#579 - Removing the friction from your sales cycle | Todd Caponi | 30MPC Hall of Fame

Negotiation is one of the most stressful parts of working in sales, but our course with Todd Capone, the negotiation master, is here to help you. You can go grab it at 30MPC.com/courses. And in true, transparent negotiation fashion, the earlier that you pre-order, the better price that you get. Go grab it at 30MPC.com/courses. That's 30MPC.com/courses. What's up everybody? It's Nick here. Before we get into this episode, I wanted to give you a quick heads up about this one. This is one of the best negotiation episodes that we've ever done. And it's with Todd Capone in honor of Todd's negotiation course with 30MPC that is officially launching on June 22nd. Now you can pre-order this course right now at 30MPC.com or at the link in the shown notes. Now look, even if you've heard this episode before, I got to listen to it again before this release. And there's a lot of stuff that I forgot. And so I recommend you listen again. There's a ton of gold in this one. And without further ado, onto the episode. Good morning everybody and welcome to this episode of 30 minutes to President's Club. My name is Armand Furok. I'm here with my co-host Nick Skelsky. And today we have the one and only, the author of the transparency sale. And founder over at sales millen, he's the one and only Todd Capone. Nick, why should people listen? I want to talk about removing friction from your sales cycle and making the customers whole process to buy easier. And by the way, your process to sell easier. Listen to this episode. Three, two, one, transparency sale. All right, Todd, welcome to the show. We start every single episode with your top three action will take away. So let's get your three. Number one is focus on helping the buyer predict. That's what we're wired to do as it turns out, we'll get nerdy on this later. But transparency sells better than perfection. We assume in beings we're wired to try to predict what our experience is going to be like. That's why negative reviews work on a website. It helps the buyer build trust right from the get co engage, prioritize, decide faster. So at its core, focus on helping the buyer predict. That's your job. Beautiful. What's number two, Todd? Number two is if you want to reduce losses to the status quo, remove friction from the buying journey. And I could go on like I've been researching the crap out of this one lately. But as it turns out, our perception of a reward is biased by the journey to get there. All right, a crazy example for you is let's say you want some tacos, you run out, you're like, I'm going to go to my favorite taco place. You run out, you see the line is down the street. You're just like tacos aren't that good, right? You were in the market, you were excited about getting these tacos, but the journey to get there was unexpectedly difficult. So you chose the status quo. We do that. We force that in our selling efforts all the time by creating difficult journeys to get to the reward and the drives customers to the status quo. So number two, again, is remove friction from the journey wherever possible to keep that reward looking as sweet as the ice cream you just got in line for. Wonderful. What's number three, Todd? Round us out. And yeah, number three is practice clinical empathy. And what I mean by that is, you know, empathy is such an overused word. It's just like, hey guys, I hope you're doing good through these trying times. Like that's BS empathy. True clinical empathy is being able to experience what it's like to be in your prospects shoes, right? And understand what's going on in their day. And one example that I know we're going to dig into is as a CRO in my last roll, I was getting 100 to 150 emails a day. I was in 30 to 35 meetings per week. To get through 100 to 150 emails, I could get through them pretty fast, but just imagine video where all the sudden using video to prospect, just imagine I've got 20, 3 minute videos in those 100 to 150. Do you think I'm going to spend an hour going through them? We need to understand and get into the shoes of the executives and figure out where the best place is to use those and not ruin them by making them generic because it's not going to be long now that your executives are going to stop reading or watching videos altogether. And they're still time to save it. So let's talk about this number two, the removing friction from the journey. So I'm so sick of the crap where I have to do my disco before I see the demo. I have to be at power before I discuss price. I got to get the value before I give them a proposal. I got to do this before I got to do that. But then some of that stuff, you got to do a little bit of it, I'm sure. So what's some of the junk that we put in front of our customers that we need to immediately throw in the trash that is conventional sales wisdom? Yeah, I mean, it almost is a combination of looking at number three, and empathizing with the person that's come to you interested, right? I mean, imagine I fill out a lead form on your site. And I'm like, I am interested. And wait, somebody gets back to me and it's SDR that's like, I'm going to put you on the witness stand and I'm going to ask you 50 questions, right? I'm just going to pummel you. And you're here. You're this excited. And at this point, now you're down to here, they pummel you with these questions. At the end, all right, you're going to share something with me. Can I see a demo or see what this you've just earned the right. Congratulations to talk to an AE. Like, oh, all right, cool. When does that happen? That'll be next week on Wednesday. Okay, cool. Next week on Wednesday happens. And that person puts me back on the witness stand. Starts asking me a lot of the same questions, asks me some more that I know we're going to be used against me in a court of law later. And then they're like, can I see it? Can I get the demo? Oh, we're going to have a solution consult and get on and then they'll do the demo. All right, when's that? That'll be next Monday. All right, cool. Now I've completely forgotten why I filled up a lead form in the first place. Monday comes, I see this demo and it's completely generic and use nothing that was learned from the first 10 days in this whole process and say, and now I'm like, oh, you know what? I'm just going to keep doing what I'm doing. And then the rep is just like, gosh, how did we lose to the status quo? I can't believe they just wasted our time. Like, wasted our time. It's not them. It's you, right? And those are examples where we're not empathizing with the process, right? That when I fill out a form, I have something that I'm interested in and I'm trying to get to a prediction. Now, if we combine it with number one and this idea of why do reviews work on a website, right? 96% of us looked at reviews before we buy something online, but the amazing thing is 85% of us go to the negative reviews first. You skip the fives and go right to the forest trees because we're trying to predict, right? That's one of website's acting as a salesperson. When a human being is acting as a salesperson, we've got to empathize with the fact that their brain is trying to predict what their experience is going to be like using your products and services. The more that we can inject in and capitalize on that excitement that they had when they filled out the lead form before we lose them because we've got certain steps arm-on to what you said about like we've got processes and they got to earn the right. Well, you're going to be earning the right to much more status quo decisions and you're going to earn the right to have to do a lot more prospecting to make up for the crap that you just caused. I want to go back to the thing that you were talking about about the three star Amazon reviews or the two star Amazon reviews that people are looking at. And I always have this insecurity where I don't want to pull out all of the things that I suck at. But I know you have a different perspective on this. So I was, could you talk about that a little bit? Like how do we do our own three star Amazon reviews without totally shooting ourselves in the foot? Well, first of all, the term that I want everybody to know is comes from a supermodel. So like how would we not inject the wisdom of a supermodel in the sales? But Tyra Banks coined the term "flossum." And "flossum" means to embrace your flaws but know that you're still awesome, right? That data around how we all look at reviews and 85% of us go to the negative reviews. First, the core element there is that a product on a website that has a review score average between a 4.2 and a 4.5. That's optimal for purchase conversion. In other words, a 4.2 sells better than a 5. And what I mean by that is I'm not advising anybody go into your next sales cycle and go, hey, this is why we suck. Like, no, think "flossum." Think 4.2 to 4.5. Again, every company, every solution in the world, every retailer, every person as an individual, they give up something to be great at their core, right? And that something is probably easy for that customer or that prospect to find anyway. This whole element of leading with your flaws and leading with transparency, it sells better than a behavioral science, the data, the research, all that's in the practical application tells us that it sells better than perfection. When we start to position our products and services that way, you'll find that customers engage faster, you win faster, your sales cycles go down. I've got tons of examples of sales cycles going down so dramatically, blow your mind. Win rates go up, we qualify deals in faster that we should win. And then the deals we're going to lose anyway, we lose those faster too. So we spend our time in a better way with the opportunities that we should be with. Should I be giving price before I've established value, before I'm at power, before I'm on meeting 3, 7, or 8? Or should I just throw it out there and get this thing out of the way so they move? If I'm talking about a 7-figure solution with a 5-figure buyer, one of us is in the wrong discussion, right? That was always my feeling is you got to set the range. You got to get somebody in the framework of, you know, again, When I talk about wired to try to predict what our experience is gonna be like, we're wired to try to figure out whether the juice is gonna be worth the squeeze. Now, the way our brains are wired is, if all you do is talk about how great that juice is gonna taste, but I have no idea what the squeeze is going to entail. My brain won't file it. It's going through a filter of going, yeah, but, yeah, or what's the downside? There was a recent research, I read research, like I don't read books anymore. I read literally behavioral and decision science research. That's my nerdery. Oh, and sales history, if you ever want to go down that path. But this was a study in the journal of marketing research in October. The title is Open Negotiation, the back end benefits of sales people's transparency in the front end. And this talks to the fact that when we actually lead with that price range, that A, or on before we get too deep into this, an investment like we're talking about, customers like you that have some of the challenges you do, we're probably gonna be in this range, right? Now, if that's gonna be trouble, let's address that now. Let's get that out of the way. Let's figure out the path. Because if we're way off, again, one of us is probably in the wrong discussion. What that does, now the research backs it up, that it builds your relationship on a foundation of trust. And in the end, you end up again, your sales cycle shrink. You end up with customers that not only buy, but they stay longer and they're more willing to advocate when you lead with your price. And I know there's gonna be people listening going, "Ah, blah, blah, blah, blah." All right, cool. Yeah, there's certainly circumstances where maybe you don't want to, but all of the research and all of the data, all the behavioral science tells us that it disarms the buying brand and helps set an expectation so that they can assess whether that tasty juice is gonna be worth the squeeze to get it. Todd, can you talk a little bit about weaving in the flaw sum to the conversation that you're having with the buyer? And I'm hoping maybe you can give me an example. So let's say you're in a meeting with somebody and you've learned a little bit about them, they kind of learn a little about you and they say, "Well, can you tell me about your business?" I think what a lot of salespeople have been taught is to start talking about the logos and why they're great. And I'm curious, like, how would you approach that question? What would you actually say? I'll give you a story. So there's nine of us in a hot Manhattan office at this big apparel manufacturer. This dude starts the conversation in the most New York way possible. Like there was no small talk. It was just, Todd, looking at your competitors, looking at you, how are you better? And like the other seven people their arms are going up, they're like, "All right, here comes the sales pitch." So instead of going into that speech, I just said, "Hey, listen, before we get too deep into this, can I tell you how our competitor is better than us?" And I know that sounds crazy, but they just released an add-on to their core solution that not only do we not have, but it's not even on our roadmap. And if that's gonna be an important consideration, I would love to vet that out now, versus us get six months through this process, you'd do an RFP, we're flying all over the place, people are spending time, and then at the end, you're like, "I wish you had that." Like, can we get that out now? And they're like, "Yeah, tell us about it." I literally started selling the add-on as though I was the competitor. I was like, "Here's what it does. Here's the results. Their first customer is in the apparel space." So like, here's how it works. And again, it's not really adhered to our core. So it's probably not something we're gonna do ever. Like, we would partner on it. They talked about it for a couple of minutes more. They came back and they're like, Todd, totally not important. And you're right. Like, why would we go to a reviews provider for that? Like, I don't know. But apparently, somebody must be excited about it. We talked for only about five or 10 minutes longer. 10 days later, they threw out the RFP process, didn't have us fly up. And the guy calls me to tell me that they've just felt more comfortable with us. And as a result, they were throwing out that process and just gonna move forward. And that's when I burst into tears. And I was like, "I guess I gotta write a book." But that, I mean, that's the core, right? Help the buyer predict your job isn't to sell. It is to sell, but your job is to help them make the best decision for them. As quickly as possible, remove friction. And if that decision's not gonna be for you, how much time, like we've got a hard time, like a miser, right? That qualify these deals out faster. If that was gonna be important, man, that would have pissed me off of six months from now. They would have said that was the reason they were growing with the competitor. - Well, you were quite literally taking the obstacles that you know are going to come up later on. You're literally running ahead of them 20 feet on the path and grabbing them and bringing them forward now so you can get them out of the way. So that later on, you don't waste a whole grip of time further in the process. And so this deal went super smoothly, right? It sounds like it went great. You didn't have to go through the grueling RFP. I remember seeing those. You had something around like, why learning negotiation skills from an FBI hostage, blah, blah, blah is not good for us today. What's the deal with that? Because I know we have a lot of people who love our FBI hostage negotiation. We're not negotiating the release of hostages from a bank heist, right? We're negotiating a technology deal, a product deal, a services deal, whatever it is. And so this idea of why does negotiation have to be any different than the rest of the process? And here's what I mean. Well, let's say you're selling a SaaS solution. The approach that you take when you're talking pricing, when you're proposing pricing, and then at the goal line is to say, hey, listen, our pricing is based on four things. Now there's four things that matter to us as an organization. The first one's volume. And we'll pay you in the form of a discount to commit to more volume. So higher volume commitment, there's discount schedules will pay you in the form of a discount to commit to more. Number two, timing a cash. Turns out we like money, the faster you're willing to pay us, the better it is for us, the more we're willing to pay you in the form of a discount for that. Number three, length of commitment. The longer you commit to our products technology services, the better it is for us. More willing to pay you in the form of a discount. Number four, is the timing of the deal. As it turns out, our ability to forecast is not only helpful for me and my rep. And they got a quote, I don't know if you do that. And of course, like every buyer knows you got quotas. But for our ability to resource the business. And we've got investors that, I mean, you know that. So help us forecast with mutually align around the timing of this thing. And I'll pay you in the form of a discount to hold to it. When it comes down to the customer saying, "I need a discount." Instead of you, Tommy Boyan, you know, "Okay, okay." And like, "Here's 10%. Instead, you say, "Hey, we might have a way to get there." Commit to more volume. Pay us faster. Commit longer. Help me forecast. And instead of a roading trust of the goal line you're building it, your deals are becoming more valuable because you've gotten out of the business of charity to the customer's bottom line. And your deal, especially if you use that fourth lever the right way, the deals become more predictable too. And so when we've implemented that at companies, I mean, the ROI on that process is like two days. It's just, it's a magic how it works. And then if you're in a space where there's renewals you'll find that if you reinforce that enough your customers will start actually negotiating their own renewals too. And again, for every dollar you give away in the form of a discount, you're getting something of value back. And it doesn't need to be, I need to read your I-twitches and mirror your language and all that stuff. It's just simple. Card space up. Here's what matters to us. What's trade? - One of the things we talk about all the time is, like you've got to build up the ask internally. And then you've got to trade whatever you need to move that deal forward in exchange for that ask. And so we talked about this in a negotiation play but we'll say like, look, like what you're asking me for is a lot. So the first thing is I need use step four because I'm not going to go and negotiate against myself. And that's the first thing we need to return is we need to know what's going to get this thing done. And then two, we're going to do this thing one time once. And if you're not ready to sign by this date, we should not be going through this ask right now because otherwise my CEO is going to chop my head off and we're both going to lose our chance to win this deal together. And by just cutting through all of the nonsense, you can actually get to the real answer as opposed to just fishing and giving away blind discounts to people without actually having any sense of, are they willing to give up and put some skin in the game to actually get this thing done? Todd, one more question I have for you was something you put into prep doc about putting text on slides and why that should be a big no-no. And I'm wondering if you can talk a little about that. Oh, man. All right. So, and there was something else earlier too, you had talked about with like, where tend to see the lead with our NASCAR slide, like our logo slides and all that. I'll combine both of these for a second. The year of 1620, Francis Bacon, who is the founder of like the scientific method, he came up with this idea of something that is resulted in what we call cognitive bias, which is essentially logic is polarizing. When we've got an opinion and you throw logic at me, I will use that logic to support my opinion. Even if your logic goes against my opinion, so you throw a logo slide at me and it's really impressive and you're so proud of it. If I'm leaning towards you, I'll look at that logo sliding and go, you know what, if they're good enough for them, they're good enough for me, right? I'm gonna use it. But if I'm against you, I might look at that same logo slide and say, "Yeah, so we're gonna be a small fish in a big pond." And I don't really see too many companies that are in my vertical, they're all over the place. Like, these guys, generalists, like, do they really know? So my point is with each one of your logic slides that you throw in, you're literally polarizing a consensus audience. And that's why, you keep seeing that story sell, right? Story sell, but they sell for a biological, you know, internal mechanism in our brains that stories and emotion they bring us together and in a consensus sale, you need to be telling stories where your customer is the hero, not you. All right, I'll say that again. Tell a story where your customer is the hero, not you. And your story leads to you, not leads with you. Now, to your point about text on slides, this is a new thing that I've discovered that I kind of put the two things together. We actually read with our ears. So we're listening with our ears, and then I'm reading, and basically your brain is reading the words to yourself. I don't know if you're reading something, you're basically reading to yourself. So the same processing center is trying to process your spoken word and your written word. Brain is not wired to be able to do that. It can't do that. It cannot listen with comprehension and read with comprehension at the same time. And as a result, if you're throwing text on slides, your customer is doing one of three things. They're choosing to read and not listen. They're choosing to listen and not read, or they're choosing to try to do both poorly, and subconsciously that exhaustion that it's causing the brain is causing them to completely disengage. So when I give a presentation, it's always images only, or it's me in a whiteboard and we're sketching stuff out, I just like everybody, be careful. Your words should be one word here to reinforce something on a slide. Well, if it's a quote, read the quote. But any other words, your paragraphs, you gotta get them out of there. So like, realize you gotta get the clutter off of your slides. They're looking at a tiny little screen now. Get rid of the words, tell stories that lead to you, not with you, make your customer the hero, and use images to reinforce the words that you're saying. And it's going to make a huge impact almost instantly. - All right, Todd, this has been phenomenal. We've got one last question for you. What's one belief or piece of sales dogma that exists out there that you think needs to be scooped up, picked up and dumped into the trash can because it's wrong? There's a data point now that says that it takes 18 touches when you're prospecting to get an executive to engage. Now, there's some people that would look at that and go, "Damn it, I'm stopping at 10. I gotta add eight." I'm like, "That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my life." Like, why are they rejecting the first 17? That's the question you should be asking yourself, right? There's a reason that it's taking 18. It's because your content and your outreach strategy sucks. I see it in the numbers that we looked at from a pipeline load perspective where you used to think, "You know what, a rep at all times needs to have four X, their quota and pipeline at any time," right? And just like, "You always got a four X, guess what? "That would cause the reps to do. Get four X," which means 75% of their stuff in their pipeline's crap, right? But we forced them to do that. You don't need 18 touches if your content's great. You don't need four X, your pipeline, if your deals are great, right? There's an opportunity to think differently. And that's one thing that I'm trying to get people to realize. This has been one heck of an interview. We really appreciate your time. Is there anything that you want to plug before we jump off here? Now, guys, it was a blast being on here. If anybody wants to reach out, my goal is always the outcome. When I wrote the book, "The Transparency Sale," I literally thought there was a 50/50 shot that it would suck. But I knew that I wanted to get these ideas out there and it's done so well, which is amazing. But my goal has always been the outcome. So if you've got questions, feel free to reach out to me, connect with me on LinkedIn, and just let me know where you heard me. And then again, if you want some more free stuff, I publish a blog, I do videos. You can find it all at TransparencySale.com. - Beautiful. Everybody, go check out the Transparency Sale. It's one heck of a book. Centod, 18 different LinkedIn messages, telling them that you heard them on the show and stick around for a 60-second recap. Someone coming up soon. - You are a top four takeaways from this episode with Todd Cpony, include number one. You gotta remove all your BS from the journey. Yes, you should do some disco before demo or sharing pricing, but you do not have to rate your customers over calls. Chances are they're probably gonna need to get out of your way anyway if they're the type of customer who wants to say software or wants to get pricing in the first five minutes. So just get it out of the way. Number two, to that point, you don't need to hide price. You can get it out early. In fact, you can use it to disqualify early on and then focus on the stuff that actually matters. Number three, when they're asking about your competitors, do not hide, do not bad mouth. Tell them all the reasons your competitors are great and then focus on the things that they care about, which is where you win. And then number four, negotiation does not have to be so overcomplicated, folks. It's very simple. You anchor them at a certain point. You trade value for dollars. It's not all about saying the last three words are a certain tone and this and that and that stuff is important. But the principles of negotiation don't have to be so overcomplicated. All right, Nick, I'll give you a little help. - Armand, sometimes when I'm stressed about my pipeline or hitting quota and laying awake late at night, I need to soothe myself to sleep. And the way that I do that is I read reviews of 30 minutes to president's club on Apple podcasts. So if you haven't left us a review, I need some new reading material to soothe my anxiety to sleep. We'll catch you guys next week on 30 minutes to president's club. (upbeat music) Today's show was brought to you by Outreach, the Agentech AI platform for driving execution across every stage of your deal. Great sellers drive velocity at every stage of their sale. And one thing that's worked well for me is assigning red line deadlines to my prospects when we kick off vendor review. Even artificial micro deadlines for things like first cut of red lines and security review helps my prospects get their internal team moving. We built a guide on how to help you drive six and seven figure deals with our friends at Outreach, get it free in the show notes. Today's show was brought to you by 11X, you're all in one digital GTM team handling, creating, qualifying and converting pipeline across every channel. If you are still using stale triggers like congrats on the funding, you're getting blended in with everybody else. The best use unique signals, exact LinkedIn posts, negative product reviews, podcast appearances and use those as their trigger. And we built a growth playbook with our friends at 11X breaking this stuff down. You can get it for free at 11X.ai/30MPC or grab it in the show notes.