EP45: It‘s the CEO‘s Job to Feel the Ice Rather than Harpoon the Whale

CEOs are allowed to have weird thoughts and consider odd possibilities. You need input from the market you don't have yet. This is why a CEO needs to be selling to understand what is actually happening. Their job is to feel the ice rather than just sending your reps to drive the road.

Put yourself in there as CEO, don't absorb the friction, find the root cause. The marketplace is always changing. CEOs love to harpoon a whale, but they need to experience every aspect of a sale. They need to be in the mix and feel what is behind the numbers. Listen to this episode of Market Dominance Guys, It's the CEO's Job to Feel the Ice Rather than Harpoon the Whale.

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The complete transcript of this episode is below:

 

 

Corey Frank (00:35):

Welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with Corey Frank and the Sage of Sales, Chris Beall, with all things markets dominant oriented.

Chris Beall (00:45):

This is something that drives me a little bit nuts when CEOs stop selling and they cut themselves off from the only information flow that counts, which is what's happening inside of a discovery conversation that indicates to you that something needs to be different, something about your positions, something about your product, something about your company needs to change in order to stay current and stay ahead of what's going on in your marketplace. As you go through the process of dominating market, things change. One of the things that changes is some things get easier, and so if you keep doing certain things the hard way, you're wasting money and time. It could be that there's an easier way to move ahead at that point. So who knows, but unless you're out there on the front lines, and particularly, very specifically, CEOs need to engage in discovery conversations.

Chris Beall (01:38):

Discovery is discovery. Discovery is not discovering whether they need your product. That's what sales people tend to think of discovery as "I'm going to discover that you, Corey, need to buy my thing. You know a miracle that every discovery conversation has the same outcome. You should buy my stuff", it's like, "Really?" I thought we were going to discover the nature of the problem that you think you have. And then we're going to examine that problem in the light of different ways of looking at it, thinking about it, that might reveal a solution to the problem that you hadn't considered before. It may well be that that solution is something we can help you with. It may well be otherwise. That's why it's called discovery. And it's actually been flipped on its head. It's like, "We're not discovering what we're doing is hoping. We're hoping that you want to buy something because I going to make my number." Right?

Chris Beall (02:27):

It's kind of funny that we call it "making my number", when I get lucky enough that the hope turns into an outcome. So as a CEO, I want to know what's going on. I'm driving on a road that hasn't been driven before. By definition at all times, my company is going into new territory. Even if all we're doing is going into the easier part of this market, how do I know for instance, something we've talked about which is, when I've gotten far enough into one market where it's time to seriously consider a foray into an adjacent market. Well, I've said before, it's stunned by the numbers. But in fact, I'm lying when I say that. It's actually done b