What’s the most efficient, most secure method of growing your company? Shane Mahi, Founder and CEO of SalesDRIIVN, and Gerry Hill, EMEA Regional Vice President of ConnectAndSell, explore this question with Chris Beall in today’s Market Dominance Guys’ podcast. “Overhead is like a racehorse,” Chris says. “It eats while we sleep.” He offers the following advice to Shane and to our loyal listeners: Forget taking money from VCs. Instead, work on shortening your pitch-to-value cycle time and build your business that way. “The faster your company can cycle and produce value,” he explains, “the lower your risk of losing your business.” Gerry chimes in with his own great advice: “Be sure to take a scientific approach to the experiment, not an emotional approach.” And, as always, Chris reminds those pursuing success in business that “Market dominance is a risk-reduction program: in order to reduce the risk of losing your company, you need to dominate one market. Then go dominate another.” That’s the way we roll on Market Dominance Guys every day: lots of valuable advice and helpful reminders. Listen in for more of it on today’s episode, “Overhead Is Like a Racehorse.”

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About Our Guests

Shane Mahi is Founder and CEO of SalesDRIIVN, a service provided by some of the sharpest minds in sales, generating quality meetings for its customers.

Gerry Hill holds the position of Regional Vice President/EMEA of ConnectAndSell, a Silicon Valley–based sales acceleration company, which provides technology that gets salespeople 10x more live conversations with decision-makers.

Here is the full transcript from this episode:

Shane Mahi (01:36):

So how does a new business owner protect themselves when they are seeking funding? Because with all the advice in the world, some people will just still go for it. What can a business owner do to protect themselves from getting into bed with the wrong person?

Chris Beall (02:01):

Wow, that's a tough question. I'll take a shot at it. Well, I'm going to go with an analogy. Some people who've watched this program know that there was a time when I was working with somebody as an advisor to his company as a friend, and he came into some money and decided to hire some salespeople, a salesperson to take his product to market. And I told him, "I'll fire you. I won't advise you anymore if you do that." And he asked me, "Why?" And I said, "Because we're doing an experiment now with a great deal of money to determine the answer to this question, 'Are you great at hiring salespeople?' And the answer is no, we know you're not, you've never done it before."

Chris Beall (02:40):

So what are the odds, your first go, one of the hardest things in business, which is to hire a salesperson, but an unattractive company that you do no business with anybody, you're just getting started, what are the odds that you're going to hire the great salesperson that you need to take a product nobody knows about to market with the chief operating officers and similar of some of the biggest companies in the world? It's like zero, right? So I told him, "I'm not going to waste my time." And he said, "Well, what's your alternative advice?" I said, "You mean, after you fire the salesperson?"

Chris Beall (03:13):

And he said, "Well..." And I said, "Okay, let's assume that you do the right thing and that you let this person go so that they can go do something useful with their life. You need to cold-call these chief operating officers and talk to them, somehow, get a meeting with them and talk to them about what their needs are, what they see in their own organization that you can help with, with your idea of a product, and that's it. And if you can get the flow rate of those conversations up high enough, then you'll be fine. Your money won't run out, or you'll find out your idea is bad and you'll find out fairly quickly it's bad. And then you'll save yourself a bunch of grief and you can do something else."

Chris Beall (03:54)