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The Math of Sales:Market Domination

Brought to you by The Sales Developers andChris Beall, CEO from ConnectAndSell

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About the Authors 3

Foreword by Trish Bertuzzi 4

What Is Market Domination? 5

The Road to Market Domination 7

Phases to Market Domination 9

Phase 1: Is Your Market Worth Dominating? 9

Phase 2: Get Signals 10

Phase 3: Scale 13

Phase 4: Optimize 15

Hacks to Jump Ahead 16

Bucketing Leads 17

Math of Sales 19

Double Connection Rates 20

More Conversations, Faster 21

Conclusion 22

Table of Contents

It’s very difficult to go out of business if you’re the

dominant player in any marketplace.”

Chris Beall

“

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About the Authors

In 2017, The Sales Developers’ co-founders, Ryan Reisert and Rex Biberston, wrote the best-selling book, Outbound Sales, No Fluff. It was quickly adopted for teaching the fundamentals of sales to college students, new hires, and salespeople everywhere.

While the fundamental formula is simple, the execution is difficult. It takes an understanding of the way buyers engage, combined with a knowledge of the best in sales technology and methodology.

This is why The Sales Developers came to exist. They are the team called upon by B2B organizations actively investing in growth when they need modern outbound sales expertise delivered with no fluff and total commitment to excellence. They provide premium quality contact data, outbound prospecting services, and expert consulting to consistently fill your sales buckets.

Since 2007, ConnectAndSell’s patented cloud sales acceleration platform has helped over 1,000 B2B companies, ranging from small startups to Fortune 500 enterprises like IBM, Dell Technologies, and Intuit solve multiple sales development challenges with one breakthrough platform: ConnectAndSell Lightning.

CEO of ConnectAndSell, Chris Beall, has been participating in software start-ups as a founder or at a very early stage for most of the past 30 years. His focus has consistently been on creating and taking to market simple products that can be used successfully the first time they are touched, without taking a course or reading a manual.

Chris’ belief is that the most powerful part of any software system is the human being that we inappropriately call a “user,” and that the value key in software is to let the computer do what it does well (go fast without getting bored) in order to free up human potential.

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Foreword byTrish Bertuzzi

In the last few years, the landscape of modern selling has changed dramatically. Buyer behavior has changed. Selling techniques have changed. Technology has transformed the selling landscape. Yet, one thing has remained consistent: Those that dominate their market space are those that win. This ebook details some of the initial steps you can take when thinking about market domination.

Those that dominate their market space

are those that win.

Having said that, is market domination for everyone? Probably not. Here is the question you need to ask yourself before you do anything else: “Is my solution an aspirin or a vitamin?” If you answered “aspirin,” meaning you solve an identified pain, then read on and learn the building blocks of domination. If you answered “vitamin,” meaning you offer a “nice to have” and not a “need to have” solution, you should still read on, but you might have a different goal.

Or maybe you can’t answer that question at all. Now that is a crying shame as it is one of the most important questions you will ever ask yourself. So, what do you do? Go out and have conversations with your market. That is the only way you are going to figure out if you are a dominator or a niche player. Your market will tell you what you need to know, however in order to gather that information, you have to have many conversations. This ebook will guide you down the path to having enough conversations to answer the question.

So, whether you know you have the right solution to dominate an identified market or you want that question answered, this ebook is for you. Enjoy and learn!

- Trish Bertuzzi, Founder & CEO of The Bridge Group

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What Is Market Domination?

Market domination is the act of becoming the major player in a market — the 800-pound gorilla who sits where it wants.

Market dominance is the safe place to go in business. It’s significantly more difficult to go out of business when you’re the dominant player. In this book we lay out a way to dominate your market, and it has to do with a surprisingly simple formula: make a list, put together a good script, talk to everybody in your market, and stay consistent.

Determining how much of your market you can dominate and how quickly is laid out in four stages. But take a look at the buyer’s pyramid below from the late great Chet Holmes.

There’s only so much you can expect to win at first. The vast majority of the people you’ll talk to at first will be disinterested at best. The majority of your market is won in follow up. If you can earn the follow up, you can stay ahead of the rest of your competition who are just trying to skim the cream on top (find the top 3% buying now).

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There’s only so much you can expect to win at first. The majority

of your market is won in follow up.

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Dominating the market sounds pretty difficult, right? Why even bother?

1. It’s economic. Every dollar of revenue you make dominating a market is worth 10 times a dollar that you would make in a market where you’re in second, third, or fourth place. If you’re a business owner, you should care about this.

2. It’s strategic. When you dominate one market, you’re in a position to dominate other markets. Every market is a platform to move into adjacent markets and provides you with the outsized returns that give you access to capital to do so.

3. It’s emotional. Market dominance is a lot of fun; it’s a lot more fun than chasing around being second place, third place, fourth place. That matters no matter who you are: an owner, a manager, or a sales rep. It doesn’t make any difference. It’s a lot more fun to be the dominant player.

When we’re talking about dominating a market, we’re really talking about dominating a market segment. In 1991, Geoffrey Moore told us that a market segment is a set of customers (or potential customers) for a given set of products and services who share a common set of wants and needs and who reference each other when making a buying decision.

A market segment provides you with leverage. If you sell to one, your chances of selling to another go up and then up and up from there. The key to this is that you have to be satisfying those wants and needs with your products and services. As this happens and market resistance decreases, it gets easier to penetrate the market.

The Road to Market Domination

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The goods that people need

+The will to do what it takes

=Market accepting you

as the standard

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Estimate the size of your Total Addressable Market (TAM)

• Start with the problem you solve and narrow it down to the segment of the market most likely to be experiencing that problem at any given time. How many companies fit that description?

• Tools like Crunchbase, ZoomInfo, DiscoverOrg, and others allow you to get a quick snapshot of the market, but remember that this is an estimate.

Calculate how many are in-market each quarter

• When you look at any given offering, it’s going to take about 3 years before anybody’s going to replace their solution with something new (i.e., your solution). When you take those 3 years and divide them by 12 quarters, that means 8.5% of the TAM is likely to be in the market for something you’re offering.

• NOTE: You might be tempted to believe your product is so innovative that it has no competitors. This is rarely the case. If your ideal customer is currently spending resources on something else in search of a solution to the problem you address, that’s your competition.

• If your only competition is the status quo, and prospects have money in their budget going unspent, you may fit into this niche of innovative solutions that is able to conquer more than the aforementioned 8.5%. Use the numbers in this chapter as a “worst case scenario” to guide your planning.

Multiply this number by your average customer lifetime value (LTV)

• If you sell a $1,000/month product and the average customer is with you 18 months, their LTV is $18,000.

• With 1,000 companies in-market this quarter, there is $18MM in lifetime revenue up for grabs.

Multiply this by the winnable rate (controlling for people who are not in-market).

• You’re going to meet with a lot of people who are “interested” in your product, but not all of them are actively looking for a solution to a problem.

• According to inside sales expert Trish Bertuzzi, with the right offer and an active buyer, you’ll likely still lose 50% of the deals to indecision and 25% of the deals to a competitor.

• Assuming the numbers from our example, it’s possible to win $4.5MM.

Now you have to decide if the amount of revenue you can win is worth all the effort that follows in the next three phases.

Phase 1: Is Your Market Worth Dominating?

EXAMPLE

12,000TAM

~1,000 IN-MARKET

x $18,000 LTV

= $18MM AVAILABLE

$4.5MM WINNABLE

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Phase 2: Get SignalsSTEP 1. BUILD A LIST

Create a simple list of actual people at real companies fitting the TAM you created in Phase 1. The list should not be a grab bag of multiple people at the same company who might be experiencing a problem you can solve. You are looking for the persona, as narrowly focused as possible, who is likely to be experiencing this problem. This may be based on title, years in a role, seniority in a department, number of direct reports, and more.

Naturally you’re wondering how big of a list you need. This depends on a few things, but we’ll use averages here to represent what you’re likely to experience.

In order to properly gauge the likelihood of future success at scale, you’ll need to have conversations with enough people to get a good signal. We use the formula “square root of TAM.” If your TAM is 10,000 companies, you need to have 100 conversations.

Here’s how the actual work of reaching these people breaks down:

You’ll only ever reach ~50% of the people on your list. If you need 100 conversations, you need to attempt to reach at least 200 people.

On average, phone calls are answered at the rate of about 5%, so this can take a long time to earn enough conversations.

To increase the speed at which you earn these conversations, see our Hacks chapter later in this book. Quick preview: You can amp up the volume of activity, but you’ll also need more contacts so you don’t call the same people 20 times a day.

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STEP 2. CREATE THE MESSAGE

Before you talk to the people on your list, develop a single consistent message that will get them to attend a meeting where you can explore their pain and find out whether they will fit your offering.

Sounds tough, but it’s actually a lot easier than you think!

Imagine walking into your prospect’s favorite watering hole at the end of the day. You ask how their day was, and they respond, “You have no idea.” They’ll most likely tell you everything that didn’t go well, because people rarely talk about what goes right.

Now take your offering that has the most impact on getting rid of the pain they have and start with this message, “I believe we’ve discovered a breakthrough that completely eliminates [prospect’s pain].“

Don’t elaborate on what or how. Ask for a scheduled time to discuss their pain and your potential solution.

STEP 3. HAVE CONVERSATIONS

You’ll need effective people delivering the message to have conversations with enough of your potential decision-makers. See the math in step 1.

Here are your options for the who behind these conversations and some considerations:

DIYMost early-stage founders want to do everything themselves (either for love of the product or due to budget constraints). Just remember that having enough conversations of consistent quality will be a significant time-drain and require serious commitment.

In-house (non-sales pros)If you have an intern, an engineer, or another non-sales professional who is willing to have these conversations, be sure they are capable of following the script in a clear and professional manner. Run lots of drills with them before you let them on the phones to represent your brand.

In-house (sales pros)If you have a professional seller on your founding team or as part of your current staff, this could be a great opportunity to leverage their skills.

However, without a tool like ConnectAndSell to eliminate the “dials” this could take a long time, as the average in-house rep has just 4-5 qualified conversations per day.

OutsourceIf you work with an outsourced partner who commits to consistent conversations with a consistent message, your budget is likely the only constraint on your ability to rapidly attain the signals you need for step 4 below.

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STEP 4. GAUGE FEEDBACK

If 5% of your cold conversations are able to yield a meeting, you’ve got good reason to continue on to Phase 3. If you’re not yet at 5% conversion, consider the following:

What reasons do people list for not moving forward? Likely outcomes include:

No reasonThis is either a target problem (speaking to the wrong person) or a message problem (saying the wrong thing).

Not meIf you’re getting this result consistently, consider revisiting Phase 1 for a new target contact. You may still be able to leverage the same list of companies, but need a different person. Be sure to ask these folks for a referral to the right person to help you with that.

Not nowThis is almost as good as setting a meeting: if the prospect simply isn’t ready for a meeting because they already have a solution, this is a golden follow up in the making. Chalk it up as a positive result.

Are 5% of your cold conversations yielding a meeting?

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1. Based on Phase 2 efforts, evaluate how you’re going to scale your outreach. Considerations include:

• Do you have enough time to hire, onboard, and coach new sales hires at the necessary rate?

• Are you confident in your team’s ability to consistently deliver the message and provide adequate feedback?

• Are you in the business of growing a sales team or supporting your product?

• Are you ready and willing to make a sales leadership hire, or do you already have someone on staff to manage this internal team growth?

• Is your budget consistent with the cost to acquire conversations?

In the chapter on Hacks, you’ll see that there are some really unique solutions to the challenges you might be facing as you scale.

2. Craft a consistent message for every outcome

• If you don’t have a script, template, and even snippet of information for every potential conversation outcome, your sales team will be forced to make it up on their own every time. This presents a host of challenges when it comes to learning what’s working, not to mention the time your reps are wasting by writing when they could be selling.

• Here’s a list of the minimum messaging you’ll need:

3. Create a path for every conversation outcome

• You’ll need a path every prospect should take once they reach this outcome so nothing slips through the cracks. (Remember, follow up is where all the gold is since only 8.5% of your prospects are in-market today.)

• There are four primary outcomes (Yes / No / Not Me / Not Now), but ConnectAndSell has a great list of the more nuanced possibilities.

Phase 3: Scale

Sentiment:InterestedNot InterestedAmbivalent

Channels:EmailPhoneVoicemailSocial

Needs AttentionInterest, Call Back LaterInterest, Send Information

ReferralMeeting ScheduledBusy, Call Back Later

Incorrect Contact, No ReferralNo Interest, No Reason GivenNo Interest, Reason Given

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Follow up is where all the gold is since only 8.5% of your prospects are in-market today.

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Every month, you should be updating your funnel math, which you’ll find in Hack #2 below. This helps you see performance over time and make estimates of how changes to your process and team would impact your ability to scale profitably.

As you consider the various improvements you can make to your sales efforts in your quest for market domination, they’ll generally fall into these two buckets:

2. EFFECTIVENESS

Your success over time will improve as you increase the ability to convert an unscheduled interruption into a next conversation. Here are some things you’ll want to evaluate:

• How good are your reps’ conversational skills?

• How compelling is your offer? (Could you provide a better one?)

• How well does your message speak to the pain and in the language of your prospects?

• Are you providing sufficient social proof to overcome the “I don’t know you” that’s built into cold conversations?

Consider the hacks in this next chapter as ways to make more than steady improvement on your sales efforts. These are leaps ahead that can help you achieve dominance at a significantly faster rate.

Phase 4: Optimize

DATA WORKFLOWS

MESSAGE FOLLOW UP

DATA WORKFLOWS

MESSAGE FOLLOW UP

1. EFFICIENCY

Your next best customer is being pushed through your pipeline by your sales reps like flowing water. Inefficiencies in the way you handle the sales process will reduce the flow through the pipeline — and remember, it’s already constricting as you go.

Here are some examples of blockages:

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Hacks to jump ahead

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Hack #1 - Bucketing Leads

It’s easy to waste time on the wrong prospecting activities. There are lots of moving parts, and it can be very difficult to effectively manage your time.

We use a technique called “bucketing leads.” This is how we ensure that we’re always maximizing our prospecting time.

BUCKET 1 - UNCONTACTEDThese are people you’ve never spoken with, including both cold outbound leads and new inbound leads who have yet to be researched.

Primary Bucket 1 activities:

• Removing any accounts outside your swimlane• Attempting to contact leads via phone, email, and social media• Performing additional research or preparation

BUCKET 2 - WORKINGThese leads were researched in Bucket 1 and already have at least one outbound call attempt with a verified dial. A verified dial is when you can confirm that the number associated with that person actually reaches them.

For full-time appointment setters, this bucket should consistently hold at least 100 leads so you have enough people to contact regularly. For full-cycle sales reps or closers trying to supplement their pipeline, this bucket shouldn’t drop below 50 leads.

Primary Bucket 2 activities:

• Calling regularly (as often as multiple times daily) to make contact• Documenting phone tree path on first attempt (e.g., “Dial 1, then 314, then 1”)• Continuing with other outreach (email, social, etc.)

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BUCKET 3 - PRIORITYThese are the prospects who meet any of the following criteria:

• You spoke with them but couldn’t schedule a meeting.• They engaged heavily with your email outreach in Bucket 2, but never replied.• They’re an inbound lead and are in your swimlane.• They were once in your deal pipeline but failed to close over the last 6-9 months.

The only activity in this bucket is continuing with outreach via phone, email, and social to schedule an appointment.

BUCKET 4 - SCHEDULEDThis bucket consists of all upcoming appointments you have scheduled. These prospects are where the money comes from, so you have to watch this bucket like a hawk to ensure that they show up for the meeting.

Primary Bucket 4 activities:

• Confirming any appointments scheduled 1 or more weeks out, during the week the appointment is due

• Confirming all appointments within 12–24 hours via email• Calling to confirm 2–3 hours before the scheduled time if the prospect doesn’t

respond to final email confirmation

If your prospect misses the appointment, put their name back in Bucket 3 until their appointment is rescheduled.

In order to optimize your effectiveness, you work the bucket system in reverse.

Here’s a typical workflow:

1. Bucket 4: Call to confirm any appointments due in the next 2–3 hours not yet confirmed via email.2. Bucket 4: Confirm any appointments due in the next 24 hours via email.3. Bucket 4: Confirm any appointments set more than 1 week out that are due this week.4. Bucket 3: Contact anyone you’ve already spoken with who’s asked to be contacted today.5. Bucket 3: Call through the remaining leads in this bucket.6. Bucket 2: Call through the entire list in this bucket.7. Bucket 1: Call through any leads you’ve already researched.8. Bucket 1: Research all brand-new leads to ensure they’re in your swimlane.

If the only prospecting you do today is confirming tomorrow’s appointments, you’re much better off than if you had started by sending cold emails to brand-new leads in Bucket 1.

Hack #1 - Bucketing Leads

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Many supposed gurus are claiming that “sales is no longer a numbers game” and recommending that you “focus on quality, not quantity.”

Here’s the bad news: The math of sales has never changed.

If you need to close 5 sales but only have 3 qualified prospects, you won’t hit your number.

Here’s the good news: You don’t have to sacrifice quality for quantity.

You don’t have to spend an hour researching every prospect in order to have a “quality” conversation.

The quality of the conversation lies in your ability to personalize your message to the needs of the prospect.

What does it mean?

No matter how cleverly you craft your message, your prospect might not pick up the phone or reply to your email. And even if they do pick up or reply, it might not be the right time.

“Fine, I need to do a lot of prospecting. But how much?”

The real, no-fluff answer is, “However much it takes to hit your quota.”

How to calculate your Math of Sales

We’ll work backwards from a quota of 1 sale. (You can do the multiplying later.)

Goal: Close 1 sale.

A 25% closing rate means you need to present to 4 prospects.

An 80% meeting hold rate means you need to schedule meetings with 5 prospects.

A 20% meeting scheduled rate means you need to speak with 25 prospects.

A 10% dial-to-connect or email reply rate means you need to reach out to 250 prospects once each (or 50 prospects five times each).

Each of these rates will vary based on your skills, process, and market. Calculate your Math of Sales, or “Math of Market Domination” using our calculator at marketdominationmath.com here.

We have a saying: “The math of sales never lies.”

When you know your target, your message, your channel, and your timing, you can scale to dominate your market.

Your Math of Sales

Hack #2 - Math of Sales

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Math of Market Domination Calculator

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Once you’ve got the quality leads (the Glengarry Glen Ross leads) for your list in step 1, what do you do with them?

If you’ve built a series of prospecting activities in a tool like Outreach or SalesLoft, you’re probably dropping leads into those funnels based on their industry or other qualification criteria. One criteria you may not have considered is, “Which channel is the mostly likely one to reach this prospect on?” For example:

Yes, it adds some complexity to how you build your workflow, but it also eliminates a lot of wasted effort in channels that are dramatically less likely to convert to conversations and sales opportunities.

When we stopped making calls on numbers that we couldn’t validate with our research team (our sales reps don’t waste their time on this), we saw our connection rates double overnight.

Despite (and perhaps because of) the availability of contact data, reaching your next best customer is harder than ever. It’s critical to maximize every attempt.

Susan Smith has three validated channels so she’ll fit great into

the sequence that covers all three available channels.

Mark Sanders isn’t worth calling until your research team can find you

a good phone number to dial, but you can drop him into an email and

social sequence.

Pablo Rodriguez likely isn’t worth reaching out to via LinkedIn, but you can try him over email and

phone all day long.

Hack #3 - Double Connection Rates

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Here’s a quick comparison of a few market-leading tools and how they accelerate conversations:

Salesforce1.5x average conversation rate by helping you focus on priority leads above cold leads (using bucketing). Learn more here.

Outreach, SalesLoft, and other cadence tools2x average conversation rate by eliminating confusion around who to call next through their cadence of tasks. Learn more about Outreach here and SalesLoft here.

ConnectAndSell10x average conversation rate by eliminating dialing, waiting on hold, gatekeepers, and navigating phone trees and voicemails. Learn more about ConnectAndSell here.

Once you have the bucketing process down, you can accelerate your rate of conversation using technology.

Hack #4 - More Conversations, Faster

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Now you’re equipped with the steps to achieve market domination and the hacks to get there significantly faster.

Where’s the proof?

Here’s what Varun Badhwar, CEO of Redlock, had to say about our work combining The Sales Developers and ConnectAndSell while leveraging the techniques described in this book.

Everything You Thought You Knew About High Volume Prospecting Is Wrong - View webinar here.

Stop Wasting Money on Lists That Don’t Fit Your Needs - Read here.

What Does Quality Data Look Like? - Read here.

What Do You Do With Your Data List? - Read here.

ConnectAndSell’s Blog - Read here.

Chris Beall’s LinkedIn - Follow here.

The Sales Developers’ Blog - Read here.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Varun Badhwar

Contact us for more info:

sales@thesalesdevelopers.com | thesalesdevelopers.com

Varun’s company went from Series A financing to a $173MM acquisition by the market leader in months, not decades.

We believe you can too. If we can help, let us know.

The Sales Developers installed a repeatable process for our team and solved the challenge of bandwidth.

Within weeks the team was having more conversations with the right people

than we had in the six months prior.