They're trying to get some gesture out, I don't know what it is.

Corey Frank (06:31):

It's got to be something like that. But certainly that's where I was leaning into the commercial real estate is that as broadly lucrative, Chris and I have done a number of episodes certainly on, especially when COVID first hit about the need for my three-pound brain to be next to somebody's five-pound brain. And what, within that six-foot proximity, I think it is, and how critical that some employers still feel that that is correct, Chris.

Chris Beall (06:59):

Yeah. I actually commented on the Apple thing. It's kind of funny. I just put a LinkedIn comment out there yesterday on what I think is... Well, as I said, Apple will find themselves on the wrong side of history and employers like ourselves are essentially, I will say with vis-a-vis, our employees are now ultimately no more powerful than we are. Vis-a-vis our customers. It's the same game. As employees have become full-on customers of the corporations they work for. And that sea change will not ever change. That is a done deal. It's been coming for a long time, but I needed a tsunami to wash the beach away and expose the bluff. And now it's a big step function and the employees are up there on the top of the bluff. The main players are down on the beach, wondering when the next tsunami is going to show up.

Chris Beall (07:51):

So these statements of you got to be in the office, beg the question of who you is and willing to include their top 20%. And the answer is pretty simple. Only if they want to. So top 20% used to do all sorts of things, make all sorts of compromises, oh, we'll go live on Mercer Island because it has a great school system, blah, blah, blah. And it's close enough to Microsoft. Well, and it's close enough to Microsoft is no longer a relevant consideration. So now the question is [inaudible 00:08:23] like Mercer island live there? And if you like Quail Creek, Arizona go live there. It's like, you can live wherever you want, work wherever you want if you're a top 20% knowledge worker today and it makes the union movements of the late 1800's and early 1900's look like nothing in terms of power, because the unions were always bustable mathematically.

Chris Beall (08:47):

They had a serious problem, which is the workers needed the money. They needed to make that paycheck. And you can provide some insurance, strength in numbers kind of insurance, but you can't provide enough insurance to have them make another hand gesture to the employers and continue that with a lot of stare-down power. There's issues. The stare-down power of the modern top 20% employee and knowledge work is right now infinite, and it's infinite and growing, which is even more interesting. And all employers should take note. Now, one of the things we really like about, accidentally by the way, about our own product is it makes it fun to work from home with family. So Cheryl Turner who's been on this show, goes to the park with her three year old and they play on the swings while she talks to CEOs, that would be work-life balance in reality, that is work and life truly coming together synergistically to support each other without sacrifice of either. She is the best cold caller in the world, talking to CEOs.

Chris Beall (09:54):

And I bet she's a heck of a mom, too, playing with her three-year-old. She can drive her 11-year-old to school, but it's her work. She's doing it while she's driving and talking to CEOs. So technology's capabilities that make that easier are going to be a big deal. But the first thing is, man, these executives running these companies got to get over themselves. They do not have the strength, the capacity, the staying power to tell their top 20% of their employees screw you, I'm going to tell you where you're going to live, I'm going to tell you where you're going to spend your time, on the road going back and forth to work, I'm going to tell you which days you have to be there because otherwise the whole thing doesn't happen.

Chris Beall (10:35):

At least Apple's right on that. That has to be Monday something, something, it can't become whenever you want because those other three-pound brains won't be there. So that's idiotic. So they're at least trying, but what they're trying can't be accomplished. Now, the other thing is for those who care, this is the real estate thing here, the conference business and the real estate around conferences and around meeting each other somewhere nice, that business is going to go crazy. That business is going to see a renaissance that is unheard of in the history of hospitality. And it's because there's never been anything other than jet air travel in the history of hospitality that caused every place to be in place online. And this makes every place in play because guess what? We already have jet air travel. So every nice place to get together is suddenly in play competing with those office campuses.

Chris Beall (11:33):

And I can tell you who's going to win. The nice places you go just to be with people are going to be the kind of funny place that had, as my mother would always say, that high school, is that a prison or a national guard armory. That's what she'd always say. They make those buildings like they're one or the other. Look at the average corporate campus has those kinds of qualities. Whereas the four seasons doesn't. The Rosewood, the Edgewater, these places are really, really nice. You want to go meet, go meet there. So there's a dynamic that I've said before on the show, people are under betting like crazy on the work from home, work from anywhere top 20% do whatever they want dynamic. That under bet right now I would say will turn out historically to have been at least off by a factor of five.

Chris Beall (13:03):

If you want to make money now just pay attention to this. Ignore Henry. He does hard work. He has his brain and everything, he has to think. This is the thing you can do with no brain whatsoever.

Henry Wojdyla (13:15):

Well, Chris, it's interesting that you're mentioning, and this has actually nothing to do with the fact that I'm in the commercial real estate space generally, or I should really say specifically. I think real estate is going to have a huge piece of this. And we all heard a million times that COVID accelerated trends that are already in place. This is clearly true here. I think in the case of commercial office space, to be clear, totally different from medical office space. If it's not mission-critical, it's fungible. And what's really interesting is I think the timeframe in which employee dynamic is going to play out in part, not in total, but a key variable is going to be the loss cost bias or sunk cost bias.

Henry Wojdyla (13:54):

And what you're going to see, I think, over time is as these very expensive office leases begin to expire and office leases in commercial space tend to run in larger markets, 5 to 10 years, maybe average it out to 3 to 7 as a range, but the Jamie Diamonds of the world, these large CEOs, Tim Cook's Apple, of course they own their facilities, they're a little bit different, but at the end of the day, it's as these leases begin to expire, I think there'll be a little bit less pressure on the C-suite to force people to come into an office just because they're paying rent on it. And I won't [inaudible 00:14:33] to all the phenomenal points Chris that you've made, but I think really the, as you said, the top 20% is going to really have... Really the world is their oyster. I think there'll largely be able to dictate over time increasingly over time, partly because of the real estate dynamics, where they can work with increasing conviction.

Henry Wojdyla (14:52):

And as you've said here and elsewhere, and if you think about just the tremendous amount of loss of time, and if there's one asset we know that we can never get back is time. We can get money back theoretically and frequently you can, you can get other investments back, but you can never get time back. And I just have always been amazed that people are willing to sacrifice so much of their lives, maybe they don't have a choice in many cases, about the commutation that they take on every day.

Henry Wojdyla (15:17):

And that's something that's a really big expense, not just for the individual, but actually for their employer. And while it seems amazingly obvious, somehow it seems to be lost in a lot of the C-suite at least in the larger corporations. It's kind of an institutional imperative in a different way and I've alluded to that earlier in terms of the decision or not decision to essentially sell assets. It's really the large-scale kind of institutional imperative, the inertia is something that's going to have to kind of take place over a period of time now. So it's going to be a very interesting gear shift over the next 18, 24 months in terms of how this plays out.

Corey Frank (15:51):

Well, isn't it fascinating that the tech stack, particularly what we've talked about a lot ConnectAndSell, reading signals from noise parallels, that same type of restriction or coming together of efficiencies that you have the top 20% team member now who can thumb his nose at his employer and now can do what Cheryl's doing at 20%, 50%, 100% higher than she was doing working for their employer by doing it now. And I have the balance to do it with my child 15 feet away on the jungle gym.

Henry Wojdyla (16:33):

Absolutely.

Chris Beall (16:34):

Yeah. And it brings up another point, which is if employers have got to learn that their employees are our customers, that means they have to play a different trust game than they're playing now. And one thing we haven't spoken of here that Henry you said was a pivotal moment of flip the pancake moment for you was you went through the process of kind of finding this and that and eventually wandering into it or being lured in or whatever to this Market Dominance Guys thing. And you need to tell the story of the binge-listening because you're the second person ever to do it that I know of. And I sure hope anybody else who so interesting that you binge listen to a Market Dominance Guys, please call Corey Frank at about 11:00 PM Pacific or later because he's free then to talk to you.

Chris Beall (17:23):

So you had a bit of a moment regarding this question that we've explored a lot, which is what do you lead with? Once you get past fear, what do you lead with? Value or trust? And the tradition in sales is to lead with value, which is in the first part of a relationship, a failing proposition because the other party is not ready for a value. That is trust proceeds value. You can't listen to value cleanly because in order to listen to value, I have to be prepared to confess my problems. And I do not confess to somebody I don't trust. So that's the little broken triangle that sales was built on for years and years and years. The idea of being well, you're not ever going to see me again anyway, so [inaudible 00:18:09] some value, right? That's it. That's what I call the tragedy of the crossroads.

Chris Beall (18:13):

The sales were made at the crossroads. The caravaners going one way, the trader is at the crossroads. You're never going to see him again. The trader has superior knowledge of the goods. They sell you crap at the maximum price. And the poor caravaner has got to get going before the snow starts flying in the mountains. So there's this old... I'll call that the old sales dynamic. The modern sales dynamic is nobody gets away from anybody just like these employers. You can't get away from your employees because you're now made of employees. Used to be made of a bunch of bricks and steel and access to raw materials and all this stuff. It's like, I'm sorry, but now you're kind of made out of your employees. That is the actual structural material of your company. And if you don't trust them and they don't trust you, you got bricks, you ain't got no mortar.

Chris Beall (18:59):

And it's a real serious, serious problem. And Henry so tell the audience about this trust thing because you told me about your eye-opening on that. And it was surprising and delightful to me.

Henry Wojdyla (19:12):

Well, I really have to credit the both of you really, for that kind of pivotal moment. But I was way over-indexing on... I was obsessed with the idea of leading with value. And again, you've kind of heard me outlining schematic format, how we've tried to really get super hyper granular with our very defined TAM and part of the reason for that was well, if we could really know who we're addressing, we can really kind of customize the data and the information and the sharing of knowledge on a very bespoke level. There's still real value in being able to do that. But the problem is you have a counterparty on the other end of the phone who's not ready to listen to that.

Corey Frank (19:52):

So you were front-loading in your screenplay, all the benefits of your firm and all the cold cognitions of your stats and your yields. Is that what you're saying?

Henry Wojdyla (20:06):

Not exactly. It was definitely vectorally in that direction. It was more so I would say more data-driven and not so much about us as a firm. In many ways, I would say probably one of my faults is I probably tried to templatize my impression of how people sell and usually do the inverse, which is kind of a simplistic way to look at it. But leading with trying to beat my chest about who I am or who Real Source Group is I don't think is of frankly any value to someone that's not familiar with us.

Corey Frank (20:37):

That's why I want to understand from your perspective, because you ask five different folks in a firm, they lead with value. Some could lead with status as my value, some could lead with longevity of my firm as value. So that's why I want to just try to deconstruct that.

Henry Wojdyla (20:53):

We were data forward. It was data forward. So it was a hyper-focus on data that was then very finitely aggregated and to different components and then partitioned out to people that we thought that those particular data points would be most relevant too. I still think that that's of some aid, but as opposed to it being the tip of the spear, when it really can't be received, the idea of leading with trust. I guess in some ways I would almost say, just talking about binge-listening, I'm actually kind of taken back to the Oren Klaff episodes that you had.

Henry Wojdyla (21:23):

You could say that the cold call is the micro condition of the larger psychological play Oren Klaff does in the pitch. When you've got the disparity of the crocodile brain with a higher functioning of the brain. And clearly, in the context of cold call, that is a completely a defensive posture of the part of the recipient. So as Chris has outlined many, many times the ability to create trust by essentially alleviating the pain of who you are as the attacking entity, it's almost hard to kind of overstate the... Well, speaking of value there's value there. There's value in creating trust, but it's an entirely different dynamic.

Corey Frank (22:02):

So the initial cold calls you'd make BC and 80 right before...