Conversation Flow Rate - with Chris Beall - ConnectandSell

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, CEO of RevUp Squared and the host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B SaaS industry thought leaders, executives, and people just like you to discuss how they use metrics, key performance indicators, and benchmarks to enable better data-driven, metrics-informed decisions that accelerate revenue performance and increase enterprise value. If you'd like to gain insights into how your metrics measure up to industry benchmarks, you can learn more at revopsquared.com. Now, on to today's show. Welcome to today's Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We are joined today by a fellow Metrics junkie, Chris Beall, CEO of ConnectandSell, and a long time veteran in the tech industry. Welcome to the show, Chris.

**Chris Beall** (0:57)
Hi, great to be here, Rick.

**Ray Rike** (0:58)
Hey, I really appreciate you taking time out of your day to be a guest, and I wanted to start with taking a minute and just introduce yourself to our listeners, and what's led you to being a guest on the Metrics that Measure Up podcast?

**Chris Beall** (1:10)
Well, I guess the main thing is, I run a company called ConnectandSell, and what we do is help business salespeople talk to lots more people, lots more like my team today, this morning, it is 10:07 AM on the Pacific Coast, has had 188 conversations and set 14 meetings, and that's just a handful of people. So we're into driving big numbers in terms of business conversations, and that really drives you into all the other metrics. It's the conversion metrics, the follow-up metrics, how do you manage time? It's the raw, raw, raw, which is what happens with dials, how do they convert to conversations, how do those convert to meetings, what happens in the world of the follow-ups. So as you say, I'm a metrics junkie, I kind of have to be. My background is I'm an old programmer. I come from the world of physics and mathematics. So I have a degree in physics and kind of a little different from the background, a lot of people in sales, but I've also spent a career building companies and that means selling.

**Ray Rike** (2:05)
Well, it's interesting. One of the things our audience knows is I'm in engineering by schooling, but I did transfer over to sales because I thought being able to articulate and share the technology and how it could impact business value, and then the financial rewards, I thought it was a good move. But let's talk a little bit about the last six months, Chris. It's been a wild ride for the entire world, and especially B2B sales professionals. I just heard you say something about 188 conversations before 10:07 AM. But let me pull back and what have you seen as far as the overarching approach to outbound sales activity over the last six months? How has it changed?

**Chris Beall** (2:43)
Well, the main thing that we're being told, and we're not in the email business, so we don't know this firsthand, but HubSpot should know it and they report it to everybody, is that there was a huge increase in the rate of email sending by B2B salespeople. these aren't marketing emails. these are actually more direct kind of solicitations and then are assisted along by the engagement sales, engagement products like Outreach and salesloft and Zant. Now, soon coming on, we'll see more of salesforce's new high-velocity selling products. What happened as a result of that is that email response rates went way down. interestingly, most folks intuitively thought that it would be too much to call people directly, either cold call or even if you've talked to them before a follow-up call. During this pandemic time, especially in March and April and May. What we saw was that it got slightly easier to reach people. I think that was for two reasons. One is that there was a fair amount of forwarding of business phones, work phones to cell phone because as people went to work from home, which was a wave that occurred over about a two-week period in March, a lot of folks became very aware of their ability to communicate, especially with their own team.
Oddly enough, the cell phone became the business phone and the business phone got forwarded to the cell phone. If you could navigate a main phone number, you would actually get to folks' cells. That drove the dial-to-conversation rate down, that is fewer dials per conversation, not by much, but by a little. The other thing we saw is that folks who adjusted their message a little bit in March and April, got higher conversation to meeting rates. Overall, it was an improved environment for prospecting by phone. Not that prospecting by phone is ever easy. I'm looking at my team today and it's taking 30.7 dials to get a conversation. Most people won't do that manually, dial 60 to 90 dials a day and talk to two or three people is the standard. But we get to see it at an accelerated pace. What we saw was a slight improvement. We also analyzed tone. It's not just the numbers in the raw, it's the outcomes. You can get an answer to question how many conversations had positive tone or a positive outcome, which you can read directly off both the outcomes of conversations. Was it a busy callback, interested to send information, did they accept the meeting and so forth. But you can also analyze transcripts of the text of the conversation itself, and then you can have human and automated listening for tonality. So overall, those who have defted did a little bit did well. And the way they had defted was just by softening their opening a little bit to recognize that they were interrupting somebody and that it might not be that great. There was a lot of tactical empathy that started to be used and the good cold callers did really, really well and continue to do well.