“I wanted to introduce you to this evolution that’s going on in the world of selling that is essentially resulting in the fact that transparency sells better than perfection.” – Todd Caponi in today’s Tip 58.
Embracing transparency and leading with your imperfections, actually, is not only the fields like the right thing to do but as it turns out, it actually maximizes your results.
Join the conversation below and share your thoughts!
Todd’s LinkedIn
Todd’s Twitter
The Transparency Sale Book
Transparency Sale Website
Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from Todd Caponi who has a passion for all things sales methodology, learning theory and decision science. He’s led multiple sales organizations, helped two companies to successful exits and won the American Business “Stevie” award for VP of Worldwide Sales of the Year. Todd’s first book, The Transparency Sale is available wherever books are sold. Here he is with today’s tip:
Todd Caponi: Hey everybody. Todd Caponi here, author of the Transparency Sale and for today’s daily sales tip, I wanted to introduce you to this evolution that’s going on in the world of selling that is essentially resulting in the fact that transparency sells better than perfection. And here’s what I mean by that. I think it’s an understatement to say that the world of selling has been evolving at an accelerating pace. Buyers that have problems are able to self diagnose and self prescribe solutions to their problems. So that sellers in the old approach, we’re waking up realizing that that old approach wasn’t working. So they hadn’t to embrace this idea of leading with insights and helping to educate customers instead of just being like a drive Thru attended. Well there’s another evolution going on in the world of sales and it’s the proliferation of reviews and feedback and everything we do from, you know, obviously the apps we download to the shows we watched to the hotels we’ve picked and the restaurants that we choose the dine-in to are Uber drivers who are also rating us. But now it’s moved over into the B2B world where buyers now have the ability to not only self diagnose and self prescribed, but predict what their experience is going to be like using you from the unsolicited feedback of their peers. So that’s the first thing that we got to keep in mind. But here’s the second thing that’s super interesting.
In my last role, I was the chief revenue officer of Chicago’s Power Reviews that helps retailers and brands collect and display readings and reviews on their websites. And what we found in a study is that a consumer is more likely to buy a product that has a review score of between at 4.2 and 4.5 so in other words, a 4.2 sells better than a perfect five. Imperfection sells better than perfection. Now that’s when a website is acting as the salesperson, what happens in the B2B world, but we started to experiment with it. We started to lead with our flaws and embrace the fact that we were not perfect and basically positioned ourselves as a 4.2 to a 4.5 and what we found is first of all, sales cycles sped up dramatically because trust was built foundationally from day one but our win rates also went way up. And there’s really two reasons for this.
Number one, we did a much better job of qualifying in the opportunities that we really should be working on. And number two is we did a much better job of qualifying out the deals that we probably would’ve lost eventually anyway. And lastly, we made it really, really hard on our competitors to compete against us when they would bring up a flaw, our buyers and able to say, yeah, they already told us. So embracing transparency and leading with your imperfections actually is not only the fields like the right thing to do, but as it turns out it actually maximize your results. Give it a try. I hope it helps and I’d love to hear how you do with it. Thank you.
Scott Ingram: Todd has offered to giveaway two signed copies of his book The Transparency Sale. All you have to do to enter to win one of those copies is to share your thoughts on the tips page at DailySales.Tips/58 and we’ll choose the winners at random one month from today. On that page you’ll also find links to all things Todd including Transparencysale.com where you can subscribe to his blog. Then be sure to come back tomorrow for a tip from a former olympian turned medical device sales superstar.