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For 30 years Chris Beall has led software start-ups as a founder or early-stage developer. He believes the most powerful part of a software system is the human being, and that the value key is to let the computer do what it does well \\u2014 go fast without getting bored \\u2014 in order to free up human potential. Chris is currently CEO of ConnectAndSell, Inc., based in Silicon Valley, and hosts a podcast at MarketDominanceGuys.

Most passionate about

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• What I'm doing now, and I\\u2019ve been doing for quite a while, is running a company called
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• It helps companies dominate their markets by leading with the human voice.
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• I've been passionate for a long time about having computers and humans work together in a way that unleashes the strengths of each.
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Chris\\u2019s career and story

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• I was raised out in the desert in Arizona, pretty far away from most people.
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• I was raised by animals\\u2014by horses and dogs and cats and goats and all manner of creatures like that. I think that's how I learned how to sell. My first sale ever, where I was successful, was getting a bridle on a horse when I was seven years old.
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• I was very interested in mathematics and the physical sciences.
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• Kerry Wilcox took me aside and said, \\u201cI want to let you know something that might change your mind about teaching.\\u201d Here I was with this dream of being a teacher. She said to me, \\u201cYou are an entrepreneur by nature.\\u201d
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• \\u201cI invest in my former students' companies.\\u201d This was all a revelation to me, that she was an angel investor. She said, \\u201cYou can teach if you want to, but I don't want you to go off into industry, get a job in some field where there's a lot of opportunity.\\u201d
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• I reluctantly followed her instructions when I got a job at an NCR computer company in 1979. Sure enough, I was dissatisfied. That led me down a path where, within four years, I was starting my first company.
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Best advice for entrepreneurs

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• One thing I find that's the number one mistake that entrepreneurs make is that they build the product before they sell the product. I think you should do it the other way around.
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• I highly recommend that any entrepreneur who wants to be a product entrepreneur, especially in B2B, start by having conversations\\u2014sales conversations, not survey conversations. If you're not doing it under pressure, you're probably not really doing it. So, try to sell your product before you build it and be serious about it.
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The biggest, most critical failure with customers

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• I can go back to 1984. The company was called Unison software. Unison was an ERP system before there were ERP systems. So, it was called an MRP II system. It was intended to help primarily manufacturers with their processes around Bilson material and so forth, but it had a complete accounting system in it.
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• The biggest failure was that we could go after two kinds of markets. We had discrete manufacturing folks who put parts together in order to make up a product. And then there was what's called continuous or flow manufacturing.
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• So, there are no parts; there are inputs and outputs and then control conditions and all that kind of stuff. What we failed to do, rather dramatically, was focus on one or the other. We could have done very well.
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• We had impatient investors who drove us down a path that was impossible. It ended up shrinking the software.
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Biggest success with customers

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• It was in 1998 and I was at a company called Requisite Technology. Requisite had the world's most advanced (at that time) electronic cataloging..."