Drop the Poker Face, Sell With Transparency

0:00At Cox, your internet and mobile price won't change for five years. That's five New Year's celebrations, five Valentine's Days, five Fourth of Julys, five Halloweens, five Thanksgivings, and five summers that go by too fast. Through it all, your price stays the same with our five-year Price Lock guarantee. Cox, a step ahead. Requires 2 gig speeds and gig unlimited mobile. Taxes and fees excluded from Price Lock. Mobile data speeds reduced after 20 gigs. This is the Sales Gravy Podcast. Hi, I'm Jeb Blunt, bestselling author, fanatical prospecting, objections, sales EQ, and inked. And I'm here to help you open more doors, close bigger deals, and rock your commission check.

0:45Welcome back to the Sales Gravy Podcast. I'm Jeb Blunt Jr. And today we're taking a deep dive into the intersection of behavioral science, sales history, high stakes world of closing, and how the best minds in sales strategy today are thinking about the negotiation table. Our guest today is Mr. Todd Capone. I am such a fan. I have been following his work for a very long time. We haven't had a lot of crossover, Todd, but I'm really glad you're here because your previous work, The Transparency Sale, turned the industry on its head by proving that you can lead with your flaws and actually build trust faster than perfection ever could.

1:18He's also an author of The Transparent Sales Leader, a framework for revenue leadership. He's back with his new book, The Four Levers of Negotiating. Todd makes the argument that the poker face. The hostage negotiation tactics that have been taught for decades are actually destroying our deal values and our reputations. Todd, it's wonderful to have you on the show. I can't wait to get nerdy with you. So let's go. I want to get into your new book. But before we do, you are a sales historian. I have been following this since I was in college. Maybe I was in high school. And I just thought it was so cool because I'm a deep history fan and a deep nerd when it comes to these kinds of things.

1:51Sales history is a very particular niche. I can't say that I am the most nerdy about this particular space. And you have so much cool stuff. If you're watching on YouTube, he's got a phone from like the 19 - 1908. 1908. He's got books that I think were written when Julius Caesar was invading Gaul about sales and professional B2B selling. What draws you to this particular kind of history, more so than other kinds of history? Back when COVID hit and nobody would talk to people like myself and you and Jeb, I had a book from the 1940s on sales history. And it was called The Five Great Rules of Selling from Percy Whiting.

2:27And I was I picked it up. I start reading it. I'm like, wait, this could have been written today. Eighty five percent of it. But it kept referencing books further back. And so I started digging and I kept finding things that, A, we continued to believe that sales was invented in the 1980s. Like, no, almost everything we do, like objection handling, sales process, all that stuff. it comes from the 1880s and 1890s, and it's so relevant. But number two is there are things that sales history got right that we consistently get wrong. And so part of my effort is, I think this is cool and nerdy, but part of it is, okay, there's some lessons that could be learned that we could apply to today.

3:09Because I'll tell you this, early 1900s, sales was trusted, it was respected. In many cases, it was even admired as a profession. We lost that, kind of know why. And so maybe we can help get the profession back to where it was and stop scraping the bottom of Gallup's annual professions list along with politicians because we don't want to be hanging out down there. It's tough on the bottom, you know, but you got to work hard. I kind of like this, this history analogy. And I, you know, as someone who's been in the sales world my entire life, I mean, you have, you know, Napoleon Hill, right. And you go all the way back there and you have Dr.

3:44Covey and the seven habits and all of these different books that were written. And then you get to kind of the modern age of selling it like Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross. That's like when people think sales started was when that movie dropped. And then suddenly B2B sales professionals are everywhere. You have everybody from the IBM, you know, Zig Ziglar's to eat the frog, Brian Tracy. And then you get into like our era where we have, you know, Jeb Blunt and you have Mark Hunter and you have Todd Capone and you have these different people. 85 % of those books could have been written today. One of the things that will shock you as a listener is if you actually go back and read this stuff, you'll be like, oh yeah, they were right.

4:16It was like 85 % was the same. What in your mind as a sales historian or somebody who's kind of gone through that from a historical perspective, what do you think drove maybe the lack of trust with the sales profession? My second favorite quote of all time from sales history is 1911 guy named Arthur Sheldon book is over my left shoulder, the art of selling. He is a guy that in 1902 was the one that really founded public facing sales training. You know, while sales training was taking place before that, he started an organization, was doing correspondence courses. But his quote from 1911 is simply, true salesmanship is the science of service.

4:53Grasp that thought firmly and never let go. Back in the early 1900s, sales was designed to be a service profession. We were there to be a guide and a navigator and a consultant for customers to show them what's possible and to guide them through. So 1916 World Sales Congress takes place. It's the first sales conference of its kind. Middle of the world war, by the way, the first, the greatest war. Yeah. So 1916, there's a world war happening around the world. They decide in the US, we're not in it yet. And so sales conference takes place, 3000 people get together. The keynote speaker was then sitting president Woodrow Wilson.

5:32And again, world war is going on. And this dude is keynoting a sales conference. Like, why would that be? Well, it goes back to that point about being trusted, respected, and admired that Wilson was there. He had very specific marching orders for the sales profession. And it was around this idea that, hey, the rest of the world's screwing around. They're messing with each other. And we've got an opportunity to become a world superpower, but that requires salespeople with a service mindset. The entire sales conference, everybody's got like, believe it, achieve it. They've got all these terms for what they're calling it That one had one word, service.

6:09And so he was there to tell the sales community, hey, listen, do right by your customers. We have an opportunity to lift all boats, which then in a self-serving way serves ourselves, but go out there and do right by the country. You are the stewards. When words are living your mouth, that is the difference between success and failure, not only of those companies, but our entire economy. Salespeople were looked at as that vessel. Now, here's what happened. And I'll give you the Cliff Notes version because I could probably talk about this all day. But we have World War I happens. We come out of it.

6:39It looked an awful lot, by the way, like what happened when we shut down for COVID, right? The economy shuts down, comes back. We have a boom. And then all of a sudden we have a drop. Inflation goes up 1921, 1922. The sales profession experienced 77 % turnover, 1921, 1922, 85 % turnover, like salespeople being purged everywhere. Now, what does that also mean? So we had something called the forgotten depression of the early 1920s. What happened, though, was that, you know, the manufacturers were manufacturing. There was stuff. There was inventory. That's expensive. Idle machines is expensive. So all of a sudden, these organizations are like, screw the economy.

7:19We got to get these machines work and we got to get this inventory out there. Do whatever it takes. And high pressure selling became the mantra. And we forgot about what it was like to be service oriented. We start to get back a little bit, 1925, 1926. And then we all remember what happened 1929 to 1939, the depression. Now you've gone a whole generation. You've got 20 years since service was the mindset. Nobody remembers service as a mindset in sales. So it's gone. And it was gone forever. The last fact that I'll share with you there, in the 1910s, sales was taught in most universities. And it was actually taught in high schools, the 1910s.

7:58And then it disappeared, starting to come back, right? We see that kind of momentum happening. And shameless self-plug here, I've got a podcast called the Sales History Podcast, where it's just 14 to 20-minute monologues where I research a topic and then I share it. There's 55 episodes now, so pick a topic, go find it, and you'll hear me nerding out on it. From a historical perspective, it makes so much sense. And just to help understand why the profession feels and is shaped the way it is in the 21st century is you have to go look at the 20th century and you look at, you know, an entire generation, 40, 20 years.

8:33You think of all those people who grew up in that era, you have a mini depression and you have the great depression and the economy is essentially stalled. So the only thing that salespeople can do is sell to people who can't buy. And in that scenario, you build the culture of sell it at any cost, sell it at any price possible. And that includes your own character, the ability to speak the truth and be transparent and actually help customers kind of goes out the window when there's nobody to buy from you. So those pressure tactics really came into place. And we all kind of like the tie downs and all of those things.

9:02I think one last lesson from history, since you've got a whole podcast about this and you should definitely go listen to it. History is informative. I don't believe in the history as a circle. It repeats itself. I believe it's a spiral. It looks very, very similar. We're in the twenties and we're starting to see classes and college campuses and all of these different groups are starting to see sales as a real profession that they should invest into. You know, corporate wants you to see the difference between these two pictures and they're kind of the same thing. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I like to say that there's an echo to it.

9:29It doesn't, right. Yeah. For the most part, there's a lot of repeatability and a lot of lessons to be learned. As you've spent time in that world, in the history of sales, and you're looking forward into, you know, the four levers of negotiation, what is a persistent, maybe lie, or maybe something that has been repeated a lot since 1920 that actually makes it harder for modern buyers to trust us that we, that's still prevalent in our culture. All right. So for anybody watching, I'm going to, I'm just going to show you something here. This book is from 1910. It's from Thomas Herbert Russell. It's called Salesmanship Theory and Practice.

10:05And I just, there's four words in it that again, this is 1910. Four words. Buyers no more nowadays. Buyers no more nowadays. 1910, right? Like we keep hearing this and repeating this idea that back then mail order catalog. So I've got a 1907 or sorry, 1908 Sears Roebuck catalog in the collection here where it was basically Amazon and printed form. So back then sales professions like, Hey, what are we going to need salespeople for in the future? They've got access to information. They've got mail order. They've got advertising. What would we be needed for? What happened? Well, the profession flourish.

10:41We fast forward to even 11 years ago. So 2015 2015, Forrester comes out with a report saying that by 2020, a million B2B sales jobs would go away and that hundreds of thousands of college students wouldn't graduate into the profession. Why? Because of the rise of e-commerce, the internet, buyers knew more nowadays. Now, what do we keep hearing over and over again? Well, AI, and we've got access to more information, and oh my gosh, what are we going to need salespeople for? And it's going to be, I keep going back to this fact that throughout history, more information has never made it easier on buyers.

11:16It has always made it harder. And that's why I go back to that phrase of, hey, true salesmanship is the science of service. That when we see our world and our responsibility as being that guide and that navigator and presenting the pros and the cons. Here's what we're great at. Here's what we're not. If I'm in your shoes, here's what I would love. Here's what I wouldn't. you build trust, you win fast, you lose fast. But if you see the world through this idea, again, more information has never made it easier. It's always made it harder. And these words, buyers know more nowadays, you're going to keep seeing it, but that shouldn't be a threat to the good sales professional.

11:53Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it. I haven't had that context before. I'm 28, grew up in sales and the world has accelerated. Just in my perspective, history has accelerated since 1945. It's crazy how fast we've made progress. And now we're 26 years into the 21st century and we have artificial intelligence. Now it's artificially intelligent, but it's artificial intelligence. I remember watching cartoons in 2006 as a child, you know, thinking that this was not flying cars were never going to happen. I watched like back to the future too. And he had a hoverboard and that happened in 2015.

12:27We're way past that. You know, I think it's really important that, you know, that context as a salesperson that saying, and as a leader, you say, okay, more information has never really made it easier. In fact, I would argue that the only thing that's made buying harder is trust. And arguably we've have, we have way less trust in our society than we did a hundred years ago. And a lot of that has to do with the rise of social media and how disparate all of our social interactions are. A lot of things are just essentially like headlines that we then have opinions about rather than like full context.

12:56And now all of these things you could say, well, JBJ, you're just judging me and my family for really like having social media, but being aware of those things is really important. You have this principle you kind of brought out in your first book, the transparency sale, but I think it applies really well here. And it's called the pratfall effect. This is such a big difference from, you know, even my dad's generation, you wear a suit and tie to the office. You have a poker face, you're a business person, you're a serious person. You don't laugh at yourself. You know, you kind of write a different way.

13:22And I've really resonated with as a seller, as someone in this society, I like the way you approach it. So could you kind of flesh out the pratfall effect for us. And then why does a salesperson who presents the perfect solution kind of give the flip side of that coin? Like, why is it actually detrimental? The pratfall effect in essence is basically sharing, you know, small humanizing errors and that sort of thing. What I advocate is more around that idea of, hey, buyers, no more nowadays. And it's our role to expose both the pros and the cons. The transparency sale came from this idea that in my last role, I was the chief revenue officer of a company based in Chicago called Power Reviews.

14:00Now, you've never heard of them, but you've used the tech and not realized it. You bought a pair of Crocs or a sweater on vineyard vines or a thousand other retailers. You look at the product, you scroll down, there's reviews under it. We are the engine behind the collect and display of those. What had happened was I was running a big team and my marketing team went off and did a research study with Northwestern University here in Chicago, where I'm based, they came back, there was three data points that came out of it, two of which changed my life like could only happen to a nerd, meaning like a lunatic, I quit my job and wrote the book.

14:32But here's the three, the one that didn't surprise me. And of course, I mean, it's obvious didn't change my life was that today, we all read reviews when we're buying something that matters that we have never bought before. But the two that changed my life. So number one was that almost all of us, at the time it was 86 % of us, when we're reading reviews, go to the negative reviews first. Like we skip the fives, we read the fours, threes, twos, and ones first. And almost all of us require the negative. We seek it out. The other data point, that last one, is that on a five-star scale, when a product has an average review score between a 4.2 and a 4.5, that's optimal for purchase conversion.

15:14In other words, product that has negative reviews sells faster and more often than a product that has nothing but perfect five-star reviews. Now I looked at this and I'm like, all right, that's when a website's acting as a salesperson. Cool. But wait, I do that. I'm a human. I sell to humans. I've got a whole team out here that's presenting our solutions as, hey, we're a five and they suck, right? Like that was, that's the way we were brought up. Are we doing it wrong? Are we making it harder on the buyers? And I started digging into the behavioral science and started realizing not just when a website's acting as a salesperson, it's when a human.

15:48And when we go into sales engagements with, you know, not just like Prattfall effect, I see more as authenticity. My perspective on transparency is transparency is about walking in and going, hey, my role is to help you predict. My role is to help do the homework for you. So, hey, before we dig into it, here's a couple of things that make us not all things to all people. If I'm sitting in your shoes, here's what you might not like. And if that's going to be an issue, can we address that first? We started embracing that. Sales cycle sped up because we're optimizing for the buying brain. Win rates went up, partially because we were qualifying in the deals we should be winning, qualifying out the deals we're going to lose anyway, just faster.

16:27And then to your point about trust, all of a sudden, we're the cool kids, right? Like, hey, they're helpful. They're trying to sell me. Who do you want to hang out with? Like, I'd argue that trust trumps features and benefits all day long. and that when we can build that right from the get-go and go, hey, listen, I'm here to help you achieve optimal outcomes, maybe things you never thought possible. And if I'm not the right path to get you there, I'm gonna point you that way and wish you the best of luck, right? That's the whole concept behind the transparency sale is you're not all things to all people.

16:59Presenting perfection repels people. Embrace what you give up to be great at your core and all kinds of magic comes from that. It changed my life too. that last point is that not perfect sells better than perfect exactly it's so true like we just practically speaking like i'm i'm a big musician i play guitar and i like to i like to purchase guitars and i only purchase when i have the money and i and i had to spend my money very wisely because i'm a young person and i don't have like a lot of extra funds right now i got a family of four if i see a review on a on a really nice guitar but it has only five star reviews i assume they're all bots and then if i go to the less expensive guitar and it's a pretty good guitar and has 3.8 stars, I'm actually spending like a majority of my time on a 3.8 star page than I am the five star page with no negative views.

17:42Yeah. From a salesperson's perspective, you mentioned like the whole purpose of what you wrote was you walk into the room and you say, I have an ICP and I'm going to be transparent about that. The people who work best with me typically look like this, this, and this, and they have these challenges. And we come into roadblocks when they have this, this, and this, right? And so you put it all on the table and you have a conversation. You say, I want to help you, but I want to make sure that before I just sell you on this, that you feel helped, like you actually have the help that you need. And it's so interesting when you walk into these rooms, you can start to see it melt off of people, like their whole demeanor changes, but we have an authentic conversation.

18:21You can also see their armor build when you aren't doing it right. And it's both. I've been in both situations. I've had both situations happen on the same call. So going into a follow-up call, I want every important note right at my fingertips, not buried somewhere in a scribbled stack of notes. And with Plod Notepin S, I always have them because it's a wearable, portable note taker that lets me stay present and focused on customers during every single meeting. Plod captures the conversation and turns it into organized summaries and action items so I can follow up faster. And if I need a specific detail, Plod's recall has that ready for me.

18:54And that's why Jeb Sr. and I and all of Sales Gravy trusts our Plod Notepen S. Try Plod and stay focused on the conversation while it handles all of your notes. Go to plod.ai forward slash jeb. That's plod.ai forward slash jeb and use code JEB to get 10 % off your purchase. I think this really leads into the negotiating part of this conversation where you have spent however many last few years writing this book, getting all your ideas together. There's a code switch that happens. What I mean by code switching is we sort of have different faces for different social settings. Like if you go out with your buddies to a bar, right?

19:28You have a different face than when you're in the office with the corporate team. It's just very different. So you do this too in a sales call and I do this and I want to get some help because I walk into a negotiation with everything's been dandy. Todd, we've had a great conversation. You and I buddies. And then we get to the negotiation table and I am like freaking out, anxious, anxiety. I have to go through these phrases. We teach negotiating here. I've got the MLP process. I've got all of these things in my head and I sit in front of you and I go, all right, hardball, I'm going to quote you way high.

19:57And then you're going to come back with another number. And then I'm going to come back a little lower and then you're going to come back up a little bit. And then I'm going to find something in the middle and we're going to come to an agreement that benefits me and my company. And I come to it with more of an adversarial conversation style than what I did in the sales process. And this is exactly what your book is talking about. So what is this personality shift that I'm experiencing and what damage am I doing? Well, yeah, it's funny. Really, the thing that birthed this was back in 2008, got promoted to my first SVP of sales role.

20:29And traditional negotiating was exactly like you talked about. I was terrible at it. Like, I'm a terrible liar. And this idea that, yeah, the whole sales process, my focus is on helping you achieve optimal outcomes, building relationship. We get to that goal line, you say yes, and I go, cool. At a subconscious level, I'm going to start lying to you now. I'm not going to tell you what a good deal is. You got to figure that out. My focus instead of your outcomes is now my outcomes. And we're learning a lot of these techniques from former FBI hostage negotiators. Again, that's no, like, don't sit Chris Voss on me.

21:04Like, the book is brilliant. I got it right here. It's awesome. But I just don't believe that in a world when we talked about buyers, no more nowadays, right? that this idea of peers being able to talk to one another and AI exposing pricing models that you can have every one of your customers paying a different amount based on how well or poorly it was negotiating. I just don't think that's sustainable. So what had happened in 2008 is I get promoted, got a rep who's working a bigger deal. And this framework works big or small, doesn't matter. They said yes, but they were like, we got to work on the price.

21:40And the rep immediately was like, I got to go call my manager. And they were like, we don't have time for that. Get that manager in a room and let's bang this thing out. So he calls me. I go in thinking it's me, my rep and this guy, but they brought their whole procurement team and they're ready to do battle. Like there was a woman. Yeah. You can hear like the street fighter music, right? Exactly. So here we go. I'm about to get boat raced out of here. Cause I'm terrible at this. I had accidentally just kind of shared my cards face up and there's a long story behind it, But it's this idea that every for-profit company in the world, yours, mine, the company I'm selling to, if they're for-profit, there's four things that drive your business model.

22:21And so that's basically what I laid out for the customer was, hey, listen, before we get too deep into this, like our pricing model and our organization is driven on four things. Number one is volume. So how much stuff you buy. Buy more is better than buying less. Number two is how fast you pay. Like who knew that we like money? So do you. So timing of cash. Pay us faster is better than paying slower. Number three is the length of commitment, right? Longer commitments, better, more predictable. Shorter commitments, not as good. And then number four is timing of the deal or predictability. Like our ability to invest, know when things are coming, to resource opportunities.

22:58That's valuable to us and something that's reflected in our pricing as well. They were like bored out of their mind. They didn't like, that's fascinating. Whatever. We need a 35 % discount. Like, all right, cool. Well, what I advocate for is, hey, we're cards face up. You've now set a sound basis for your pricing. Let's use those four as a way to get you closer to where you need to go. Commit to more stuff. Pay us faster. Commit longer. Help us forecast. Those are the four things we're willing to pay you for in the form of a discount. Suddenly, you've established a sound basis. You're not a jerk, but it's an extension of the sales process because it's trust building.

23:35And for everything that you're giving away, whether it's a concession and payment terms, whether it's a discount, whether it's anything, you're getting something value in return. It's only four things. Just internalize that, start sharing that. And the negotiation does not need to end with you tasing a customer and bringing them to jail. You want them to stay, buy more, advocate, take you with them to their next company and tell their buds about how great you are. I don't think there's any other way that I've seen. And this, again, was birthed in 2008. I've been developing it. And finally, it was time to sit down and write it all out for everybody.

24:11You bring up a really interesting point. And before we kind of end the conversation really quickly, because I absolutely intrigued in reading your book again and getting these cards on the table and really understanding them and internalizing them. I have a couple of questions just based on the four things that you say. These are my cards. I worry as a sales rep that if I put all my cards on the table, I will be eaten alive by the sharks. Does that ring true to you at all in that it feels like a zero sum game? I can't win if I lose and therefore I'm not going to lose. And so putting all of my cards on the table feels like showing them how the sausage is made and how I'm going to like showing them the reasons I'm lying to them, essentially.

24:50Well, so you're getting rid of the lying. I mean, what happened in that room was why this whole thing kind of was like, wait, what just happened? That instead of it being customer vendor, it was six of us sitting around a table collaborating. because they got it. Their business is run by the same four things. It should be truthful. My favorite sales quote of all time from 1922, his book, Scientific Selling and Advertising, it's Arthur Dunn. And the quote is simply, if the truth won't sell it, don't sell it. You should be able to walk in with confidence and say, hey, listen, here's our price. This is our pricing model.

25:23Here's what it's based on. And then you can sit back on that and let them negotiate their own deal. There's no winning and losing anymore. There's a restaurant in New York that's also in Chicago called Au Chevelle. The cheeseburgers are priced anywhere from$34 to$38. Now, right? And so the difference is whether you got bacon or an egg on it. The place is packed, right? It was hard to get a reservation. Now, do you think anybody ever walks in there and they're like, hey, I was just down the street and there's a restaurant that's selling cheeseburgers. They give you fries and a drink. It's called McDonald's and it's$8.50.

25:59cents. Like your pricing is ridiculous, right? They would be like, go to McDonald's then jackass, right? Like it's this idea that, hey, you should have confidence that your price is your price. I, again, don't believe that it is sustainable to have every customer paying a different amount because you were either weak or strong in a negotiating or they were, because that word gets out. I was just denoting a kickoff for a company in the cyberspace. And they told me afterwards, the CISOs that they sell to, they get together and they talk about, hey, what solutions are you using? How much are you paying?

26:31What did you ask for? What did you get? That's happening. AI is exposing it. It's not like, hey, we don't discount. It's, hey, here's the things we're willing to pay you for. We're willing to pay you to commit to more, pay us faster, commit longer, help us forecast. Here, there you go. Hey, you want to pay us slower? Cool. Let's adjust something else. You don't want to commit as long? Cool. Here, adjust something else. It's meant to be a collaborative extension of the sales process and not, again, like you talked about, that, hey, I've gone from helpful to hostage negotiating techniques. And I'm going to go, you know, throw you in jail when this thing's over.

27:05And it feels like that from a listener perspective, someone who is trying to step outside of like our conversation. And I'm trying to listen to this. How would I apply this? You don't want to feel that way. Right. When you feel that way, it's not sustainable for your career. I mean, it's not sustainable for five years. It's not sustainable for like three years. It's tough going to these negotiating rooms. And trust me, I've been in both places. Honestly, I started to get to a point, you know, after reading your book, I feel differently about how I'd go about this. And it's, I would just say, sure to a discount, because it was just easier than having to drag someone through 35%.

27:39Well, I can do 32%. Well, can you do 33 %? And like, at the end of the day, I don't feel any better and they don't feel any better. And we've just haggled about a price that didn't mean anything to the relationship of the business that we're doing. I'll add one thing to this. Remember this, when you discount, let's say it's, hey, I got a month-end discount, a quarter-end discount or anything. It's counterintuitive to think, but I need you to rewire all your brains. That discount is actually slowing down your deals and not accelerating it. Because if you come to me and you ask for something and I Tommy boy and go, okie dokie, you're actually signaling to the buyer that, hey, there's more to be had.

28:15I should be asking for more. And that if that quarter-end deal expires, Well, first of all, if it's a quarter end deal, if I'm a smart buyer, I'm going to wait until the end of the quarter because I know that my leverage goes up and your leverage goes down. The quarter ends and you go, hey, discount goes away. What am I doing? Wait until you offer it again because you know you will. That idea that the discount, we're doing it because it's easy and all that. That's the power of four levers negotiating is like, hey, here's all the cards. Buy it now. Buy it later. This is it. Right. And this is what's valuable to us.

28:49here's what we'll pay you for in the form of a discount right it actually makes it easier here's what we will pay you is such an easier thing to say then this is what we're willing to accept exactly that's a very and even the language there is so powerful you've got this book out you've got all of these methodologies in it it is a really really fantastic book if you are struggling with the closing with negotiation you have to pick this up go through at minimum go like learn about volume, timing, commitment, and certainty. That's the levers because you might just get 10 % better. You might get 1 % better at this negotiating thing.

29:22And that's what you want. You are going on your little book tour right now. You've got our podcast, which I am so honored for you to be here. You're going to be speaking about this in lots and lots of places, but I want people who are listening to the sales gravy podcast. Where can they get the book? Where can they find more about you and follow you and learn more about what you got going on? And the book is available anywhere you buy your books. Matt Holt books, Ben Bella is the publisher, Simon Schuster distributed. So it's at the Barnes and Nobles and all those places in all formats. So ebook, toddcaponi.com, follow along on LinkedIn.

29:56Yeah, I'm pretty easy to find. And go listen to the Sales Historian podcast and go follow the Sales Historian. It's incredible stuff to learn about and know the history of the profession that you're in. If you are listening to the Sales Gravy podcast, you made it this far. Look, I need you to go to Spotify, Apple, YouTube, wherever, iHeartMedia, wherever you listen to your podcasts and give us a five-star review. It really, really helps us. And leave your comments too. I want to see what you're saying about what our conversations and it helps us help more people sell more. If you haven't checked out Sales Gravy on YouTube, go to youtube.com forward slash sales gravy, go there, leave us a comment.

30:27If you leave a comment, I will comment back and I might send you a little gift because I'm looking to grow our YouTube and YouTube is an amazing place to watch all of these conversations with people like Todd Capone on the Sales Gravy YouTube channel. If you are a sales team or you are looking to get training this year and invest in yourselves, go to outboundconference.com. We have our Las Vegas location locked in for November. It will be perfect for sales leaders and sales teams who want to attend the most badass sales learning conference on earth. So go to outboundconference.com. Otherwise, thank you all so much for listening.

30:59And Todd, thank you so much for being on the Sales Gravy Podcast. We'll catch you next time. That was a blast. Thanks for having me.

31:22We'll be right back.