#585 - Conquering the end-of-deal chaos | 30MPC Hall of Fame

what's going on everybody it's Nick here before we get into the episode quick heads up on this one this is one of the best negotiation episodes that we've ever done and it's with Todd Caponi in honor of Todd's negotiation course with 30 NPC which you can buy right now in the show notes now look even if you've heard this episode before I recommend listening again because Todd has some gold in this one so 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 Skalsky 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 Caponi Nick why should people listen 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 aways 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 as human beings were 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 gonna go to my favorite taco place you run out you see the line this 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 your 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 you know 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 we're all the sudden using video to prospect just imagine I've got 20 three 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 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 all together and there's still time to save it so let's talk about this number Q the removing friction from the journey so I'm so sick of the crap where it's 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 know 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 to wait somebody gets back to me and it's a 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 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 a 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 out the 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 wrap 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 that's 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 it 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 what a 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 are 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 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 percent 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 four two and a four five that's optimal for purchase conversion in other words a four two sells better than a five 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 right like now think flossum think four two to four five 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's something is probably easy for that customer or that prospect to find anyway that this whole element of leading with your flaws and leading with transparency it sells but 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 gonna 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 three seven or eight 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 seven figure solution with a five 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 we when I talk about we're wired to try to predict what our experience is going to be like we're wired to try to figure out whether the juice is going to be worth the squeeze now the way our brains are wired is if all you do is talk about how great that juice is going to 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 I 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 nurturing 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, Armand, 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 going to be in this range, right? Now, if that's going to 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 that 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 going to be people listening going, wow, all right, cool. Yeah, there are 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 brain and helps set an expectation so that they can assess whether that tasty juice is going to be worth the squeeze to get it. Todd, can you talk a little bit about weaving in the floss 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 learned 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, 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 going to be an important consideration, I would love to vet that out now. Versus us get six months through this process, you 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 here's how it works. And again, it's not really adhered to our core. So it's probably not something we're going to 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 later? 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 going to move forward. And that's when I burst into tears. And I was like, I guess I got to write a book. 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 going to be for you, how much time-- we've got a hard time, like a miser, right? That qualified these deals out faster. If that was going to be important-- man, that would have pissed me off of six months from now. They would have said that was the reason they were going with the competitor. Well, you are 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 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. 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 quota. I don't know if you do that, but 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 a line 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, hey, I need a discount instead of you, Tommy boy in it, you know, okay, okay, and 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 eroding trust at 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 level of 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 iTwitches and mirror your language and all that stuff. It's just simple, cards face up. Here's what matters to us. Let's, let'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 you to step forward 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, too, 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 in the 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, we're tendency to 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 slide and go, you know what, if they're good enough for them, they're good enough for me, right, I'm going to use it. But if I'm against you, I might look at that same logo slide and say, gosh, we're going to 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. covered 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 and 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 4x, their quota, and pipeline at any time, right? And just like, you always got a 4x, guess what? That would cause the reps to do. Get 4x, which means 75% of their stuff in their pipeline's crap, right? But we force them to do that. You don't need 18 touches if your content's great. You don't need 4x, 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 top four takeaways from this episode with Todd Cacodian, dude. 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 badmouth. 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 or 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, how good people help us out. 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) (upbeat music) Today's show is brought to you by Proposify, the Proposal Management Software Design to make every deal a closed deal. When you send a proposal to a prospect, include a video of yourself walking through the proposal because it's going to be shared with stakeholders beyond just your champion. You want to make it easy for those other people to digest and you want to be able to control the narrative with your presentation. And bonus, Proposify Data Shows when buyers watch the video, it increases your chances of winning by over three acts. So do not let your proposals become a disappointing plot twist, get our proposal success guide free in the show notes. Today's show is brought to you by ambition, the coaching and performance platform, helping sales leaders turn metrics into action. Did you know that sales orgs where the majority of reps are coached weekly are twice as likely to see high quota attainment than those who don't. And that is from ambition's new state of sales coaching report that also found teams using a system like ambition, coach almost 60% more frequently than those who don't have one. Now we built a toolkit with our friends in ambition on how to actually use data to coach your team, get it for free in the show notes.