Benjamin Ard00:00 — Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Todd. Todd, welcome to the show.
Todd Caponi00:04 — Thanks for having me.
Benjamin Ard00:05 — Yeah, Todd, I'm excited. This is gonna be fun. You have what I would call some of the strongest passion for what you do out of anyone I've ever talked to. I'm excited. You can tell you get giddy about it. There's a lot of fun. So let's get to know you a little bit. If you don't mind sharing with the audience a little bit about who you are, what you do, all that kind of fun stuff, that'd be great.
Todd Caponi00:25 — Yeah, I think passion and nerd, they sometimes kind of blend together. But yeah, long time sales leader, always been passionate about behavioral science around learning theory. And then COVID kind of knocked me into a real passion for the history of sales and sales leadership. So for anybody watching, you'll see behind me I've built a sales museum in my house that's chock full of books from the late 1800s to the early 1900s, magazines. I actually have LPs, I've got old phones. But what I actually do for a living now is I've written three books: The Transparency Sale, The Transparent Sales Leader, so a leadership one, and then Four Levers Negotiating. And I now speak and teach companies of all sizes all over the place, the power of turning transparency into a revenue superpower all the way to the way that you negotiate and the way that you lead.
Benjamin Ard01:19 — Love that. That's incredible. Also, I'm gonna promote this for you, but you have a podcast as well where you talk about this stuff. Is that right?
Todd Caponi01:26 — Yeah, it's called the Sales History Podcast. So for anybody that's really nerdy on that, it's never interviews. It's just me monologuing 14 to 20 minutes each episode, right? Dig into a topic and then I just share the research and the stories. So everything from like episode one, season one, is a story about how I think Mark Twain was the guy that was the first true sales enablement professional. And what he did for Ulysses S. Grant's memoirs is an incredible story. Grant literally died right as the book came out, five days after it came out. But Twain had taught so many people to go sell it that he was able to present a massive check to his widow a few months later. The story is incredible. That's season one, episode one, but there's so much more around cold calling, prospecting, marketing, the telephone. I could go on all day. Check it out if you're a nerd, and if not, that's cool. I don't monetize it at all, it's just a hobby.
Benjamin Ard02:23 — That's awesome. I love it. So we're gonna dive into one of your books specifically about transparency. Tell us about this book. Tell us about the process. I also love the behind the scenes. So if you don't mind, where did it come from? Where did the idea come from? What was the process like writing it? I mean, obviously, as marketers are our primary audience for this podcast, I think a lot of people are also interested in the writing process as well. So let's dive into it. I'd love to hear more about it and then we'll dive into some specifics.
Todd Caponi02:51 — Yeah, so what had happened was I was the chief revenue officer of a company based out of Chicago where I am called PowerReviews. And while you may have never heard of the company, you've probably interacted with the technology. Meaning you go onto a retailer website, let's say Crocs, and you're looking at a shoe, you scroll down, there's reviews. We are the engine behind the collection and display of those reviews for Crocs, Vineyard Vines, a thousand other retailers. So here's what happened. My marketing team partnered with Northwestern University here in Chicago just to look at buyer behavior when a website is acting as a salesperson. All right, so nothing to do with business to business marketing or selling, or so I thought. Well, the data came back, and what they did is they looked at, all right, if you're gonna buy something online that you've never bought before, that's of medium to high consideration, so not a pack of gum, but something that matters, what do people do? Well, there were three data points. Two of them changed my life like could only happen to a nerd. So the one that didn't change my life was that when you're buying something you never bought before that matters, you read reviews. At the time it was 96%. I never found the four that don't, but it's gone up to like 98 or 99%. So we all read reviews. Cool. Here's the two that changed my life though. All right. So number one is, are you one of those weirdos that when you're reading the reviews, you skip the five-star reviews and go right to the negatives first: the fours, the threes, the twos, and the ones? Well, turns out you're not a weirdo. You're human. We almost all do that. At the time, it was 86% of us specifically seek out the negative reviews when we're about to make a purchase. And then the last data point is on a five-star scale, when a product has an average review score, and by the way, this skews higher or lower based on product category, but on average, when a product has an average review score between a 4.2 and a 4.5 out of five, that's actually optimal for purchase conversion. In other words, a product that has negative reviews right under it sells faster and more often than a product that has nothing but perfect five-star reviews. As a matter of fact, a product that is nothing but perfect five-star reviews sells at the same conversion rate as a product that has an average review score of around a 3.25, which kind of sucks. And so I'm thinking about like, all right, that's when a website's acting as a salesperson, but why do we need the negative first? Why are we more likely to buy when somebody has something crappy to say about the product first? And my B2B sales team, does it apply to human to human or B2B? So I start going in a spiral on this. I'm digging into the research. I actually found a neuroscientist in Chicago. Like I Googled a neuroscientist in Chicago, found a guy. I stalked him until he answered me. Like, hey, I'm not this smart, but this is what the research is telling me. And he's like, yeah, it looks like it should be. Here was the bottom line. As it turns out that when we present our solutions as perfect, which salespeople do, which marketers do, right? Like we're great, everybody else blows. We're actually making it harder on buyers, not easier. And the opposite then becomes when we actually lead with what we give up to be great at our core, or what the risk is and the rewards. What our 4.2 to 4.5 is, why we're not a five, but why we don't blow. When we do it that way, magic happens. So I started trying it with myself first, but then with my team, where we would go in and be like, hey, this is what we give up to be great in our core. If you're looking for this, these guys are better than we are at it. We're trying to be the best at this. If you need this stuff, we're not. We started doing that. Sales cycles sped up, because we were optimizing for the buying brain. Win rates went up, partially because we were qualifying in the deals we should be working. We were losing the deals we're gonna lose anyway, much faster. So we got our time back and we became the cool kids in town, meaning we were differentiating in the way that we sold. And what ended up happening is we became Chicago's fastest growing tech company from 2014 to 2017. And I was like, wait, feels good to be honest and transparent, but as it turns out it sells better. And then add this piece. We now have to do it anyway, right? Like the rise of information proliferation on everything we do, buy, and experience, AI exposing everything. We got to figure out how to do this. So I quit my job, wrote my first book, The Transparency Sale. I thought the book would suck. We could talk about that. I'd never written a book before. I wasn't that smart in English class in high school, but it's since taken off. And like I said, I've written two more books, but the core concepts of that book are really around this idea that transparency sells better, grows better, retains better, creates advocates better, leads better, and negotiates better.
Benjamin Ard07:17 — I love that. That's incredible. So I want to go into the AI side of things as well. You're seeing this more now than ever, that transparency has become such a big lever for a business to really pull, because honestly, there is a lot of fake information out there. You can't tell if it was created by a person or not. How does transparency really impact today's market? And how do we really focus on that?
Todd Caponi07:39 — Can I just go nerdy for a second for you? So I'm holding a book from 1910. This was written by Thomas Herbert Russell. It's called Salesmanship Theory and Practice. All right, 1910. So 116 years ago. There's four words in here that are gonna kill you. All right. Here they come. Buyers know more nowadays. Buyers know more nowadays, 1910. So what was Russell talking about? He was talking about the rise of mail order catalogs. I have a 1908 Sears Roebuck catalog here that was the first one where you could buy modular homes. You could buy everything. It's 1,400 pages long. They were worried that the rise of mail order catalogs and proliferation of advertising meant, what would we need salespeople for anymore? Buyers can do their own homework. They've got access to all of this. And so what happens? Well, the opposite happened. The sales profession didn't shrink, it grew. You fast forward to even 11 years ago, so 2015, Forrester, in their annual state of sales report, reported that by 2020, a million B2B sales jobs would go away and hundreds of thousands of college students wouldn't graduate in the profession. Well, what happened? The opposite happened again. So when we think about AI and the rise of all of this information, proliferation and accessibility, and gosh, buyers can do their own homework, what do we need salespeople for? I would argue this, that the profession has always flourished because more information has never made it easier on buyers. It has always made it harder every single time. So going back to transparency, I will load a quote on you here. And it's from the book over my left shoulder here called The Art of Selling, 1911, guy named Arthur Sheldon. He said this, and this was the answer then, 1911. Still the answer today. And the quote is simply: true salesmanship is the science of service. Grasp that thought firmly and never let go. Meaning service. All this information out there, when the salesperson looks at their lens of going, hey, there's all this out here, let me cut through it for you. Here's what you're gonna love, here's what you're not gonna love. Here's the risks, here's the rewards, here's the price. There's cheaper alternatives, right? Embrace that. And what ends up happening is that you become a magnet for those buyers because you've built trust based on transparency. And again, you're getting them to their outcomes faster, whether it's with you or with somebody else. And now you're protecting your time too. So I think AI again continues to accelerate this need to do homework for the buyers and accelerates this need to be truly transparent so the customers trust you. They do their homework with AI, but they come to you and go, Ben, here's what I'm seeing. What's right, what's not? And you become the trusted advisor to back up that stuff.
Benjamin Ard10:14 — I love that. That makes perfect sense. I love that you're a service. You're providing that service. That's your whole goal.
Todd Caponi10:18 — Exactly. The original design of sales was to be a service professional. In 1916, there was something called the World Sales Congress, the first sales conference ever. 3,000 attendees, July 1916 in Detroit. Now, a couple of things I just want to point out. Number one is, imagine a sales and marketing conference today. Well, the keynote speaker was then sitting president Woodrow Wilson. Imagine a president going to a sales conference. That's crazy. But Wilson, the whole motto and theme of the event was one word: service. The whole event, service. Why? Woodrow Wilson saw it as an opportunity when the sales profession is helping customers get into the right solutions at the right price at the right time. What happens is all boats rise. And while the rest of the world was screwing around with World War I that was brewing over in Europe, Wilson and the US economy was like, hey, salespeople doing right by customers, this is our chance to become a world superpower. And when we do right by our customers, all boats rise and we all reward instead of being selfish. And so I just thought that was really cool. But again, it was always, always service. We screwed that up. There's a whole Sales History Podcast episode about how we screwed it up, but we'll talk about that another time.
Benjamin Ard11:32 — Love it. So for the audience of marketers, how does this apply to them as well? Because I think that everything you're talking about resonates, but what's your personal lens on this? What can a marketer take away from this idea of providing service? Also, the idea that not having all the information is necessary and actually good. How does a marketer really adopt this methodology?
Todd Caponi11:55 — Well, I think if you look at the most successful B2C brands in the world, what they've done is they've marketed what they give up to be great at their core. Like, for example, IKEA, right? IKEA is the number one furniture retailer in the world for 14 straight years, and it's a disaster. You walk in, you can't find anything, you gotta find the code and then go to the warehouse, pull the boxes onto a cart that doesn't have brakes, jam it in the back of your car while yelling F-bombs at your spouse or whatever. Drive home. There's 150 parts on the floor, only one word on the work instructions, which is like Sparta or some weird Scandinavian design name. And then when you get done, you're like, this looks great. We should have gotten the end tables. What, are you nuts? But the point being, IKEA literally markets that listen, you're gonna have to find it, pick it, pack it, shove it, assemble it. But we do that so you can have modern Scandinavian design furniture that you didn't pay much for. There's good meatballs too. But the point being that they've created, instead of a funnel, they've created a cylinder that everybody walks in and knows what to expect. And so for the B2B marketers out there, every lead has a cost. More leads isn't good. Having every lead that comes in pre-qualified is the most efficient way to build a business that truly scales and creates advocates, where people are all talking to each other about how great you are. I think it's such an opportunity. Costco's another one where you gotta pay to walk in. It's ugly, right? You want ranch dressing? You better like Hidden Valley Ranch, because there's no other choices. You want a toothbrush? Buy 12 of them. There's no bagging your groceries. They give you dirty boxes, and then there's somebody checking your receipt on the way out to make sure you didn't steal anything. Their renewal rate on the subscriptions is like 96%. It's the envy of every for-profit SaaS type business or as-a-service business in the world. And it's not great. The point being, I think B2C marketing has learned how do we create this cylinder approach? There's not too many B2B companies that are doing this well, because I think most marketing organizations are so incentivized for more instead of the higher quality. The higher quality is, hey listen, you're going to love us here. You're not going to love us here. And so before you even enter your little form and have somebody reach out and have a conversation with you, let's make sure that you're in the right bucket here before anybody wastes each other's time. I think it's such a huge opportunity for B2B marketing.
Benjamin Ard14:20 — I love that. Now I live here in Utah and we have a whole bunch of ski resorts and all that kind of fun stuff. I don't know if you've ever seen this ad, but it's one of the greatest ads of all time. I believe it was for Snowbird Resort. They took out in a really prominent skiing and snowboarding magazine this two-page fold ad that was a snowboarder going down this really difficult hill, and it had the one star review: the slopes are too hard. And it was such a great way of really being transparent to say, we're not for the new beginners. We're for the individuals who live out of their van and want to just snowboard all day, every day and have the hardest slopes that you possibly can get.
Todd Caponi14:58 — That's awesome. Yeah. I like Slim Jim in the 1960s. They had an advertisement that was just one person after the other, you know, Slim Jim the beef jerky. And it was one person after the other, and it was just like snapping it, like, that's really, really good. And then another person is just like, gosh, this is the worst. And they kept going back and forth. And they're like, some people love it, some people hate it. Right? They were embracing that it's a polarizing flavor. And Slim Jim took off and took over the market. Again, B2C has done that so well. Why not B2B? I don't understand where we've missed that opportunity. In my last role, that was part of what we tried to do, is to go, hey listen, we're trying to be the best in the world at this. If you want this broader solution with this and this and this and this, that's not us. So before you come to us, if you need this, go there. Right? This is how we handle it. But the bottom line is this, and I will lay one last quote on you that is my favorite sales quote of all time. It's from 1921. Another Arthur, this time it's Arthur Dunn, in his book, Scientific Selling and Advertising. So the book is pages with words, and then there's one sentence at the top of this page. And the quote is simply this: if the truth won't sell it, don't sell it. Right? If the truth won't sell it, don't sell it. We should be marketing the truth, embracing the truth. And if we need to be doing something else, we shouldn't be selling the solution anyway. Again, AI, you can't get away with this stuff like you even could in 1921. But they knew the answer back then. Service, truth, transparency.
Benjamin Ard16:26 — I love it. Well, Todd, one thing I love to end with, and we're coming to the close, we're really almost out of time. I love to provide practical advice. So if you are a marketer or a sales rep listening to this podcast, and you think to yourself, this month I want to get better with transparency, what are your recommendations of things I can start to do this month to get better in this whole area?
Todd Caponi16:49 — Well, I think first of all, one of the big issues that I see in organizations is that when we lose a deal, we say, hey, better luck next time. Go get them, champ, right? Or even worse is, gosh, you got outsold. And as a result, salespeople look at their losses as, all right, better get the next one, or I gotta make an excuse for why they're stupid. Well, I believe that the organizations that absolutely flourish are the ones that celebrate the losses. Celebrate the losses not only for the effort, like you're not getting that time back, but what are the true reasons why we lost? If we could spin the world back, what should we have seen differently? What should we have done differently? And every time a salesperson is willing to share that and go, gosh, this is what I messed up, we celebrate louder. The first time I did it in my last company, we had champagne. Like literally, I wanted to create a culture where losing was celebrated, because you start to see that. There's another company I coached that started doing a biggest mistake of the week award. And the reps would come in and go, this is what I screwed up. And they're like, really? Well, I did this. And they'd start celebrating that. Now, what happens over time is, A, we start to see trends. We start to go, hey, that deal looks like that one. And we start to see that. Marketing has to sit in on all of those, right? Marketing needs to start putting it into, there's themes here, we keep losing for the same reason. Either we fix it or we embrace it. And so, number two, though, is the biggest problem in the world is losing for the same reason over and over again and not realizing it. And so what we end up doing is, hey, it's a problem if we keep losing for the same reason and we do know why, but without creating that environment where we are truly celebrating the losses for what we could have done differently or seen differently, and make sure that that culture resides in your organizations. Marketing, you've got an opportunity to bang that drum in your organizations. That's where you start. And then cultivate that into messaging that you can take, that's the 4.2 to 4.5, or as Tyra Banks calls it, flawsome messaging, where hey, you're awesome, but you're flawed. Embrace that. And that's when the magic starts happening, companies become efficient, and you start crushing your competitors.
Benjamin Ard19:02 — I love it. That's amazing. Todd, we have run out of time, but for anyone who wants to reach out and connect with you online, how and where can they find you?
Todd Caponi19:10 — Yeah, I mean, ToddCaponi.com is an easy place, but I'm on LinkedIn. I share a bunch of stuff, sales history, transparency, messaging, positioning, leadership. I teach a lot of negotiating. My new book, Four Levers Negotiating, just came out January 27th. It flips traditional negotiating on its head. So you want to kind of lose that anxiety and discount less, build trust to the goal line instead of eroding it, and not feel like you're supposed to tase a customer because you learned from an FBI hostage negotiator how to negotiate. I think you might love that. So the books, the website, LinkedIn, those are probably the three best. And then again, as you mentioned, if you want to get nerdy, the Sales History Podcast is on all platforms, if you just want something to listen to and learn a little bit about some of the things that they got right that we don't.
Benjamin Ard19:54 — I love it. And for anyone listening, scroll down to the show notes. We will link to all of those different references there. So it's easy to find Todd and all the different places online. Todd, again, thank you for the time, insights, and really sharing your expertise with us today.
Todd Caponi20:09 — Thank you for giving me that nerdy outlet. This is fun.
