EP8: How to Free Solo Your Pitch

Alex Honnold, one of the most talented mountain climbers in the world – who is the only man to ever successfully summit El Capitan free solo – and that means no ropes - by the way – had a strategy. And his strategy did not reach the top of the mountain. That was his ultimate destination. His strategy was to map the 30 sections – or “pitches” as they are called in climbing parlance - and practice the necessary and wide variety of different skills needed to manage each of these 30 precarious steps. Now as a sales professional, I find it fascinating that climbers call each section of a mountain a pitch…especially because, in this episode of the market dominance guys, Chris talks about strategy in much the same way Alex attacks a mountain…as simply a list of necessary and intermediate destinations leading to the summit or close. And each of these strategies needs to employ the proper tactic – or in this case – the proper pitch. This episode of Market Dominance Guys is “How to Free Solo your Pitch”.

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The complete transcript of this episode is below:

You were saying that we are experts at strangers. We see, sense, can feel the seismic disruption in the force of strangers when they come into our life, albeit via phone or for a conference call or what have you. And so we're pre-wired to know that strangers, these invisible strangers, are inherently never a good thing. And so by understanding that, it's like I've seen the problem in the world and it's me. By starting from that very self aware versus being self-absorbed perspective, I think that's going to step one, chapter one of how a sales rep can have a successful discovery call. And so I think that's what we wanted to chat about today a little bit, is that this breakthrough that I really liked you talking about last time, is that the discovery call is the product, should be a product in and of itself, separate from the product.

And that if your discovery call is all about an inquisition, all about questions that the prospect can see a mile away is only going to be used to box me into a corner with some fancy alternate choice questioning technique, then that's not a successful discovery call because it doesn't lead with value. It doesn't have any value separate from the product itself. And if you do that and you do the example you used with the black widows in the garage with the Raid, it only makes them angry. So you have to have the right repellent or attractant, otherwise you're only going to piss off the person that you were intent on. You can't be like Evel Knievel and jump over discovery into the close, into the product demo. It has to be something that has much more of a nutritional value, much meatier in this case.

So I think that's probably a good place to start for today, is the discovery call. And how it has value, how it doesn't become successful, how you screw it up. Maybe a little bit of the biophysiology of why we need a good discovery call anyway and why it's the surest path, even though it takes a little bit more time and reps want to jump it, they want that Candyland shortcut, but it truly is the best way to get to a sale and then ultimately market dominance.

Chris Beall (04:52):

And number one is that the discovery call is a destination. You're not trying to get to a deal. The destination, and this is true of any strategy, by the way. It's kind of funny, when people talk strategy, so I'll back up into strategy just a little bit. They often are talking about the equivalent of standing at the bottom of the mountain and looking at the summit and saying my strategy is to get to the summit. But that's not a strategy. The strategy would be, looks to me like this crack right here on the northwest ridge is a good place to s