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EP85: When the Time Is Right, the Magic Happens

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תוכן מסופק על ידי ConnectAndSell. כל תוכן הפודקאסטים כולל פרקים, גרפיקה ותיאורי פודקאסטים מועלים ומסופקים ישירות על ידי ConnectAndSell או שותף פלטפורמת הפודקאסט שלו. אם אתה מאמין שמישהו משתמש ביצירה שלך המוגנת בזכויות יוצרים ללא רשותך, אתה יכול לעקוב אחר התהליך המתואר כאן https://he.player.fm/legal.

The Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall and Corey Frank, had a meeting of the minds this week with Marc Hodgson of ConnectAndSell, who proudly claims the titles of Sales Headcount Multiplier and Cost Per Meeting Reducer. Chris introduces Marc as a learner, a student of the craft of selling, and a delight to work with. As Chris says, “With Marc there’s no bravado, no sales-jock stuff.” Marc is what’s known as a “long-game player,” spending his work days building relationships with prospects, not pushing for an immediate sale.

He credits fellow ConnectAndSell salesperson John Jackson with being his long-player model. As Marc explains John’s sales approach, “[He] talks to a prospect three or four times a year … and when they’re ready to buy, they buy from John.” The phrase, “Conversations matter,” is the basic tenet of ConnectAndSell, and Marc explains his adoption of it this way: “It takes time to build relationships. I have that core belief that there’s going to be value in the conversation. We’re going to learn together.” You can learn more about being a long-game player in this week’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “When the Time Is Right, the Magic Happens.”

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About Our Guest

Marc Hodgson has had an illustrious and successful sales career at a variety of companies and currently holds the position of Sales Headcount Multiplier and Cost Per Meeting Reducer at ConnectAndSell. He resides happily in the Greater Boston area.

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Here is the full transcript from this episode:

Corey Frank (01:39):

Fantastic. We have a quorum... an official quorum. Of course, last week, Chris, in the last weeks episode of Market Dominance Guys, a quorum was one because I was indisposed. So... but today we have a real quorum. We actually have a guest and that is Marc Hodgson from Connect and Sell. And me Corey Frank, of course, and the prognosticator of profit in the sake of sales Chris Beall.

Corey Frank (02:05):

Chris, I'm a little ahead of myself in my skis today because Marc's joining us. And it's not often that we can chat with somebody who is... you take Chet Holmes' pyramid, the market dominance pyramid that we've talked about so much. And Marc is a living, breathing, W2-ing his off, example of somebody who lives on the bottom part of that proverbial pyramid. And so it's good to welcome you to the Market Dominance Guys, Marc.

Marc Hodgson (02:35):

I'm honored to be here. Honored to be here.

Corey Frank (02:38):

You know, Marc, I got to ask you, looking over your LinkedIn, your previous experience, you were VP of here and you were a sales director of this, but then when you get to Connect and Sell, you don't use kind of antiquated terms like that. Vice President of Sales, CRO Director. Right? You call yourself a Sales Headcount Multiplier or a Cost per Meeting Reducer. So I think that alone endears yourself, certainly to me and Chris, but of course we're biased because you're part of Connect and Sell, but love the titles. And I think that ties into what we're going to, what we're going to talk about today. Right, Chris?

Corey Frank (03:14):

How do you kind of get a tap into that 11 twelfths of the market dominance pyramid, or show where the dollars live, where lazy salespeople don't go. In fact, when lazy salespeople see that pyramid, it's like the proverbial Darby dragons, right? Because they don't go that far down the pyramid to actually tap in to this blue ocean. So Chris. How'd you end up tripping over a guy like Marc to join a company like Connect and Sell. And what makes a guy like Marc so perfectly aligned with some of the goals of Connect and Sell on how he approaches market dominance?

Chris Beall (03:51):

Well, the alignment comes from some straightforward features of our... for one he's tough, but he's pleasant and dealing with me, you better be pleasant, because otherwise, I'll be unpleasant and that's no fun at all. So that part works out. But the main thing is he's a learner. So he's a student of the craft of... not just of sales, but beyond sales and has been since the first time we ever spoke. I recognize that like, okay, we have a hard time at Connect and Sell finding people who fit in, in a sales sense, because there's a lot of folks who are transactional and that's not very interesting. There's a lot of folks who are complicated and my view, which is no solution should be more complex than the problem. And complicators like to aggrandized power actually by complicating beyond the complexity of the problem, and then they harvest the power differential between those two.

Chris Beall (04:47):

And those people are also generally politicians and Marc is not a politician. You know my intolerance for parasites. And so some of it's negative, he's not a parasite, which is what I find very handy. But this is a funny business because what you're doing is not obvious to anybody, even the people who are doing it, which is you're dealing with a future instead of just the present. Think about all the intent guys, right? Zoom info's out there right now, selling contacts, they sell tons and tons of contacts. They're worth $16 billion, a public company. So how do they try to keep relevant? They add intent data, but intent data only tells you where the feeding frenzy is already going on. So it's like, I want to be there minutes before the feeding frenzy shows up, because I sure hate to waste my time building relationships with people who are going to buy next year. That'd be crazy. Why I want to wait until the last second, see if I can snipe this deal.

Corey Frank (05:49):

Yes. [crosstalk 00:05:50] Well with everybody else who subscribes, right Marc, to that same piece of intent data.

Chris Beall (05:56):

Yeah. I mean, that's... he's somebody that I call when I want to think things over and talk things through. There's not a lot of people that can tolerate that. So maybe that's the last feature is he's just playing tolerant of listening to me, which I've listened to a lot of Market Dominance Guys and I wouldn't be. So anyway, it's a delight to work with Marc, and he's also a guy who... he moves consistently up the leaderboard. It's nothing... there's no flash. There's no bravado. There's none of the sales hur-rah-rah-rah-rah, jock kind of stuff. I'm sure he's plenty manly, but he doesn't act some sort of jock. And I like that. I'm a cerebral type myself, a little bit of a wimp and a sissy runs barefoot and stuff like that. And so we do well together. Right, Marc?

Marc Hodgson (06:42):

I agree. And it's funny, I liked how you talk about the pyramid and whatnot and moving up the leaderboard. And I think that's the thing that people miss the most. Right? You guys talk a lot about this, right? Chris, you talk about opportunities out there in the marketplace, people in the marketplace, three-year placement cycles. There's 12 quarters. There's people out there in that feeding frenzy, what 8.33% of the time that are out there doing business now and the scavengers fighting over pieces and crumbs and reducing their likelihood of success mathematically. And I think where success is really driven... if for our customers too, not just us, the sales folks, is below the water level. It's below the waterline. So the pyramid that's just poking out, that iceberg, Right? And I think that's the most important thing that I've taken from you guys, your episodes here, is the idea that you've got to consistently build trust and it takes time. Right?

Marc Hodgson (07:45):

You mentioned the time factor. And I think that's the key that people miss and it ties really well into market domination is that yeah, you can do it at scale, but yeah, you need time. And really the blue ocean is that that which is underneath, right? That you develop and you cultivate with trust over time over your competitors. Because I think for me personally, my successes have come from the fact that it's taken a long time to nurture relationships until the time is right. And it may even be earlier than when the time might've been right, but I've been there to help them along and we've discovered along the way. So I think that's been the most sort of fascinating journey for me is to be curious about where they are and continue to build relationships with them until the time is right. And then the magic happens. Right? It just happens.

Corey Frank (08:36):

Let's talk a bit about that magic. And as a refresher to those who maybe aren't familiar with the great Chet Holmes and the theory of market dominance, listen to our earlier episodes. But in essence, Marcus, you had alluded to, we have this pyramid and on the top of the pyramid, you have this three-ish percent of folks who are ready to buy now. They're in market. It's that time of their three-year bind cycle that they're raising our hand and then you have another what, six, seven, 8% or so, that they're open to it. And then you get the deep waters where you need the good tense and strength line. And there's 30% who are the market that's not thinking about it, 30% don't think that they're interested in it. And then there's 30% who know they're not interested. And you've made a living. You've made a career fishing in those waters and nurturing those little fish that turn into lunkers over time. What's your secret in doing that?

Marc Hodgson (09:38):

I'll give some credit to a colleague of mine. That's been here with Connect and Sell since the beginning, John Jackson. And I heard very early on when I started here at Connect and Sell, John Jackson has thousands of people in his addressable market, right? His own little market he's looking to dominate. He just talks to them two, three, four times a year. And when they're ready to buy, they buy from John Jackson. And I thought about that and I thought, "Wow." It takes four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 conversations sometimes before the time is right. And you guys talk a lot about trust and that person, that buyer, that group, that company trusts you more than they trust themselves.

Marc Hodgson (10:22):

And I realized John's been doing it for years. He's mastered that part of the ocean that no one dares dive down to. He owns it. That's his realm. And you know, that... I took that to heart very early on. So for me, it's about building a massive queue of relevant conversations and second conversations. And quite frankly, no one can get to them faster than I can. And no one can build more relationships because people only play that which they stay above the surface. So it's the low-hanging fruit. They pick up the apples that have fallen out of the tree. They dare not climb up and fill their bushel.

Chris Beall (11:02):

That's interesting. You know what fights over the apples on the ground? At any farm, what fights over the apples on the ground is the pigs. And it's not a pretty sight.

Corey Frank (11:12):

When you look at Marc's approach, Chris, and you see that these little acorns are turning into big trees over time. If you... because you're living it at Connect and Sell, certainly with how dominant you guys are and how dominant you are, particularly this year, the year that you're killing it here. What if you had... if I was a manufacturing or if I was in real estate or if I was in software and I had an entire team that approached in this way, I'd love your thoughts on that reciprocal effect. Because I think that as sales managers and sales leaders, we're not wired to coach our reps to process that way, to work that way. That market's working, correct? Because I have the pressures of a month, a quarter quota, here's your dial tributes or what have you. So from a leader perspective, what are the long-term gains I can expect if I play long ball, if I play true blue ocean strategy versus red ocean?

Chris Beall (12:09):

Yeah. What's so interesting to me. It has been for quite a while, and it was John Jackson and Shawn McLaren who taught me this as that the blue ocean is separated from the red ocean in time, not in space. That is... all you have to do is either go back in time. That is go back in their time to where the prospect is early in the process of even considering, or even not considering... to just go back there and talk to them in their time earlier, and the ocean's always blue. That is, there is no competitors. The definition of a blue ocean is there are no competitors. And it's thought that blue ocean strategy is generally around product differentiation, but product differentiation in the modern world is almost impossible. We actually have at Connect and Sell, which is kind of funny that I say that it's almost impossible, but we're an example of where it's... I tell you what, it ain't easy to achieve product differentiation and the way we've done it, we've kind of stumbled into it.

Chris Beall (13:05):

And then I happened to be kind of a fanatic about patents and know-how and learning how to do things that other's aren't willing to do quite frankly. And it is a dirty job. It's like, you don't want product differentiation? Clean sewers, right? You'll have product differentiation in a hurry compared to people who they're the street sweepers. They have less. And the folks who are waiting tables have less yet. And you know, the host or hostess in the restaurant has the least. There's not much product differentiation up there, but there sure is once you go down the sewers, because nobody wants to do it. And guess what? There's a lot of tricks to cleaning sewers. Once you learn how to do it, then the guy that doesn't want to do it isn't willing to learn how to do it, right? So that's the standard blue ocean theory is as a product-led theory.

Chris Beall (13:50):

But it turns out there's a universal theory of blue oceans that says, I don't need a whole blue ocean, just give me 11 twelfths. 11 twelfths of the whole lotion being my blue... good enough for me. So all I have to do is travel in time to an earlier point in the consideration cycle for everybody who intrinsically needs my solution and go make those relationships happen from a CEO perspective, it has profound financing implications. It means, especially if you don't want to give up control of your company, you've got to figure out how to finance from current sales, while setting up for future sales, which you can only be assured of on a portfolio basis. But as you... you don't know any specific thing's going to happen.

Chris Beall (15:14):

Portfolio math is the only math in business. Anybody who tells you that they got some other kind of cool math is a charlatan or an idiot. They're a charlatan saying I can control things that they can't control, or they're an idiot saying I can control things that I can't control, but I don't know I can't control them. Those are your two ends of the spectrum. When I first met Cheryl Turner, who was on one of our episodes, she came to the conclusion that I was either a charlatan or an idiot within the first probably minute and a half of me talking to her team at a primary intelligence... at a test drive. 10 minutes later, she came back in the room, made sure it was empty and said, I thought you were a charlatan or idiot, but now I actually think that you guys are... that you have the truth. They were right, because she started talking to lots of people.

Corey Frank (16:00):

So it was mutually exclusive, those terms that she tried?

Chris Beall (16:04):

Exactly charlatans and idiots... the Venn diagram has no intersection. They're like over here, right? They're just way apart from each other.

Corey Frank (16:11):

Okay. And for those with only a seven years of community college education here, what do you mean by portfolio math first?

Chris Beall (16:17):

Well portfolio math basically says this, "In the face of ignorance, we need more bets." And so more smaller bets will yield more consistently on a risk adjusted basis than a smaller number of sure things. The sure things are never as sure as you think, and a larger number of less sure things are more sure. And the math itself of portfolios is a big deal in that it's what I call the multiplicative math. That is your risk actually goes down as you multiply the risks of the individual elements of your portfolio. So your risk of one thing that's got... they call it "all your eggs in one basket," except it's actually the worst case is one egg in one basket. And then the very worst is one egg with no basket and you're holding it in your hand. And then the very worst is one egg in one basket.

Chris Beall (17:07):

What could go wrong? Right? And that's the... that is the... I'll say the charlatans view of the world. What could go wrong? The idiots view of the world, I'm just going to do a bunch of stuff, see what happens. So the portfolio, whether you're an investor investing in a whole bunch of businesses or in a whole bunch of stocks or issues or whatever, or you're an investor, like a salesperson, like Marc. Marc's an investor. Right? What is he doing? He's investing his time, because that's all he's got. Right? I'm not accepting his money. Sorry, Marc. Your money is no good here. Right? But his time is good here. So he invests his time. So now the question is in how many potential future deals at how many different stages, if they're all at the same stage, the risk is higher. If they're all at different stages, the risk is lower for a bunch of interesting reasons.

Chris Beall (18:02):

One of which is fundamentally the risk is lower because there are different stages and you have variety. The other, which is the slower ones, represent an opportunity for Marc to learn more. So one thing we tend to ignore in sales is we learn more in long relationships than in short relationships.

Corey Frank (18:20):

Yep.

Chris Beall (18:20):

And so not only do we build trust, we build knowledge. Marc knows an awful lot about his largest potential customer right now. His... he's very patient. His largest potential customer happens to be a big company whose headquarters has something to do with that flag behind you there. And that company moves at a certain pace and its U.S. operation moves at a different pace than that. And it's various pieces that they've got to make individual decisions because of the way that their budgeting and allocation process works. And, and, and, and so Marc needs to patiently wait. While he's waiting, he's learning because he keeps interacting, providing value, help, and keeps learning things as he goes along.

Chris Beall (19:07):

So when you play the long game in your portfolio, you're not only broad, but you're deep in time. You dominate the market earlier and more certainly. You actually know you'll dominate. We all show on this. What do you do when you know you're going to nominate, well, stop putting your top people on it, go have them go penetrate a new market because your portfolio of markets is what... that you dominate, is what reduces your risk of going out of business.

Chris Beall (19:32):

This stuff is, is evident and talked about among passive investors. And interestingly enough, when it comes to our time as salespeople, we are actually mostly passive investors. We're stuck in that position because we can't make anything happen. So what we have to do is engage in many places and let some things happen. The portfolio, when it's big enough, let something happen. I happen to be marrying somebody who is in her last... now how many days, what is this? A third, the last 27 days of her fiscal year. She carries a big quota. In the something that starts at the B and has numbers after it, right? She doesn't have very many customers, a few handful. She's pretty relaxed. She's going to go for a walk with me after this. We're going to go kayaking.

Corey Frank (20:26):

Yet another woman, [crosstalk 00:20:28] another woman who was in your life, who has decided that you are neither a charlatan or a liar, so.

Chris Beall (20:34):

Well, if she has decided if I'm a charlatan or an idiot, she's holding out...

Corey Frank (20:38):

Oh, that's right. Idiot.

Chris Beall (20:39):

Because my piano playing is so appealing. You never know. It could be the barefoot running, but I don't think so. So Marc, jump in here because this goes to the depths I think of what you're about.

Marc Hodgson (20:51):

Yeah. You said something really interesting. When you talk about portfolio math, I think people are going to jump right to my existing customers, my existing investments. Right? And yeah, I've got some risks and some long shots and big and small and whatnot. And what you're saying there, I think is, I deeply believe in you absolutely need to be running the top of the funnel as a portfolio as well. That's the game-changer. One of the things that I think is really important is the idea about the false negatives and the false positives. Right? We're so scared sometimes that it's important to explore with curiosity, to not miss false negatives, because we don't know what we don't know until we know it. Right? And it takes time, to your point, to really discover more deeply where they are and where they can fit in your portfolio. We don't manage, build a portfolio and service it, but not just in your customer base, but in your prospect and your relationship base. I think that's a gap that some people don't connect those two dots.

Corey Frank (22:05):

When you look at this, Marc, from a producer, from a production perspective, and Chris put your sales leader hat on. If I had to replicate this, oftentimes my investors aren't going to let me play the long ball. Right? They're not going to let me play this long game. Doesn't matter if I show them the portfolio math or not. Right? Hey, they got... we got bills. They want valuation. They see this company and they're in the space getting X valuation. And this one's aging that why multiple, how do you manage those expectations or so, and keep the eye on the long-term prize, which is again, the market domination and many of these portfolios that you can get?

Chris Beall (22:49):

Well, that had to be a question for me because thank God Marc doesn't have to deal with investors and that kind of crap. Right? So I'll take it first hand. If you're going to run something, make a deal that allows you to succeed. I mean, you got to make a deal with the money. And the money comes from two places. It comes from somebody writing a check and it comes from going out and selling stuff. And you've got to understand what their balance... what that balance is. And you've got to figure out how to run a market dominance play within the bounds of what the money will be allowing, not comfortable with. The money is never comfortable with anything other than an instantaneous return that exceeds expectations. That's whether it's your own money or not, but if you're going to play, make sure you're playing on a field where you have a chance.

Chris Beall (23:39):

I remember once I took a soccer team out on a field and we'd never lost. This was the bug squad team that kicked the ball out of bounds every single time they laid a foot on it. Drove other teams crazy. They went from never being in a game to never losing a game. And finally, they're in a game they're threatened to lose. You know why? Because the Colorado Rapids practice field is tilted toward the South by about one degree. And when you're playing uphill, it's hard. It's really hard. So don't get in a situation where you're playing uphill in advance, unless you like that kind of stuff and you're willing to eat the consequence. And the consequence might be that you have to sacrifice your time portfolio in favor of something else and you don't get to dominate. The other thing is you divide your business immediately at the very beginning into two parts.

Chris Beall (24:30):

And part one is the long play. That's what Marc is, he's our long play. Part two, which looks like part one, if you look at it by numbers, but it's not is the financing play. And the way you run that is you have your most senior executives sell in the red ocean, because your most senior executives can always sell. They can sell on any color, ocean red, blue, green, blood drenched, doesn't make any difference. These are the people who can go into battle that what I call, and I think I've mentioned this on a show, the sword fight in the darkroom. If you are at that point in your career, where you win every single sword fight in a dark room, then go win some for the company and bring in some cash so that everybody else can play a long game and you can do it without interference from the outside money.

Chris Beall (25:26):

And so that's how you actually allow yourself to play the long game is don't ask your long game players to play the short game. You play the short game. This is one of the reasons CEO's should sell. I was talking to a CEO today, Dashur, and he said, "I like Larry Ellison's phrase. If you're not creating a product or selling a product, what are you doing here?" And that's one of those things that people sometimes take as Larry being macho. But what it really is, is Larry being smart. He's saying in terms of our independence of action, our ability to execute strategy, we've got to make money today also.

Corey Frank (26:08):

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Chris Beall (26:09):

But my view is don't waste your reps time, your reps are your future. They're playing long games. Their portfolio can be much bigger yours, but if you're a leader... you're a company leader and you're not out there selling for gross profit contribution, that's what you sell for. Then you're letting the team down because you're causing the situation or allowing a situation where outside money is going to control whether your market dominance team gets to run the long play that needs to be run. The sword fight in the darkroom is not comfortable for everybody, but I guarantee you, every senior person who runs a company knows how to do it. Sometimes they have to be thrown into the darkroom a few times and come out dripping and ask whose blood that is. Right? Sometimes that's the way it is, but that's what we're good at. And so that's how you divide it up. It's super simple. It's super simple, but it's not often done.

Corey Frank (27:06):

So in essence then, and Marc you could chime in on this, right? Chris, you're saying that you need folks like Marc on that wall as a hedge, against getting diluted by having to go to the capital markets or going to the other investor markets to get more capital, with Marc's hedge against that. And Marc, you have a CEO on the wall, right, who's a hedge to support you to continue to do what you're doing on the 11 twelfths to the market, because his contribution helps bring in those margins that allow you to keep the lights on, pay the medical insurance, advise you times you guys can live to fight another day. So I hear that as an organization, you need both those elements.

Corey Frank (27:52):

If you just had a CEO who sold for margin and everybody in the short game and a red ocean, that's not very effective.

Chris Beall (27:59):

Right.

Corey Frank (27:59):

If you have all three components, you have a short-term team, you have a long-term deep pyramid, a blue ocean too. And you have a mindset of a CEO, or like you have with Jonti as well, right? A VP of sales who also contributes. And I guess in your case, you would even have a chairman who contributes.

Chris Beall (28:16):

We do. We were very fortunate. We have three senior executives who sell a lot, but we're not... it goes on the books as cash and revenue, but in my mind, it doesn't go there. Our contribution is financing.

Corey Frank (28:32):

Yes.

Chris Beall (28:32):

And what we're doing is maintaining independence of action.

Corey Frank (28:35):

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Chris Beall (28:35):

That's our job is to maintain independence of action. The action is actually not our action. The action is Marc's action and his colleagues who are building that deep, deep portfolio over time and over accounts, and sometimes even over the edge of markets where we'll... it's like water splashing out of a glass, right? You carry the glass around. If it's pretty full, it's going to splash here and there. Every once in a while, you're going to splash over into another market and you learn something. So that learning is taking place with Marc and Matt, and Seth, and all these folks. We don't have a big team, but it's a learning team. And as they execute, they're actually executing in another dimension. They're executing in deep time. Whereas my fellow executives and myself, so it's myself, it's Jonti and Shawn, the three guys who keep the lights on. We're simply avoiding. It's not dilution of money. That's not interesting. It's dilution of purpose. We're avoiding dilution of purpose...

Corey Frank (29:42):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (29:42):

By going out and winning some sword fights.

Marc Hodgson (29:46):

That's it, right? I mean, that provides us the sales directors the ability to go out there and stay curious and be open-minded to discovering things in new markets and new customers that we normally wouldn't if we run a very flat playbook. Right? We explore and talk to customers that you'd never think would be a good fit. And we learn this and we share this. So you're right, Chris, it frees us up to get out there and exponentially harvest learnings and markets and build portfolios that we otherwise wouldn't. We never would if we were governed to a playbook that was narrow. We get to go wide and that's fun.

Corey Frank (30:31):

So, Marc, how do you taste blood in this world? Right? Because as sales... sales guys and gals, right? Sometimes we'll buy your where... we want to ring the gong. Right? Every day, every week or so. And the month of the quarter and playing long ball and having a currency... an alternative currency, if you will, by building long-term relationships, now you've seen a reciprocal effect. You've seen them go though the entire life cycle, so you know how the movie ends, but how do you maintain that level of motivation and blood lust along the way with the activities that you're doing?

Marc Hodgson (31:06):

I'm a competitive person. I think there.. our whole team has that aspect. So I pride myself to be on the top of the leaderboard metrically, but intrinsically, I drive a lot of value from that know personally. Right? So that's part of it. That's it... and everybody here is kind of built that way, I believe, so that's a lot of fun. But I think it's more of the curiosity factor. I really, truly do. Chris has talked about this. I do have that core belief that when I get on the phone, that there's going to be value in a conversation that I can have with people. We're going to learn together, whether we ever do business together. And that's sort of my core belief throughout the sales cycle, whether it's the top of the funnel conversation, a discovery conversation, them getting the opportunity to experience one of our intensive test drive days, which is the best day that you can have because you learn so much about them as people and their culture and their process. And those are the best days that we have here, our test drive day. So for me, it's about getting there and having them have the experience. The rest takes care of itself.

Corey Frank (32:24):

Yeah.

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תוכן מסופק על ידי ConnectAndSell. כל תוכן הפודקאסטים כולל פרקים, גרפיקה ותיאורי פודקאסטים מועלים ומסופקים ישירות על ידי ConnectAndSell או שותף פלטפורמת הפודקאסט שלו. אם אתה מאמין שמישהו משתמש ביצירה שלך המוגנת בזכויות יוצרים ללא רשותך, אתה יכול לעקוב אחר התהליך המתואר כאן https://he.player.fm/legal.

The Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall and Corey Frank, had a meeting of the minds this week with Marc Hodgson of ConnectAndSell, who proudly claims the titles of Sales Headcount Multiplier and Cost Per Meeting Reducer. Chris introduces Marc as a learner, a student of the craft of selling, and a delight to work with. As Chris says, “With Marc there’s no bravado, no sales-jock stuff.” Marc is what’s known as a “long-game player,” spending his work days building relationships with prospects, not pushing for an immediate sale.

He credits fellow ConnectAndSell salesperson John Jackson with being his long-player model. As Marc explains John’s sales approach, “[He] talks to a prospect three or four times a year … and when they’re ready to buy, they buy from John.” The phrase, “Conversations matter,” is the basic tenet of ConnectAndSell, and Marc explains his adoption of it this way: “It takes time to build relationships. I have that core belief that there’s going to be value in the conversation. We’re going to learn together.” You can learn more about being a long-game player in this week’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “When the Time Is Right, the Magic Happens.”

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About Our Guest

Marc Hodgson has had an illustrious and successful sales career at a variety of companies and currently holds the position of Sales Headcount Multiplier and Cost Per Meeting Reducer at ConnectAndSell. He resides happily in the Greater Boston area.

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Here is the full transcript from this episode:

Corey Frank (01:39):

Fantastic. We have a quorum... an official quorum. Of course, last week, Chris, in the last weeks episode of Market Dominance Guys, a quorum was one because I was indisposed. So... but today we have a real quorum. We actually have a guest and that is Marc Hodgson from Connect and Sell. And me Corey Frank, of course, and the prognosticator of profit in the sake of sales Chris Beall.

Corey Frank (02:05):

Chris, I'm a little ahead of myself in my skis today because Marc's joining us. And it's not often that we can chat with somebody who is... you take Chet Holmes' pyramid, the market dominance pyramid that we've talked about so much. And Marc is a living, breathing, W2-ing his off, example of somebody who lives on the bottom part of that proverbial pyramid. And so it's good to welcome you to the Market Dominance Guys, Marc.

Marc Hodgson (02:35):

I'm honored to be here. Honored to be here.

Corey Frank (02:38):

You know, Marc, I got to ask you, looking over your LinkedIn, your previous experience, you were VP of here and you were a sales director of this, but then when you get to Connect and Sell, you don't use kind of antiquated terms like that. Vice President of Sales, CRO Director. Right? You call yourself a Sales Headcount Multiplier or a Cost per Meeting Reducer. So I think that alone endears yourself, certainly to me and Chris, but of course we're biased because you're part of Connect and Sell, but love the titles. And I think that ties into what we're going to, what we're going to talk about today. Right, Chris?

Corey Frank (03:14):

How do you kind of get a tap into that 11 twelfths of the market dominance pyramid, or show where the dollars live, where lazy salespeople don't go. In fact, when lazy salespeople see that pyramid, it's like the proverbial Darby dragons, right? Because they don't go that far down the pyramid to actually tap in to this blue ocean. So Chris. How'd you end up tripping over a guy like Marc to join a company like Connect and Sell. And what makes a guy like Marc so perfectly aligned with some of the goals of Connect and Sell on how he approaches market dominance?

Chris Beall (03:51):

Well, the alignment comes from some straightforward features of our... for one he's tough, but he's pleasant and dealing with me, you better be pleasant, because otherwise, I'll be unpleasant and that's no fun at all. So that part works out. But the main thing is he's a learner. So he's a student of the craft of... not just of sales, but beyond sales and has been since the first time we ever spoke. I recognize that like, okay, we have a hard time at Connect and Sell finding people who fit in, in a sales sense, because there's a lot of folks who are transactional and that's not very interesting. There's a lot of folks who are complicated and my view, which is no solution should be more complex than the problem. And complicators like to aggrandized power actually by complicating beyond the complexity of the problem, and then they harvest the power differential between those two.

Chris Beall (04:47):

And those people are also generally politicians and Marc is not a politician. You know my intolerance for parasites. And so some of it's negative, he's not a parasite, which is what I find very handy. But this is a funny business because what you're doing is not obvious to anybody, even the people who are doing it, which is you're dealing with a future instead of just the present. Think about all the intent guys, right? Zoom info's out there right now, selling contacts, they sell tons and tons of contacts. They're worth $16 billion, a public company. So how do they try to keep relevant? They add intent data, but intent data only tells you where the feeding frenzy is already going on. So it's like, I want to be there minutes before the feeding frenzy shows up, because I sure hate to waste my time building relationships with people who are going to buy next year. That'd be crazy. Why I want to wait until the last second, see if I can snipe this deal.

Corey Frank (05:49):

Yes. [crosstalk 00:05:50] Well with everybody else who subscribes, right Marc, to that same piece of intent data.

Chris Beall (05:56):

Yeah. I mean, that's... he's somebody that I call when I want to think things over and talk things through. There's not a lot of people that can tolerate that. So maybe that's the last feature is he's just playing tolerant of listening to me, which I've listened to a lot of Market Dominance Guys and I wouldn't be. So anyway, it's a delight to work with Marc, and he's also a guy who... he moves consistently up the leaderboard. It's nothing... there's no flash. There's no bravado. There's none of the sales hur-rah-rah-rah-rah, jock kind of stuff. I'm sure he's plenty manly, but he doesn't act some sort of jock. And I like that. I'm a cerebral type myself, a little bit of a wimp and a sissy runs barefoot and stuff like that. And so we do well together. Right, Marc?

Marc Hodgson (06:42):

I agree. And it's funny, I liked how you talk about the pyramid and whatnot and moving up the leaderboard. And I think that's the thing that people miss the most. Right? You guys talk a lot about this, right? Chris, you talk about opportunities out there in the marketplace, people in the marketplace, three-year placement cycles. There's 12 quarters. There's people out there in that feeding frenzy, what 8.33% of the time that are out there doing business now and the scavengers fighting over pieces and crumbs and reducing their likelihood of success mathematically. And I think where success is really driven... if for our customers too, not just us, the sales folks, is below the water level. It's below the waterline. So the pyramid that's just poking out, that iceberg, Right? And I think that's the most important thing that I've taken from you guys, your episodes here, is the idea that you've got to consistently build trust and it takes time. Right?

Marc Hodgson (07:45):

You mentioned the time factor. And I think that's the key that people miss and it ties really well into market domination is that yeah, you can do it at scale, but yeah, you need time. And really the blue ocean is that that which is underneath, right? That you develop and you cultivate with trust over time over your competitors. Because I think for me personally, my successes have come from the fact that it's taken a long time to nurture relationships until the time is right. And it may even be earlier than when the time might've been right, but I've been there to help them along and we've discovered along the way. So I think that's been the most sort of fascinating journey for me is to be curious about where they are and continue to build relationships with them until the time is right. And then the magic happens. Right? It just happens.

Corey Frank (08:36):

Let's talk a bit about that magic. And as a refresher to those who maybe aren't familiar with the great Chet Holmes and the theory of market dominance, listen to our earlier episodes. But in essence, Marcus, you had alluded to, we have this pyramid and on the top of the pyramid, you have this three-ish percent of folks who are ready to buy now. They're in market. It's that time of their three-year bind cycle that they're raising our hand and then you have another what, six, seven, 8% or so, that they're open to it. And then you get the deep waters where you need the good tense and strength line. And there's 30% who are the market that's not thinking about it, 30% don't think that they're interested in it. And then there's 30% who know they're not interested. And you've made a living. You've made a career fishing in those waters and nurturing those little fish that turn into lunkers over time. What's your secret in doing that?

Marc Hodgson (09:38):

I'll give some credit to a colleague of mine. That's been here with Connect and Sell since the beginning, John Jackson. And I heard very early on when I started here at Connect and Sell, John Jackson has thousands of people in his addressable market, right? His own little market he's looking to dominate. He just talks to them two, three, four times a year. And when they're ready to buy, they buy from John Jackson. And I thought about that and I thought, "Wow." It takes four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 conversations sometimes before the time is right. And you guys talk a lot about trust and that person, that buyer, that group, that company trusts you more than they trust themselves.

Marc Hodgson (10:22):

And I realized John's been doing it for years. He's mastered that part of the ocean that no one dares dive down to. He owns it. That's his realm. And you know, that... I took that to heart very early on. So for me, it's about building a massive queue of relevant conversations and second conversations. And quite frankly, no one can get to them faster than I can. And no one can build more relationships because people only play that which they stay above the surface. So it's the low-hanging fruit. They pick up the apples that have fallen out of the tree. They dare not climb up and fill their bushel.

Chris Beall (11:02):

That's interesting. You know what fights over the apples on the ground? At any farm, what fights over the apples on the ground is the pigs. And it's not a pretty sight.

Corey Frank (11:12):

When you look at Marc's approach, Chris, and you see that these little acorns are turning into big trees over time. If you... because you're living it at Connect and Sell, certainly with how dominant you guys are and how dominant you are, particularly this year, the year that you're killing it here. What if you had... if I was a manufacturing or if I was in real estate or if I was in software and I had an entire team that approached in this way, I'd love your thoughts on that reciprocal effect. Because I think that as sales managers and sales leaders, we're not wired to coach our reps to process that way, to work that way. That market's working, correct? Because I have the pressures of a month, a quarter quota, here's your dial tributes or what have you. So from a leader perspective, what are the long-term gains I can expect if I play long ball, if I play true blue ocean strategy versus red ocean?

Chris Beall (12:09):

Yeah. What's so interesting to me. It has been for quite a while, and it was John Jackson and Shawn McLaren who taught me this as that the blue ocean is separated from the red ocean in time, not in space. That is... all you have to do is either go back in time. That is go back in their time to where the prospect is early in the process of even considering, or even not considering... to just go back there and talk to them in their time earlier, and the ocean's always blue. That is, there is no competitors. The definition of a blue ocean is there are no competitors. And it's thought that blue ocean strategy is generally around product differentiation, but product differentiation in the modern world is almost impossible. We actually have at Connect and Sell, which is kind of funny that I say that it's almost impossible, but we're an example of where it's... I tell you what, it ain't easy to achieve product differentiation and the way we've done it, we've kind of stumbled into it.

Chris Beall (13:05):

And then I happened to be kind of a fanatic about patents and know-how and learning how to do things that other's aren't willing to do quite frankly. And it is a dirty job. It's like, you don't want product differentiation? Clean sewers, right? You'll have product differentiation in a hurry compared to people who they're the street sweepers. They have less. And the folks who are waiting tables have less yet. And you know, the host or hostess in the restaurant has the least. There's not much product differentiation up there, but there sure is once you go down the sewers, because nobody wants to do it. And guess what? There's a lot of tricks to cleaning sewers. Once you learn how to do it, then the guy that doesn't want to do it isn't willing to learn how to do it, right? So that's the standard blue ocean theory is as a product-led theory.

Chris Beall (13:50):

But it turns out there's a universal theory of blue oceans that says, I don't need a whole blue ocean, just give me 11 twelfths. 11 twelfths of the whole lotion being my blue... good enough for me. So all I have to do is travel in time to an earlier point in the consideration cycle for everybody who intrinsically needs my solution and go make those relationships happen from a CEO perspective, it has profound financing implications. It means, especially if you don't want to give up control of your company, you've got to figure out how to finance from current sales, while setting up for future sales, which you can only be assured of on a portfolio basis. But as you... you don't know any specific thing's going to happen.

Chris Beall (15:14):

Portfolio math is the only math in business. Anybody who tells you that they got some other kind of cool math is a charlatan or an idiot. They're a charlatan saying I can control things that they can't control, or they're an idiot saying I can control things that I can't control, but I don't know I can't control them. Those are your two ends of the spectrum. When I first met Cheryl Turner, who was on one of our episodes, she came to the conclusion that I was either a charlatan or an idiot within the first probably minute and a half of me talking to her team at a primary intelligence... at a test drive. 10 minutes later, she came back in the room, made sure it was empty and said, I thought you were a charlatan or idiot, but now I actually think that you guys are... that you have the truth. They were right, because she started talking to lots of people.

Corey Frank (16:00):

So it was mutually exclusive, those terms that she tried?

Chris Beall (16:04):

Exactly charlatans and idiots... the Venn diagram has no intersection. They're like over here, right? They're just way apart from each other.

Corey Frank (16:11):

Okay. And for those with only a seven years of community college education here, what do you mean by portfolio math first?

Chris Beall (16:17):

Well portfolio math basically says this, "In the face of ignorance, we need more bets." And so more smaller bets will yield more consistently on a risk adjusted basis than a smaller number of sure things. The sure things are never as sure as you think, and a larger number of less sure things are more sure. And the math itself of portfolios is a big deal in that it's what I call the multiplicative math. That is your risk actually goes down as you multiply the risks of the individual elements of your portfolio. So your risk of one thing that's got... they call it "all your eggs in one basket," except it's actually the worst case is one egg in one basket. And then the very worst is one egg with no basket and you're holding it in your hand. And then the very worst is one egg in one basket.

Chris Beall (17:07):

What could go wrong? Right? And that's the... that is the... I'll say the charlatans view of the world. What could go wrong? The idiots view of the world, I'm just going to do a bunch of stuff, see what happens. So the portfolio, whether you're an investor investing in a whole bunch of businesses or in a whole bunch of stocks or issues or whatever, or you're an investor, like a salesperson, like Marc. Marc's an investor. Right? What is he doing? He's investing his time, because that's all he's got. Right? I'm not accepting his money. Sorry, Marc. Your money is no good here. Right? But his time is good here. So he invests his time. So now the question is in how many potential future deals at how many different stages, if they're all at the same stage, the risk is higher. If they're all at different stages, the risk is lower for a bunch of interesting reasons.

Chris Beall (18:02):

One of which is fundamentally the risk is lower because there are different stages and you have variety. The other, which is the slower ones, represent an opportunity for Marc to learn more. So one thing we tend to ignore in sales is we learn more in long relationships than in short relationships.

Corey Frank (18:20):

Yep.

Chris Beall (18:20):

And so not only do we build trust, we build knowledge. Marc knows an awful lot about his largest potential customer right now. His... he's very patient. His largest potential customer happens to be a big company whose headquarters has something to do with that flag behind you there. And that company moves at a certain pace and its U.S. operation moves at a different pace than that. And it's various pieces that they've got to make individual decisions because of the way that their budgeting and allocation process works. And, and, and, and so Marc needs to patiently wait. While he's waiting, he's learning because he keeps interacting, providing value, help, and keeps learning things as he goes along.

Chris Beall (19:07):

So when you play the long game in your portfolio, you're not only broad, but you're deep in time. You dominate the market earlier and more certainly. You actually know you'll dominate. We all show on this. What do you do when you know you're going to nominate, well, stop putting your top people on it, go have them go penetrate a new market because your portfolio of markets is what... that you dominate, is what reduces your risk of going out of business.

Chris Beall (19:32):

This stuff is, is evident and talked about among passive investors. And interestingly enough, when it comes to our time as salespeople, we are actually mostly passive investors. We're stuck in that position because we can't make anything happen. So what we have to do is engage in many places and let some things happen. The portfolio, when it's big enough, let something happen. I happen to be marrying somebody who is in her last... now how many days, what is this? A third, the last 27 days of her fiscal year. She carries a big quota. In the something that starts at the B and has numbers after it, right? She doesn't have very many customers, a few handful. She's pretty relaxed. She's going to go for a walk with me after this. We're going to go kayaking.

Corey Frank (20:26):

Yet another woman, [crosstalk 00:20:28] another woman who was in your life, who has decided that you are neither a charlatan or a liar, so.

Chris Beall (20:34):

Well, if she has decided if I'm a charlatan or an idiot, she's holding out...

Corey Frank (20:38):

Oh, that's right. Idiot.

Chris Beall (20:39):

Because my piano playing is so appealing. You never know. It could be the barefoot running, but I don't think so. So Marc, jump in here because this goes to the depths I think of what you're about.

Marc Hodgson (20:51):

Yeah. You said something really interesting. When you talk about portfolio math, I think people are going to jump right to my existing customers, my existing investments. Right? And yeah, I've got some risks and some long shots and big and small and whatnot. And what you're saying there, I think is, I deeply believe in you absolutely need to be running the top of the funnel as a portfolio as well. That's the game-changer. One of the things that I think is really important is the idea about the false negatives and the false positives. Right? We're so scared sometimes that it's important to explore with curiosity, to not miss false negatives, because we don't know what we don't know until we know it. Right? And it takes time, to your point, to really discover more deeply where they are and where they can fit in your portfolio. We don't manage, build a portfolio and service it, but not just in your customer base, but in your prospect and your relationship base. I think that's a gap that some people don't connect those two dots.

Corey Frank (22:05):

When you look at this, Marc, from a producer, from a production perspective, and Chris put your sales leader hat on. If I had to replicate this, oftentimes my investors aren't going to let me play the long ball. Right? They're not going to let me play this long game. Doesn't matter if I show them the portfolio math or not. Right? Hey, they got... we got bills. They want valuation. They see this company and they're in the space getting X valuation. And this one's aging that why multiple, how do you manage those expectations or so, and keep the eye on the long-term prize, which is again, the market domination and many of these portfolios that you can get?

Chris Beall (22:49):

Well, that had to be a question for me because thank God Marc doesn't have to deal with investors and that kind of crap. Right? So I'll take it first hand. If you're going to run something, make a deal that allows you to succeed. I mean, you got to make a deal with the money. And the money comes from two places. It comes from somebody writing a check and it comes from going out and selling stuff. And you've got to understand what their balance... what that balance is. And you've got to figure out how to run a market dominance play within the bounds of what the money will be allowing, not comfortable with. The money is never comfortable with anything other than an instantaneous return that exceeds expectations. That's whether it's your own money or not, but if you're going to play, make sure you're playing on a field where you have a chance.

Chris Beall (23:39):

I remember once I took a soccer team out on a field and we'd never lost. This was the bug squad team that kicked the ball out of bounds every single time they laid a foot on it. Drove other teams crazy. They went from never being in a game to never losing a game. And finally, they're in a game they're threatened to lose. You know why? Because the Colorado Rapids practice field is tilted toward the South by about one degree. And when you're playing uphill, it's hard. It's really hard. So don't get in a situation where you're playing uphill in advance, unless you like that kind of stuff and you're willing to eat the consequence. And the consequence might be that you have to sacrifice your time portfolio in favor of something else and you don't get to dominate. The other thing is you divide your business immediately at the very beginning into two parts.

Chris Beall (24:30):

And part one is the long play. That's what Marc is, he's our long play. Part two, which looks like part one, if you look at it by numbers, but it's not is the financing play. And the way you run that is you have your most senior executives sell in the red ocean, because your most senior executives can always sell. They can sell on any color, ocean red, blue, green, blood drenched, doesn't make any difference. These are the people who can go into battle that what I call, and I think I've mentioned this on a show, the sword fight in the darkroom. If you are at that point in your career, where you win every single sword fight in a dark room, then go win some for the company and bring in some cash so that everybody else can play a long game and you can do it without interference from the outside money.

Chris Beall (25:26):

And so that's how you actually allow yourself to play the long game is don't ask your long game players to play the short game. You play the short game. This is one of the reasons CEO's should sell. I was talking to a CEO today, Dashur, and he said, "I like Larry Ellison's phrase. If you're not creating a product or selling a product, what are you doing here?" And that's one of those things that people sometimes take as Larry being macho. But what it really is, is Larry being smart. He's saying in terms of our independence of action, our ability to execute strategy, we've got to make money today also.

Corey Frank (26:08):

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Chris Beall (26:09):

But my view is don't waste your reps time, your reps are your future. They're playing long games. Their portfolio can be much bigger yours, but if you're a leader... you're a company leader and you're not out there selling for gross profit contribution, that's what you sell for. Then you're letting the team down because you're causing the situation or allowing a situation where outside money is going to control whether your market dominance team gets to run the long play that needs to be run. The sword fight in the darkroom is not comfortable for everybody, but I guarantee you, every senior person who runs a company knows how to do it. Sometimes they have to be thrown into the darkroom a few times and come out dripping and ask whose blood that is. Right? Sometimes that's the way it is, but that's what we're good at. And so that's how you divide it up. It's super simple. It's super simple, but it's not often done.

Corey Frank (27:06):

So in essence then, and Marc you could chime in on this, right? Chris, you're saying that you need folks like Marc on that wall as a hedge, against getting diluted by having to go to the capital markets or going to the other investor markets to get more capital, with Marc's hedge against that. And Marc, you have a CEO on the wall, right, who's a hedge to support you to continue to do what you're doing on the 11 twelfths to the market, because his contribution helps bring in those margins that allow you to keep the lights on, pay the medical insurance, advise you times you guys can live to fight another day. So I hear that as an organization, you need both those elements.

Corey Frank (27:52):

If you just had a CEO who sold for margin and everybody in the short game and a red ocean, that's not very effective.

Chris Beall (27:59):

Right.

Corey Frank (27:59):

If you have all three components, you have a short-term team, you have a long-term deep pyramid, a blue ocean too. And you have a mindset of a CEO, or like you have with Jonti as well, right? A VP of sales who also contributes. And I guess in your case, you would even have a chairman who contributes.

Chris Beall (28:16):

We do. We were very fortunate. We have three senior executives who sell a lot, but we're not... it goes on the books as cash and revenue, but in my mind, it doesn't go there. Our contribution is financing.

Corey Frank (28:32):

Yes.

Chris Beall (28:32):

And what we're doing is maintaining independence of action.

Corey Frank (28:35):

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Chris Beall (28:35):

That's our job is to maintain independence of action. The action is actually not our action. The action is Marc's action and his colleagues who are building that deep, deep portfolio over time and over accounts, and sometimes even over the edge of markets where we'll... it's like water splashing out of a glass, right? You carry the glass around. If it's pretty full, it's going to splash here and there. Every once in a while, you're going to splash over into another market and you learn something. So that learning is taking place with Marc and Matt, and Seth, and all these folks. We don't have a big team, but it's a learning team. And as they execute, they're actually executing in another dimension. They're executing in deep time. Whereas my fellow executives and myself, so it's myself, it's Jonti and Shawn, the three guys who keep the lights on. We're simply avoiding. It's not dilution of money. That's not interesting. It's dilution of purpose. We're avoiding dilution of purpose...

Corey Frank (29:42):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (29:42):

By going out and winning some sword fights.

Marc Hodgson (29:46):

That's it, right? I mean, that provides us the sales directors the ability to go out there and stay curious and be open-minded to discovering things in new markets and new customers that we normally wouldn't if we run a very flat playbook. Right? We explore and talk to customers that you'd never think would be a good fit. And we learn this and we share this. So you're right, Chris, it frees us up to get out there and exponentially harvest learnings and markets and build portfolios that we otherwise wouldn't. We never would if we were governed to a playbook that was narrow. We get to go wide and that's fun.

Corey Frank (30:31):

So, Marc, how do you taste blood in this world? Right? Because as sales... sales guys and gals, right? Sometimes we'll buy your where... we want to ring the gong. Right? Every day, every week or so. And the month of the quarter and playing long ball and having a currency... an alternative currency, if you will, by building long-term relationships, now you've seen a reciprocal effect. You've seen them go though the entire life cycle, so you know how the movie ends, but how do you maintain that level of motivation and blood lust along the way with the activities that you're doing?

Marc Hodgson (31:06):

I'm a competitive person. I think there.. our whole team has that aspect. So I pride myself to be on the top of the leaderboard metrically, but intrinsically, I drive a lot of value from that know personally. Right? So that's part of it. That's it... and everybody here is kind of built that way, I believe, so that's a lot of fun. But I think it's more of the curiosity factor. I really, truly do. Chris has talked about this. I do have that core belief that when I get on the phone, that there's going to be value in a conversation that I can have with people. We're going to learn together, whether we ever do business together. And that's sort of my core belief throughout the sales cycle, whether it's the top of the funnel conversation, a discovery conversation, them getting the opportunity to experience one of our intensive test drive days, which is the best day that you can have because you learn so much about them as people and their culture and their process. And those are the best days that we have here, our test drive day. So for me, it's about getting there and having them have the experience. The rest takes care of itself.

Corey Frank (32:24):

Yeah.

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