Podcasts about powerreviews

Welcome to OrchestrateSales.com‘s Inside Sales Enablement Season 3 Enablement History. Where we hop in the Enablement Time machine and explore the past, present, and future of the elevation of a profession.Mark Twain - the PIONEER of Sales Enablement who empowered a LITERAL customer facing frontline of 10,000!?!!!On ISEs3 Episode 14, Erich Starrett is out-history-nerded ENTIRELY when he is joined in the Orchestrate Sales studios by Sales Melon's Todd Caponi. Todd is not only an aficionado (and collector!) of SALES history, he is a man on a mission to further a movement towards sales TRANSPARENCY. This includes authoring a 3x award-winning book (

Today we're sharing another insightful presentation from our most recent Innovative Executives League Summit, where Leon Chism, the Vice President of Engineering at Evolve, delivered a powerful lesson on collecting critical metrics for organization-wide success. As an experienced technologist and executive, Leon leads teams in unparalleled growth and innovation. In this presentation, Leon dives into how the collection of metrics examining speed and quality paired with human-driven evaluation and consistent reporting are the keys to success. In this episode, Leon first dives into DORA metrics and the significance of collecting and reporting those figures of speed and quality. He overviews the additional customization of the data he collects; in one example, he looks closely at aging reports to determine where processes are sticking and gains a live perspective on getting those tasks unstuck by allocating more resources. As the last place to observe metrics, Leon offers a compelling outlook on examining team balance and individual metrics. ("You want to measure the process and not the people.") In further support of optimizing processes and not people, Leon shares his perspective on leaderboards, comparison, and other human-oriented metric frameworks of note. In the final segment, Leon answers audience questions ranging from setting WIP limits (never too low), developer satisfaction, and key aspects of the communication around metrics to create a shared understanding and identify the value beyond the data. (02:16) – DORA metrics(07:39) – Aging Report(10:15) – Balance and individual metrics(12:22) – Metrics in the boardroom(13:35) – SPACE Framework(15:45) – Manual metric collection(17:19) – Developer satisfaction(18:48) – Gaming the metrics(20:26) – WIP limits(21:45) – Shared metrics and collaboration(26:00) – Hardware, software, firmware(27:05) – Communicating the metrics(28:26) – Value beyond the dataLeon Chism is the Vice President of Engineering at Evolve. As an experienced technologist and executive, he has led innovation and technology at Jellyvision, DialogTech, Rewards Network, Analyte Health, PowerReviews, and ORBITZ. He earned a bachelor's degree from the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois Urbana-Campaign.If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to Innovation and the Digital Enterprise in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in

Ever wondered about the twists and turns that make a successful marketing career? In this episode, I sit down with Kim Feil, Aspire Brands' Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer, unravelling her unconventional path in the marketing realm. How did Kim navigate her unique journey and collaborate with major consumer brands? What insights does she share on ambition, self-improvement, and aligning personal values with professional pursuits? Join our conversation as we explore the nuances of handling challenging work environments, the weight of reputation, and the art of articulating one's worth. Come along for an insightful and personal exploration of the dynamic world of marketing and the keys to a truly gratifying career.Learn more about Kim:Kim Feil is Chief Marketing & Strategy Officer of ASPIRE® Healthy Energy Drinks, an international brand reinventing energy for adults with all natural caffeine and vitamins for every day use. Following a 32-year public company career as CMO of OfficeMax, Walgreens, Sara Lee, Kimberly-Clark; CEO/President of divisions of Information Resources, Inc., and executive roles with Dr Pepper/7UP, Kim now draws on her transformation experiences as a manufacturer, retailer and insights provider to grow PE-backed companies and brands.Kim serves on the boards of ASPIRE, Naturally Chicago and The CMO Club. She has been an advisor to retail tech companies Rubikloud, RetailNext and 12Digit Marketing. She is a past board member of Roundy's, a public grocery retailer, PowerReviews and On the Border Cantina Restaurants.Kim's Links:Kim's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kim-feil/Aspire Brands Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aspiredrinks/Aspire Brands LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aspiredrinks/Connect with Veronica on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vromney/If you're serious about advancing your career in marketing and you're looking for some personal insights into how then I invite you to schedule a free Pathway to Promotion call with me: https://pathwaycall.com/If you found value in today's episode, I would appreciate it if you could leave a rating and review.

After hearing Rhasheeda Hughes on a panel webinar, I had to invite her to join our podcast so that others could learn about her journey and her strategies for being a successful woman in sales leadership.  Rhasheeda has a proven record as a sales expert, trainer, and team leader with a reputation for enhancing organizational capabilities. She led a national team of 10 Account Managers with full responsibility for team hiring, development, and performance coaching. She is adept at consultative sales strategies based on data-driven analysis and a relentless focus on customer service. Rhasheeda has a reputation as an empathetic leader who builds inclusive culture while coaching individuals to develop high-performing teams. https://www.linkedin.com/in/rhasheeda-hughes-mba-4a81b313/ Conversations with Women in Sales podcast now has over 160 episodes with amazing sales contributors and sales leaders - large companies and small - new reps and seasoned veterans. If you like the podcast, please SHARE it with another woman or a male ally. Please rate it and review it as we do not get many reviews and really could use them. For more help with adding women to your sales team, reach out to Lori at Women Sales Pros.  https://womensalespros.com/

Jim is a coach for Product Management leaders and teams in early stage startups, tech companies and Fortune 100 corporations.Jim co-founded PowerReviews which grew to 1,200+ clients and sold for $168 million. He product-managed and architected one of the Internet's first ecommerce systems at Fogdog.com that went IPO at a $450 million valuation.These days, he coaches companies to find product-market fit and accelerate growth in digital health, financial services, ecommerce, internal platforms, machine learning, computer vision, energy infrastructure and more.He graduated from Stanford University with a BS in Computer Science. He lectures in Product Management at UC Berkeley.LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimmorrisstanford/Website: https://productdiscoverygroup.com/SOCIAL: Twitter: https://twitter.com/iamdesmonddixon LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/campfire-capitalism/?viewAsMember=true Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Campfire-Capitalism-103501098870849 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/campfirecapitalism/ Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/campfirecapitalism

Joining us this week to explore this topic is Aamir Virani, Advisor, Explorer, and President of VSHAD Holdings. He is a co-founder of Dropcam, a company that established home monitoring cameras and cloud video analysis and which was later acquired by Google Nest and rebranded as Nest Cam and the Nest Aware service. Before that, he was a software engineer at PowerReviews and the Lead Software engineer at Xobni. He was also a member of the Presidential Innovation Fellowship, 2021 and an angel and venture investor.

As digital buyers become independent and do most of their research before ever reaching out to a business, ratings, and reviews are a pivotal point in these buying journeys. PowerReviews enables organizations to generate better quality customer product ratings and reviews in larger volumes and then analyze and benchmark all this data to optimize their UGC programs. Helping others to maximize conversions we were eager to learn more about their own marketing and growth efforts from the VP of Marketing, Andrew Smith. Andrew dives into their key channels, brand awareness, and the role of their website in this competitive market.

How do product leaders launch new products?That's a big question, but fortunately we have a product leader with over 20 years of experience to help us answer it. Sara Rossio, Chief Product Officer at G2, has built and managed software for companies including Here, Gogo, and PowerReviews during her career. In this episode of Product Chats, Sara shares what she's learned about launching new products. Be sure to check it out. Time Stamped Show NotesBecoming a chief product officer [01:13]How to be a good mentor to aspiring product managers [02:47]How data can help you say no to ideas [05:24]Staying focused on problem solving [07:22]The different character archetypes of product [08:06] - [09:50]Hiring the right archetype for your product needs [09:50]Launching a new line of business [13:31]Flawless execution is just table stakes [14:51]Using discovery to get data to start building new product lines [16:23]Longitudinal Interviews [17:02]The Value of Observing Users Using Your Product [17:42] Product Chats is brought to you by Canny. Over 1,000 teams trust Canny to help them build better products. Capture, organize, and analyze product feedback in one place to inform your product decisions.Get your free Canny account today. Stay Connected!TwitterFacebookLinkedIn

Not many people are willing to call up their competitors and dive into discussions on bettering the industry at large—choosing to see their competitors as partners. Sara Rossio, Chief Product Officer athttps://www.g2.com/ ( G2), is curious about the ways transparency can build trust internally and how to embrace transparency and collaboration with customers, vendors, and across an industry. In this episode, Sara talks about how she approaches product management at G2, including utilizing artificial intelligence and people to moderate and validate reviews and personalizing data to meet a customer's needs. She discusses her leadership style of providing frequent, direct, and actionable feedback, as well as the importance of supplying context. Sara illuminates the key to her success in product management and how companies can remain competitive: stay curious. (1:05) – Chief Product Officer athttps://www.g2.com/ ( G2) (4:04) – Transparency (8:19) – Inviting criticism (11:49) – Working with competitors (13:24) – Nokia (16:12) – The customer of tomorrow (17:21) – Biggest challenge: talent (22:27) – Frequent, direct, actionable feedback (25:33) – Tough conversations and a culture of kindness (27:59) – Staying curious Sara Rossio is the Chief Product Officer athttps://www.g2.com/ ( G2), a digital marketplace for business software and services that boasts 1.7 million validated product reviews. Sara has worked in project management athttps://www.powerreviews.com/ ( PowerReviews),https://www.gogoair.com/ ( Gogo), Here (ahttps://www.nokia.com/ ( Nokia) company), NAVTEQ, andhttps://www.eaton.com/us/en-us.html ( Eaton). She earned a BSBA in Marketing and International Business at Fisher College of Business at the Ohio State University.  If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to Innovation and the Digital Enterprise in https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/innovation-and-the-digital-enterprise/id1451753709?mt=2 (Apple Podcasts), https://podcasts.google.com/?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy50cmFuc2lzdG9yLmZtL2lubm92YXRpb24tYW5kLXRoZS1kaWdpdGFsLWVudGVycHJpc2U%3D (Google Podcasts), https://open.spotify.com/show/3fOSh73F3sjyK7TIMFSOc1?si=uRAeLNvjQjmbnFjzWIvMlg (Spotify) or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/innovation-and-the-digital-enterprise/id1451753709?mt=2 (Apple Podcasts). It really helps others find the show. https://www.dante32.com/ (Podcast episode production by Dante32.)

In this episode of the Sales Secrets podcast, Brandon talks to decorated sales leader and sales author Todd Caponi about that story at PowerReviews, where they went from 0 to 100 in 90 days by taking every deal and doing an "Art of the Possible" on it. Todd also talks about leading with transparency by being completely honest to customers about your product or service, even to the point of disclosing its weaknesses as much as its competitive advantages.SUBSCRIBE TO SALES SECRETS PODCASTITUNES ► https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/s...​SPOTIFY ► https://open.spotify.com/show/1BKYsQo...​YOUTUBE ► https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVUh...​THIS EPISODE IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY SEAMLESS.AI - THE WORLD'S BEST SALES LEADSWEBSITE ► https://www.seamless.ai/LINKEDIN ► https://www.linkedin.com/company/seamlessai/JOIN FOR FREE TODAY ► https://login.seamless.ai/invite/podcastSHOW DESCRIPTIONBrandon Bornancin is a serial salesperson, entrepreneur, and founder of Seamless.AI. Twice a week, Brandon interviews the world's top sales experts like Jill Konrath, Aaron Ross, John Barrows, Trish Bertuzzi, Mark Hunter, Anthony Iannarino, and many more -- to uncover actionable strategies, playbooks, tips, and insights you can use to generate more revenue and close more business. If you want to learn the most powerful sales secrets from the top sales experts in the world, Sales Secrets From The Top 1% is the place to find them.SALES SECRET FROM THE TOP 1%WEBSITE ► https://www.secretsalesbook.com/LINKEDIN ► https://www.linkedin.com/company/sales-secret-book/ABOUT BRANDONBrandon Bornancin is a serial salesperson (over $100M in sales deals), multi-million dollar sales tech entrepreneur, motivational sales speaker, international sales DJ (DJ NoQ5), and sales author who is obsessed with helping you maximize your sales success.Mr. Bornancin is currently the CEO & Founder at Seamless.AI delivering the world's best sales leads. Over 10,000+ companies use Seamless.ai to generate millions in sales at companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Slack, Dell, Oracle & many others.Mr. Bornancin is also the author of "Sales Secrets From The Top 1%" where the world's best sales experts share their secrets to sales success and author of “The Ultimate Guide To Overcoming Sales Objections.”FOLLOW BRANDONLINKEDIN ► https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandonbornancin/INSTAGRAM ► https://www.instagram.com/brandonbornancinofficial/FACEBOOK ► https://www.facebook.com/SeamlessAITWITTER ► https://twitter.com/BBornancin

We all know that much of the buying journey happens via word of mouth and on social media. Prospects see mentions of products in their feeds and they have conversations with colleagues who make recommendations. It's really hard to track and measure this activity, which is why it's called “Dark Social.” Steve Voith is a veteran of marketing in the software space, having worked in demand gen at Litera and PowerReviews. He's now at Refine Labs, serving as Director of Demand Gen, and he has seen firsthand what Dark Social can do. I'm excited to share his insights with you in this episode! ✨ Transcript with Key Takeaways ✨ Connect with Steve on LinkedIn ✨ Check out Refine Labs

Olivia Fuller: Hi, and welcome to Book Club, a Sales Enablement PRO podcast, I’m Olivia Fuller. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space, and we’re here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so they can be more effective in their role. When most people think about the act of selling, they often think that it’s all about making something seem desirable to motivate someone to buy it, but what if it was actually about the opposite? This is an idea that Todd Caponi explores in his book, “The Transparency Sale,” where he makes the case that leading with your flaws and actually embracing vulnerability is the key to building buyer engagement. As Todd puts it, effective sales today requires radical transparency, and he’s here to tell us a little bit more about why this is so essential. With that, Todd, I’d love if you can introduce yourself to our audience and tell us a little bit about your book. Todd Caponi: Cool. I’ll do it in story form because I think it’ll crystallize this. I’m a multi-time sales leader. My last role was the Chief Revenue Officer of a company here in Chicago, where I am, called PowerReviews. You could probably guess from the name PowerReviews, we were in the space of helping retailers and brands collect and display ratings and reviews on their websites. Meaning you’re buying a pair of Crocs or a sweater on Vineyard Vines or whatever, you look at the product, you scroll down, there’s the reviews. That was us for many cases, doing the collect and display. Here’s what happened. We did a research study with Northwestern University here in Chicago that looked at when a website’s acting as a salesperson, i.e., an e-commerce site, what do people do? What do human beings do? There were three data points that came back from it. Two of them changed my life in only a way that could be changed for a nerd like me because I’m super behavioral science data nerdy. The first step that did not change my life was that we all read reviews today. I’m assuming, Olivia, when you’re buying something that you haven’t bought before, you probably read reviews first, but here’s the two that blew my mind. Number one, that 85% of us go to the negative reviews first. I don’t know if when you’re reading reviews, you skip the fives and go right to the fours, threes, twos, and ones, but that’s what most of us do. The second data point that changed my life was a product that has an average review score between a 4.2 and a 4.5, that range on a five-star scale is optimal for purchase conversion. You're selling something on a website, right under it somebody who’s bought that comes back and says, I hated this product, here’s why, and it’s right under the product, somehow that actually helps it sell more. I looked at that and thought, alright, that’s when a website’s acting as a salesperson, what happens in human to human or B2B selling? Should that dynamic be the same? As it turns out, it is. I found really, really quickly that, again, if 85% of us go to the negative first, it’s what our brain desires. When we start a conversation by embracing something that maybe we’re not great at or that we give up to be good at our core or a competitor that we’re looking at might be better at than us, when you lead with that, magic happens. Sales cycles speed up, win rates get better, we work deals we should be working, and we stop working the deals that we’re going to lose anyway, we lose faster. From trying it out and seeing that magic happen, I like a lunatic, quit my job and wrote the book, “The Transparency Sale,” which really talks through not only the data, but the behavioral science, and then how you apply it to every single stage of your sales process from positioning and prospecting to even negotiating and post-sale clients. OF: Yeah, I’m glad you brought that story up because I think that helps put this into context a little bit more with actually one of the key points that stood out to me in your book, which was that embracing imperfections and prioritizing honesty is really how salespeople can better engage customers. Can you tell us a little bit more about this? Why does transparency, even in maybe areas where a product or service fall short, how does that help build loyalty? TC: Well, yeah, there’s a couple of things. First of all, if you’ve been to Ikea before or Costco or been on a Southwest Airlines flight, those organizations, those companies, those retailers, they embrace the things they give up. Ikea is a nightmare. When you walk into an Ikea, you know you’re in for it. When they hand you a map, you're like, I need a map to buy stuff? What? Then you’ve got to find it, you've got to go to the warehouse, pull the boxes off onto carts that don’t have brakes, jam it into the back of your car Tetris style. swear your way through that, get it home, thinking that you just left the nightmare back at the store. Instead, you open up the box, there’s 150 parts and no words on the work instructions other than like Sparta or whatever their crazy brand names are, and then when you’re done, you’re like, oh, you know what, that looks pretty good. We should go back. we should’ve bought the end tables with that bedroom set. Ikea shoppers, it’s a nightmare, yet they’re incredibly loyal. They're the number one retailer for furniture in the world for 13 straight years. Costco, the same thing. You've got to buy a membership, there’s very limited brand selection, if you want some ranch dressing for your salad you've got to buy almost a gallon, if you need a toothbrush here’s a half dozen, we’re going to have somebody at the door that’s going to check your receipt to make sure you’re not stealing anything. And yet, number two retailer in the country is Costco behind Walmart. The point being that obviously over promise and under deliver is a bad idea. We all know we never should over promise and under deliver, but there’s something crazy I discovered. Under promise and over deliver is also bad because it creates a short-term satisfaction spike, but it becomes unsustainable, and it is a form of lying believe it or not. We get something I like to call expectation inflation. If we keep doing it, then I’m going to take what you tell me and I’m going to add a little to it, and if I don’t get that, I’m going to be disappointed. The point being that in our brains as human beings, when expectations are set properly, and we feel like we trust that we can predict what our experience is going to be like, that’s what triggers our decision. When expectations are set and consistently met over and over and over again, that’s what creates loyalty. You go to a Starbucks here, I’m in Chicago obviously and you’re in Seattle, the heart of Starbucks, the coffee tastes exactly the same. Go to Europe, the Pike Place is still the exact same, it’s consistent expectation setting. It’s building that consistency and that’s what creates customers that not only buy, but they stay, they buy more, and they’re more likely to advocate. I’m clearly biased, but it all starts with transparency and setting proper expectations, not over promising and under delivering or doing vice versa. OF: Actually, on that point, you also emphasize that every interaction with a prospect is really a decision point for them. What role does empathy play in the decision-making process for buyers, and how can reps really take advantage of every interaction with buyers to not only reduce skepticism, but also build better engagement? TC: Yeah. Well, there’s a funny thing about empathy, I’ll start there. When I scroll through LinkedIn, and people are like, oh, you've got be empathetic, and then they go on to explain it, 9 times out of 10 they’re actually talking about sympathy, not empathy. Empathy is literally being able to see the world through the eyes of the people that you’re trying to communicate with. Empathy actually takes it to the point where you’re almost feeling what they feel along with them. To be truly great at what we do as sales professionals, as sales enablers trying to get into the heads of the salespeople that you’re trying to enable, that empathy, not sympathy, like, oh, I hope things are good in these trying times, that’s sympathy, empathy is, hey, I understand you. From a buyer’s perspective, I’m going to give you a weird analogy. A quick story. In Seattle, they don’t have Culver’s I don't think. Culver’s is a fast-food place and they’ve got something called butter burgers and then they’ve got frozen custard, which is heavenly. It’s really, really good. A few months ago, my wife and I and my two kids, who are 8 and 10, we’re out and about and we my wife was like, hey, should we go get some ice cream? My kids with their hawk ears are just like, ice cream? Yeah, let’s go! They’re all excited, so we go drive to Culver’s because they love this frozen custard. We’ve got the means; we’ve made the decision to go there. We get there, the line for the drive thru is 15 cars long and then we can see there’s a bunch of people waiting for their food right on the other side, where the pickup window is. We’re just like, oh gosh, this blows. We get in line because the kids are bought in, they’ve got the means, they’re there, they want this reward. Within two minutes, my ten-year-old daughter leans forward and she’s like, hey, can we just go home? Like really? Then my eight-year-old was like, yeah, I don’t want to wait here. Let’s go. Alright! We were there, the reward is there, this fantastic reward, but we get there and within two minutes, our expectations hadn’t been met. There was this expectation that the journey to the reward was going to be difficult, which in the end made that reward looked less sweet even to a 10-year-old and an eight-year-old. My point being, when you think about the processes that you take buyers through, expectation setting and empathy, understanding that that perception of a reward may be biased by the perception of the journey to get to it. That’s part of what empathy is. Do you have an opportunity to differentiate in the way that you sell? Part of what transparency does is it does the homework for the buyer. There was a study in 2017 by the Corporate Executive Board, which is now part of Gartner, that looked at consensus buyers and looked at, how do they spend their time? What they found is 39% of their time was spent talking to you, talking to your competitors, or talking to their internal buying groups. That leaves another 61%. What are they doing? They’re back-channeling you because all they hear is perfect five-star stuff. They’ve got to call their buddies and check with analysts and if you’re in the tech space, they’re going to the G2's and the TrustRadius'. They’re even reading Glassdoor reviews. That’s homework, that’s like extra cars in the drive through line. How do we reduce those cars in the drive through and make the journey as frictionless as possible? When we do that, because I'm betting you anybody who’s listening, if I say, who’s your biggest competitor, they’re probably going to go, oh that's the status quo. Yeah, it’s the status quo, and many times it’s not the customer it’s you. This part of transparency is about removing homework. Now, this was one of those rants, Olivia, but I I’ll just add one little piece to it. Another piece of empathy, we all think that consensus selling is hard. We got to sell and there’s multiple buyers, we’ve got to wrangle them all, how difficult. True, but consensus buying is harder. These buyers, they don’t have a whole organization behind you. Your sellers, they’ve got you, sales enablers. Your buyers, they don’t have buyer enablement, they don’t have processes. The stuff they’re buying from you, they buy once ever. They don’t know how to do this, so consensus buying is harder. Now, add to it that all of those buyers are remote just like you. Consensus buying just got harder. They can’t run into somebody in the parking lot or run into them in the kitchen getting coffee, consensus building for your buyers just became much more difficult. When we think about the elements of transparency, but just to your question about true empathy, see through the customer’s eyes that at home, it’s added cars to that drive thru. You’re going to find that no matter how sweet that frozen custard is, even the kids look at it, that’s an amazing reward, but gosh, this is going to be too hard, I’m going to prioritize something else. Your buyers are doing that, and transparency is just one of those ways that you can remove friction and make that drive thru line look a lot shorter. OF: Well, that’s a fantastic story. One of the points that you brought up throughout that was around buy-in, and in the book, you talk about one of the steps to really create resonance with buyers is actually through building a mutual decision plan. What are some of the core things to include in a mutual decision plan and how can that help streamline the buying process for the buyer? TC: Well, yeah. It goes back to that point about the buyer not having the expertise in buying like you do in selling. How do we remove friction from that buying journey and set proper expectations? I call it the mutual decision plan in book, which is sitting across the table with the individual or across your Zoom or across the phone, and just helping them see what that journey is going to be like. The mutual decision plan really brings all of these pieces together. That perception of a reward being biased by the journey and transparency and true empathy. It’s about sitting across the table and going, hey, listen, when we work with companies like yours, here’s some of the steps that they typically have to go through. Can we just match those up and make sure that we’ve got the journey right? I don’t know if you’ve ever mountain climbed or anything, but imagine going to Mount Everest, and there’s a Sherpa there that meets you. The Sherpa’s just like, it’s a big mountain, how do you want to go? Which way do you want to go? You’d probably be like we’re all going to die. There’s a confidence that’s built. A lot of salespeople are like, oh, I don’t want to put the customer into a box and feel like I’m creating all these structures around them. If it’s positioned right, you’re giving them confidence that A, you know the journey, and B, you’re setting an expectation about what that journey is going to be like. That Culver’s example, my family and I, we went a few weeks ago to Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge in Tennessee. I don’t know if you’ve ever been there, it’s like Vegas for kids, but there’s Dollywood. Dollywood is this big amusement park, it's a fantastic amusement. You get there and one of the rides the kids wanted to go on, there’s a line. At the entrance to the line, it says it’s a 40-minute wait from here. We’re like, alright, cool. That Culver’s example is when expectations aren’t met, the Dollywood example, we gladly waited in line because they set proper expectations with us. We knew what that journey was going to be. We made the decision. Is the juice going to be worth the squeeze here? We said yes. It was probably like 38 minutes; it was right on. We were cool with it because they set proper expectations. I think that’s part of the power of, hey, his is what the journey is going to look like, we’ve seen it a hundred times, I want to help you and enable you to get to the goal line in your decision, whether it’s with us or not. Here’s the expectation around it, let’s add in some of the things that are unique to your situation. If you don’t want to go on this journey, that’s cool too. Let’s part as friends right now. I think that’s part of the power of all of this. OF: Definitely. We’ve been talking a lot about the buyer’s journey and the buyer’s experience, but a lot of that has been in the context of leading up to the initial purchase. It's just as important to keep customers engaged and continue to drive loyalty throughout their entire experience with an organization. I’m curious if you can tell us what are some best practices for really partnering with revenue teams internally to continue to deliver value through transparency? TC: This transparency is not only just about the front of the sales process. Friction removal and the buying journey is not about the front either, it’s about the whole process. One of the things that I teach a lot of is this idea called transparent negotiating. I don’t know about you, I always thought it was weird that when we get to the goal line of a deal with a customer, the customer says, yes, it requires a different person to negotiate than it does to sell. As a matter of fact, like I learned how to negotiate from a former FBI hostage negotiator. We’re not negotiating the release of hostages from a bank heist, and this person I’m negotiating with, I need to have a relationship with post-sale. What are we doing? I had stumbled upon a concept called transparent negotiating, which is basically playing your card space up around the four things that matter to you and every for-profit organization in the world, which is every single one cares about how much you buy, so volume, how fast you pay, so the timing of cash, how long you commit, so the length of commitment and when you sign. Those are four things that we’re willing to pay you for in the form of a discount. Commit to more pay faster, commit longer, help us forecast. That’s another one of those examples of A, you’re building trust to the goal line instead of eroding it via traditional negotiation methods, B, you’re getting value for every dollar you give away in the form of a discount, and C, you’re giving them the cards to negotiate their own deal. You’re removing friction in a big way, and you end up with more valuable, more predictable deals, and you’ve built trust to the goal line. That’s one really important piece that I would hope that everybody would think about. Think about the negotiation that you do. Now, to your question about sales enablement, I have a slightly different take on sales enablement than most. I’ve got this book, but I’m in the midst of writing my second book right now, which is called, “The Transparent Sales Leader,” that hopefully will be out in February. I feel like sales enablement's role is essentially three core components. Number one is this idea of what I call amalgamate, which is going across an organization to their leaders and helping to curate all of the requirements across the organization, and then prioritize them and work with sales leaders on we’re going to say yes to these, we’re going to say no to these, and every new thing that comes in is going to require one of the yeses to go away. You amalgamate. The second piece is orchestrate, which is on those priorities, now you focus on orchestrating. What is the most efficient and effective way of getting those priorities and the goals associated with them into the brains of our salespeople in an executable way? The third piece is what I call evaluate, which is, how’s it working? Measuring, adjusting. Sales enablement is the first line of understanding whether your new hires are going to make it. Having structures in place that allow them to be able to see those warning signs upfront and be able to communicate those. I think when sales enablement thinks about their role, that way, that becomes such an effective partnering mechanism. As a CRO and a multi-time sales leader, when those structures were in place and there wasn’t an expectation that sales enablement is the dreaded sales trainer, no, that’s not the role, the role is to help prioritize, execute on those priorities and then help us see what’s going on in the field. That’s where partnership truly takes place and becomes so valuable. When that clicks, that’s where I, as a sales leader, invest more and more and more in sales enablement. OF: Digging in there actually a little bit more about enablement's role, you mentioned this, but enablement often plays a large part in arming reps with the tools that they need to be successful. To your point, it’s also about driving collaboration among key stakeholders. How can enablement really ensure that reps across revenue teams have the knowledge and skills that are really needed to engage with prospects and customers in an authentic way? TC: In the last three business days, I’ve had five different sales leaders reach out to me going Todd, do you know anybody? I’m hiring sales reps; I can’t find them. There's such like a frantic mode right there. Before I answer your question, for anybody who’s in sales enablement who’s listening, the thing that I’ve told all of those sales leaders is that right now, according to ZipRecruiter, there is 714,000 open sales roles. Your organizations that are hiring are competing for talent against all of that. Then you add to it that the number of new unicorns that have been established, the funding that are multi-billion dollars that are considered unicorns, year over year, beginning of the year to beginning of the year pre COVID, it’s up 600 percent. That’s only going to get worse. My advice for all of the sales leaders that I gave was this: look at your job requirements. You’ve got sales roles, you've got 10 bullets of the things you’re going to look for, cross off five of them. Right now, find five that you’re going to be fine if you live without, and then double down on enablement. Take one of those head count, take the dollars, and use it to invest in more internal resources to assist enablement, allow enablement to go outside and bring in outside practitioners to fill in the gaps and the holes, and just focus on taking those people that are not quite going to be able to check all the boxes and get them upskilled or out as quickly as possible. You’ve got to do that now. That's number one on this whole thing. I guess that answers the question. If you can seek ways to help educate your leaders to understand that conundrum, that you’re going to be bringing in some people that don’t check all the boxes. Then you've got to invest in enablement. I know that’ll come across as self-serving, so hopefully my words here will help you, it’ll help you with that justification. The competition for talent is real and it’s not going away anytime soon. I think sales enablement is the success or failure of many of these organizations. OF: Definitely. I’m so glad that we have you here to share your perspective on sales enablement from the perspective of a sales leader. Digging into that a little bit more, my last question for you is really around, given your background as a sales leader, what are some of the key metrics or things that enablement leaders really need to be tracking to reinforce the importance of transparency and also their impact on business? TC: Number one, one of the things that I used to screw up is this idea of we need to at all times have four X our quota in pipeline looking across my salespeople. One stat that you can use that’s really effective when you think about transparency is your ratio, your win percentage. That’s really, really important, but there’s another data point, which is time to loss. The deals you lose, how long is it taking you to lose? My point being, I used to manage my reps and I’d be like, hey, you need to always have four X quota in pipeline because we know we’re not going to close everything. What did the reps do? They filled it four X filled with crap because that was something I was measuring. If you do transparency right, and you lead with, hey, we give up this to be great at our core, our competitor might be better in this area and if that’s going to be important, let’s bet that now, or hey, our pricing based on our understanding of your environment is going to be between X and Y, if that’s going to be trouble, let’s discuss that upfront before we invest a bunch of time in each other. If that won’t match, let’s part as friends right now. What that ends up doing is like I said, it speeds sales cycles because you’ve built it on a foundation of trust, your win rates should go up mainly because you’re working deals that you should be working and instead of working the deals you’re going to lose anyway, you lose them really, really quickly. The answer, again, is look at your win rate. If you’re only winning 20, 25% of the deals that you’re qualifying, there’s a qualification issue. I bet the transparency upfront would help vet some of that, so you’re spending time on the deals you should be working or you’re spending time prospecting into the opportunities that would be better for you. That second data point is look across your losses and figure out is it taking us two weeks to lose or two years to lose or six months to lose. If it’s taking you that long to lose, analyze the heck out of that and use that as a really key data point to see whether or not transparency could be a powerful tool to get more efficient in your pipeline. OF: Fantastic. Well, Todd, thank you so much for sharing all of these insights with our audience. I know I learned a ton from you and our audience I’m sure will as well. Thank you again. TC: Hey, thanks for having me. As you can tell, I’m such a nerd for this, I could rant about it all day. Again, sales enablement, there’s nothing more important right now in this economy, in this market. If I can be a resource for you or anybody else, please reach out. I’d love to help out in any way that I can. OF: Awesome. To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear you.

Olivia Fuller: Hi, and welcome to Book Club, a Sales Enablement PRO podcast, I’m Olivia Fuller. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space, and we’re here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so they can be more effective in their role. When most people think about the act of selling, they often think that it’s all about making something seem desirable to motivate someone to buy it, but what if it was actually about the opposite? This is an idea that Todd Caponi explores in his book, “The Transparency Sale,” where he makes the case that leading with your flaws and actually embracing vulnerability is the key to building buyer engagement. As Todd puts it, effective sales today requires radical transparency, and he’s here to tell us a little bit more about why this is so essential. With that, Todd, I’d love if you can introduce yourself to our audience and tell us a little bit about your book. Todd Caponi: Cool. I’ll do it in story form because I think it’ll crystallize this. I’m a multi-time sales leader. My last role was the Chief Revenue Officer of a company here in Chicago, where I am, called PowerReviews. You could probably guess from the name PowerReviews, we were in the space of helping retailers and brands collect and display ratings and reviews on their websites. Meaning you’re buying a pair of Crocs or a sweater on Vineyard Vines or whatever, you look at the product, you scroll down, there’s the reviews. That was us for many cases, doing the collect and display. Here’s what happened. We did a research study with Northwestern University here in Chicago that looked at when a website’s acting as a salesperson, i.e., an e-commerce site, what do people do? What do human beings do? There were three data points that came back from it. Two of them changed my life in only a way that could be changed for a nerd like me because I’m super behavioral science data nerdy. The first step that did not change my life was that we all read reviews today. I’m assuming, Olivia, when you’re buying something that you haven’t bought before, you probably read reviews first, but here’s the two that blew my mind. Number one, that 85% of us go to the negative reviews first. I don’t know if when you’re reading reviews, you skip the fives and go right to the fours, threes, twos, and ones, but that’s what most of us do. The second data point that changed my life was a product that has an average review score between a 4.2 and a 4.5, that range on a five-star scale is optimal for purchase conversion. You're selling something on a website, right under it somebody who’s bought that comes back and says, I hated this product, here’s why, and it’s right under the product, somehow that actually helps it sell more. I looked at that and thought, alright, that’s when a website’s acting as a salesperson, what happens in human to human or B2B selling? Should that dynamic be the same? As it turns out, it is. I found really, really quickly that, again, if 85% of us go to the negative first, it’s what our brain desires. When we start a conversation by embracing something that maybe we’re not great at or that we give up to be good at our core or a competitor that we’re looking at might be better at than us, when you lead with that, magic happens. Sales cycles speed up, win rates get better, we work deals we should be working, and we stop working the deals that we’re going to lose anyway, we lose faster. From trying it out and seeing that magic happen, I like a lunatic, quit my job and wrote the book, “The Transparency Sale,” which really talks through not only the data, but the behavioral science, and then how you apply it to every single stage of your sales process from positioning and prospecting to even negotiating and post-sale clients. OF: Yeah, I’m glad you brought that story up because I think that helps put this into context a little bit more with actually one of the key points that stood out to me in your book, which was that embracing imperfections and prioritizing honesty is really how salespeople can better engage customers. Can you tell us a little bit more about this? Why does transparency, even in maybe areas where a product or service fall short, how does that help build loyalty? TC: Well, yeah, there’s a couple of things. First of all, if you’ve been to Ikea before or Costco or been on a Southwest Airlines flight, those organizations, those companies, those retailers, they embrace the things they give up. Ikea is a nightmare. When you walk into an Ikea, you know you’re in for it. When they hand you a map, you're like, I need a map to buy stuff? What? Then you’ve got to find it, you've got to go to the warehouse, pull the boxes off onto carts that don’t have brakes, jam it into the back of your car Tetris style. swear your way through that, get it home, thinking that you just left the nightmare back at the store. Instead, you open up the box, there’s 150 parts and no words on the work instructions other than like Sparta or whatever their crazy brand names are, and then when you’re done, you’re like, oh, you know what, that looks pretty good. We should go back. we should’ve bought the end tables with that bedroom set. Ikea shoppers, it’s a nightmare, yet they’re incredibly loyal. They're the number one retailer for furniture in the world for 13 straight years. Costco, the same thing. You've got to buy a membership, there’s very limited brand selection, if you want some ranch dressing for your salad you've got to buy almost a gallon, if you need a toothbrush here’s a half dozen, we’re going to have somebody at the door that’s going to check your receipt to make sure you’re not stealing anything. And yet, number two retailer in the country is Costco behind Walmart. The point being that obviously over promise and under deliver is a bad idea. We all know we never should over promise and under deliver, but there’s something crazy I discovered. Under promise and over deliver is also bad because it creates a short-term satisfaction spike, but it becomes unsustainable, and it is a form of lying believe it or not. We get something I like to call expectation inflation. If we keep doing it, then I’m going to take what you tell me and I’m going to add a little to it, and if I don’t get that, I’m going to be disappointed. The point being that in our brains as human beings, when expectations are set properly, and we feel like we trust that we can predict what our experience is going to be like, that’s what triggers our decision. When expectations are set and consistently met over and over and over again, that’s what creates loyalty. You go to a Starbucks here, I’m in Chicago obviously and you’re in Seattle, the heart of Starbucks, the coffee tastes exactly the same. Go to Europe, the Pike Place is still the exact same, it’s consistent expectation setting. It’s building that consistency and that’s what creates customers that not only buy, but they stay, they buy more, and they’re more likely to advocate. I’m clearly biased, but it all starts with transparency and setting proper expectations, not over promising and under delivering or doing vice versa. OF: Actually, on that point, you also emphasize that every interaction with a prospect is really a decision point for them. What role does empathy play in the decision-making process for buyers, and how can reps really take advantage of every interaction with buyers to not only reduce skepticism, but also build better engagement? TC: Yeah. Well, there’s a funny thing about empathy, I’ll start there. When I scroll through LinkedIn, and people are like, oh, you've got be empathetic, and then they go on to explain it, 9 times out of 10 they’re actually talking about sympathy, not empathy. Empathy is literally being able to see the world through the eyes of the people that you’re trying to communicate with. Empathy actually takes it to the point where you’re almost feeling what they feel along with them. To be truly great at what we do as sales professionals, as sales enablers trying to get into the heads of the salespeople that you’re trying to enable, that empathy, not sympathy, like, oh, I hope things are good in these trying times, that’s sympathy, empathy is, hey, I understand you. From a buyer’s perspective, I’m going to give you a weird analogy. A quick story. In Seattle, they don’t have Culver’s I don't think. Culver’s is a fast-food place and they’ve got something called butter burgers and then they’ve got frozen custard, which is heavenly. It’s really, really good. A few months ago, my wife and I and my two kids, who are 8 and 10, we’re out and about and we my wife was like, hey, should we go get some ice cream? My kids with their hawk ears are just like, ice cream? Yeah, let’s go! They’re all excited, so we go drive to Culver’s because they love this frozen custard. We’ve got the means; we’ve made the decision to go there. We get there, the line for the drive thru is 15 cars long and then we can see there’s a bunch of people waiting for their food right on the other side, where the pickup window is. We’re just like, oh gosh, this blows. We get in line because the kids are bought in, they’ve got the means, they’re there, they want this reward. Within two minutes, my ten-year-old daughter leans forward and she’s like, hey, can we just go home? Like really? Then my eight-year-old was like, yeah, I don’t want to wait here. Let’s go. Alright! We were there, the reward is there, this fantastic reward, but we get there and within two minutes, our expectations hadn’t been met. There was this expectation that the journey to the reward was going to be difficult, which in the end made that reward looked less sweet even to a 10-year-old and an eight-year-old. My point being, when you think about the processes that you take buyers through, expectation setting and empathy, understanding that that perception of a reward may be biased by the perception of the journey to get to it. That’s part of what empathy is. Do you have an opportunity to differentiate in the way that you sell? Part of what transparency does is it does the homework for the buyer. There was a study in 2017 by the Corporate Executive Board, which is now part of Gartner, that looked at consensus buyers and looked at, how do they spend their time? What they found is 39% of their time was spent talking to you, talking to your competitors, or talking to their internal buying groups. That leaves another 61%. What are they doing? They’re back-channeling you because all they hear is perfect five-star stuff. They’ve got to call their buddies and check with analysts and if you’re in the tech space, they’re going to the G2's and the TrustRadius'. They’re even reading Glassdoor reviews. That’s homework, that’s like extra cars in the drive through line. How do we reduce those cars in the drive through and make the journey as frictionless as possible? When we do that, because I'm betting you anybody who’s listening, if I say, who’s your biggest competitor, they’re probably going to go, oh that's the status quo. Yeah, it’s the status quo, and many times it’s not the customer it’s you. This part of transparency is about removing homework. Now, this was one of those rants, Olivia, but I I’ll just add one little piece to it. Another piece of empathy, we all think that consensus selling is hard. We got to sell and there’s multiple buyers, we’ve got to wrangle them all, how difficult. True, but consensus buying is harder. These buyers, they don’t have a whole organization behind you. Your sellers, they’ve got you, sales enablers. Your buyers, they don’t have buyer enablement, they don’t have processes. The stuff they’re buying from you, they buy once ever. They don’t know how to do this, so consensus buying is harder. Now, add to it that all of those buyers are remote just like you. Consensus buying just got harder. They can’t run into somebody in the parking lot or run into them in the kitchen getting coffee, consensus building for your buyers just became much more difficult. When we think about the elements of transparency, but just to your question about true empathy, see through the customer’s eyes that at home, it’s added cars to that drive thru. You’re going to find that no matter how sweet that frozen custard is, even the kids look at it, that’s an amazing reward, but gosh, this is going to be too hard, I’m going to prioritize something else. Your buyers are doing that, and transparency is just one of those ways that you can remove friction and make that drive thru line look a lot shorter. OF: Well, that’s a fantastic story. One of the points that you brought up throughout that was around buy-in, and in the book, you talk about one of the steps to really create resonance with buyers is actually through building a mutual decision plan. What are some of the core things to include in a mutual decision plan and how can that help streamline the buying process for the buyer? TC: Well, yeah. It goes back to that point about the buyer not having the expertise in buying like you do in selling. How do we remove friction from that buying journey and set proper expectations? I call it the mutual decision plan in book, which is sitting across the table with the individual or across your Zoom or across the phone, and just helping them see what that journey is going to be like. The mutual decision plan really brings all of these pieces together. That perception of a reward being biased by the journey and transparency and true empathy. It’s about sitting across the table and going, hey, listen, when we work with companies like yours, here’s some of the steps that they typically have to go through. Can we just match those up and make sure that we’ve got the journey right? I don’t know if you’ve ever mountain climbed or anything, but imagine going to Mount Everest, and there’s a Sherpa there that meets you. The Sherpa’s just like, it’s a big mountain, how do you want to go? Which way do you want to go? You’d probably be like we’re all going to die. There’s a confidence that’s built. A lot of salespeople are like, oh, I don’t want to put the customer into a box and feel like I’m creating all these structures around them. If it’s positioned right, you’re giving them confidence that A, you know the journey, and B, you’re setting an expectation about what that journey is going to be like. That Culver’s example, my family and I, we went a few weeks ago to Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge in Tennessee. I don’t know if you’ve ever been there, it’s like Vegas for kids, but there’s Dollywood. Dollywood is this big amusement park, it's a fantastic amusement. You get there and one of the rides the kids wanted to go on, there’s a line. At the entrance to the line, it says it’s a 40-minute wait from here. We’re like, alright, cool. That Culver’s example is when expectations aren’t met, the Dollywood example, we gladly waited in line because they set proper expectations with us. We knew what that journey was going to be. We made the decision. Is the juice going to be worth the squeeze here? We said yes. It was probably like 38 minutes; it was right on. We were cool with it because they set proper expectations. I think that’s part of the power of, hey, his is what the journey is going to look like, we’ve seen it a hundred times, I want to help you and enable you to get to the goal line in your decision, whether it’s with us or not. Here’s the expectation around it, let’s add in some of the things that are unique to your situation. If you don’t want to go on this journey, that’s cool too. Let’s part as friends right now. I think that’s part of the power of all of this. OF: Definitely. We’ve been talking a lot about the buyer’s journey and the buyer’s experience, but a lot of that has been in the context of leading up to the initial purchase. It's just as important to keep customers engaged and continue to drive loyalty throughout their entire experience with an organization. I’m curious if you can tell us what are some best practices for really partnering with revenue teams internally to continue to deliver value through transparency? TC: This transparency is not only just about the front of the sales process. Friction removal and the buying journey is not about the front either, it’s about the whole process. One of the things that I teach a lot of is this idea called transparent negotiating. I don’t know about you, I always thought it was weird that when we get to the goal line of a deal with a customer, the customer says, yes, it requires a different person to negotiate than it does to sell. As a matter of fact, like I learned how to negotiate from a former FBI hostage negotiator. We’re not negotiating the release of hostages from a bank heist, and this person I’m negotiating with, I need to have a relationship with post-sale. What are we doing? I had stumbled upon a concept called transparent negotiating, which is basically playing your card space up around the four things that matter to you and every for-profit organization in the world, which is every single one cares about how much you buy, so volume, how fast you pay, so the timing of cash, how long you commit, so the length of commitment and when you sign. Those are four things that we’re willing to pay you for in the form of a discount. Commit to more pay faster, commit longer, help us forecast. That’s another one of those examples of A, you’re building trust to the goal line instead of eroding it via traditional negotiation methods, B, you’re getting value for every dollar you give away in the form of a discount, and C, you’re giving them the cards to negotiate their own deal. You’re removing friction in a big way, and you end up with more valuable, more predictable deals, and you’ve built trust to the goal line. That’s one really important piece that I would hope that everybody would think about. Think about the negotiation that you do. Now, to your question about sales enablement, I have a slightly different take on sales enablement than most. I’ve got this book, but I’m in the midst of writing my second book right now, which is called, “The Transparent Sales Leader,” that hopefully will be out in February. I feel like sales enablement's role is essentially three core components. Number one is this idea of what I call amalgamate, which is going across an organization to their leaders and helping to curate all of the requirements across the organization, and then prioritize them and work with sales leaders on we’re going to say yes to these, we’re going to say no to these, and every new thing that comes in is going to require one of the yeses to go away. You amalgamate. The second piece is orchestrate, which is on those priorities, now you focus on orchestrating. What is the most efficient and effective way of getting those priorities and the goals associated with them into the brains of our salespeople in an executable way? The third piece is what I call evaluate, which is, how’s it working? Measuring, adjusting. Sales enablement is the first line of understanding whether your new hires are going to make it. Having structures in place that allow them to be able to see those warning signs upfront and be able to communicate those. I think when sales enablement thinks about their role, that way, that becomes such an effective partnering mechanism. As a CRO and a multi-time sales leader, when those structures were in place and there wasn’t an expectation that sales enablement is the dreaded sales trainer, no, that’s not the role, the role is to help prioritize, execute on those priorities and then help us see what’s going on in the field. That’s where partnership truly takes place and becomes so valuable. When that clicks, that’s where I, as a sales leader, invest more and more and more in sales enablement. OF: Digging in there actually a little bit more about enablement's role, you mentioned this, but enablement often plays a large part in arming reps with the tools that they need to be successful. To your point, it’s also about driving collaboration among key stakeholders. How can enablement really ensure that reps across revenue teams have the knowledge and skills that are really needed to engage with prospects and customers in an authentic way? TC: In the last three business days, I’ve had five different sales leaders reach out to me going Todd, do you know anybody? I’m hiring sales reps; I can’t find them. There's such like a frantic mode right there. Before I answer your question, for anybody who’s in sales enablement who’s listening, the thing that I’ve told all of those sales leaders is that right now, according to ZipRecruiter, there is 714,000 open sales roles. Your organizations that are hiring are competing for talent against all of that. Then you add to it that the number of new unicorns that have been established, the funding that are multi-billion dollars that are considered unicorns, year over year, beginning of the year to beginning of the year pre COVID, it’s up 600 percent. That’s only going to get worse. My advice for all of the sales leaders that I gave was this: look at your job requirements. You’ve got sales roles, you've got 10 bullets of the things you’re going to look for, cross off five of them. Right now, find five that you’re going to be fine if you live without, and then double down on enablement. Take one of those head count, take the dollars, and use it to invest in more internal resources to assist enablement, allow enablement to go outside and bring in outside practitioners to fill in the gaps and the holes, and just focus on taking those people that are not quite going to be able to check all the boxes and get them upskilled or out as quickly as possible. You’ve got to do that now. That's number one on this whole thing. I guess that answers the question. If you can seek ways to help educate your leaders to understand that conundrum, that you’re going to be bringing in some people that don’t check all the boxes. Then you've got to invest in enablement. I know that’ll come across as self-serving, so hopefully my words here will help you, it’ll help you with that justification. The competition for talent is real and it’s not going away anytime soon. I think sales enablement is the success or failure of many of these organizations. OF: Definitely. I’m so glad that we have you here to share your perspective on sales enablement from the perspective of a sales leader. Digging into that a little bit more, my last question for you is really around, given your background as a sales leader, what are some of the key metrics or things that enablement leaders really need to be tracking to reinforce the importance of transparency and also their impact on business? TC: Number one, one of the things that I used to screw up is this idea of we need to at all times have four X our quota in pipeline looking across my salespeople. One stat that you can use that’s really effective when you think about transparency is your ratio, your win percentage. That’s really, really important, but there’s another data point, which is time to loss. The deals you lose, how long is it taking you to lose? My point being, I used to manage my reps and I’d be like, hey, you need to always have four X quota in pipeline because we know we’re not going to close everything. What did the reps do? They filled it four X filled with crap because that was something I was measuring. If you do transparency right, and you lead with, hey, we give up this to be great at our core, our competitor might be better in this area and if that’s going to be important, let’s bet that now, or hey, our pricing based on our understanding of your environment is going to be between X and Y, if that’s going to be trouble, let’s discuss that upfront before we invest a bunch of time in each other. If that won’t match, let’s part as friends right now. What that ends up doing is like I said, it speeds sales cycles because you’ve built it on a foundation of trust, your win rates should go up mainly because you’re working deals that you should be working and instead of working the deals you’re going to lose anyway, you lose them really, really quickly. The answer, again, is look at your win rate. If you’re only winning 20, 25% of the deals that you’re qualifying, there’s a qualification issue. I bet the transparency upfront would help vet some of that, so you’re spending time on the deals you should be working or you’re spending time prospecting into the opportunities that would be better for you. That second data point is look across your losses and figure out is it taking us two weeks to lose or two years to lose or six months to lose. If it’s taking you that long to lose, analyze the heck out of that and use that as a really key data point to see whether or not transparency could be a powerful tool to get more efficient in your pipeline. OF: Fantastic. Well, Todd, thank you so much for sharing all of these insights with our audience. I know I learned a ton from you and our audience I’m sure will as well. Thank you again. TC: Hey, thanks for having me. As you can tell, I’m such a nerd for this, I could rant about it all day. Again, sales enablement, there’s nothing more important right now in this economy, in this market. If I can be a resource for you or anybody else, please reach out. I’d love to help out in any way that I can. OF: Awesome. To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear you.

In this episode, we're talking about a dilemma that's common to nearly every marketer: long-term brand building vs. short-term lead gen. My guest today is Andy Smith, who is the VP of Marketing at PowerReviews. And he's sharing his team's strategy for long-term vs. short-term, and also his insights on brand building. And I know that you're going to enjoy this episode! For key takeaways and show notes, visit ideallymarketing.com/saaspodcast. For more on PowerReviews, check out their website.

Peter V.S. Bond, well-known as the co-host of the CPG Guys podcast, has a day job as VP Strategy & Retail Partnerships at PowerReviews. He put on that hat to share the results of a brand new survey of 4,000 consumers on the evolution of their omnichannel grocery shopping behaviors. Great data, with some powerful takeaways for brands.

The CPG Guys Sri & PVSB are joined in this 2 part episode by digital experience maven Steven G. Koven VP of Omnichannel & eCommerce at Crossmark. Most recently, Stephen was VP of Digital Experience at Hormel Foods and had previously worked at Henkel and The Clorox Company.Stephen speaks to how brands can leverage user-generated content like product ratings & reviews up and don the marketing funnel to drive commercial success.Questions Stephen addresses:It’s been my experience reading reviews on sites like Amazon, that many reviews are 1 or two words. How can you go about generating more meaningful reviews? It seems many brands are deathly afraid of negative reviews? Should they be? How should brands consider dealing with this feedback? Also, what should they NOT do? How should  brands consider maintaining their UGC program? What things should they be considering in ensuring it delivers sales results? In my prior life as an eCommerce leader, the way I would make sense of all the UGC on  my site and on retail sites was to hire a bunch of summer interns, give them some PCs, put them in a conference room, tell them to read reviews and come back at the end of the summer with a presentation. Clearly, this is neither scalable nor objective. What should brands be doing in 2021 to learn from UGC on their products and their  competitor’s products? There is this concept called syndication. What does that mean, why is it important to brands? What is going on in the industry about monetization of syndication? Is this good for retailers, brands and consumers? What about Q&A? Should brands offer Q&A on their sites? How should they build a plan to respond on retailer sites? What is the importance of visual content? Are there some ways to promote collection? Find all of the CPG Guys content at http://cpgguys.com

The CPG Guys Sri & PVSB are joined in this 2 part episode by digital experience maven Steven G. Koven VP of Omnichannel & eCommerce at Crossmark. Most recently, Stephen was VP of Digital Experience at Hormel Foods and had previously worked at Henkel and The Clorox Company.Stephen speaks to how brands can leverage user-generated content like product ratings & reviews up and don the marketing funnel to drive commercial success.Questions Stephen addresses:My first question is: would you please define what user generated content is and whether it is measurably important on the path to purchase.Can you speak to how UGC can and should be applied in eCommerce, particularly the digital shelf? Any innovative examples?Does the impact of UGC matter based upon the product category? I mean, is it really important to collect reviews for a 2 liter bottle of Pepsi or some asparagus? What other factors may influence the importance of UGC in the path to purchase?There are a great number of brands, particularly in food & beverage, who prior to the pandemic, had not invested in UGC. Now, by all accounts, they are scrambling to get started. Can you walk our audience through exactly how to get up and running and what needs to be considered in developing a UGC program?Once you have designed a program and have selected the vendors, you’ll need to actually implement it. Can you speak to specific concerns that brands should address during the implementation phase?OK, now you have your program established and you want to start collecting content. The million dollar question that I know Peter gets asked all the time: how many reviews do I need? And a follow up: once I hit the threshold, am I golden, have I reached my destination?Does quality come into consideration? In other words, does only the start rating matter or are there other factors? (recently, length, sentiment, assortment coverage, supplementary product-relevant questions)What are some major ways to generate the content?Find all of the CPG Guys content at http://cpgguys.com

Jim Morris co-founded PowerReviews which grew to 1,200+ clients and sold for $168 million. He product-managed and architected one of the first ecommerce engines at online retailer Fogdog.com which had a $450 million IPO. We discuss: The need for product discovery [02:06] Choose your own adventure [05:42] Why product discovery is so important for the software industry [07:30] The secret behind Zoom’s success in a time of pandemic [09:43] The time is now for every company [11:18] The best companies where product discovery works well [12:52] The wrong things product teams focus on [14:37] A reflective process with multiple solutions [17:08] From shepherding a concept through a process to becoming a subject-matter expert [21:56] A pattern-matching ability that translates theory into practice [23:38] Unlocking innovation in companies and potential in employees [25:46] These days, he coaches Product teams and Product leaders at startups and corporations to replicate this success. He’s created a custom curriculum and training program that pulls from his 25 years of experience and the best minds in Product Management. He graduated from Stanford University with a BS in Computer Science. Learn more about Jim at https://productdiscoverygroup.com/ (https://productdiscoverygroup.com) and https://twitter.com/sfjmorris (Twitter).  Brief Description of Gift A free 15-minute review of your website or app prototype URL for Free Gift https://productdiscoverygroup.com/prototype (https://productdiscoverygroup.com/prototype)

It’s our nature as salespeople to sell prospects on what’s good about our service or product. But what if you started the sales conversation by sharing what isn’t? It sounds counterintuitive, but Todd Caponi, author of The Transparency Sale, believes that being open about the things you’re giving up in order to be great at your “core” is the key to sales success. While serving as the Chief Revenue Officer of Chicago's PowerReviews, Todd learned how reviews & feedback are changing the world of B2B selling - you can no longer hide your flaws and expect to get away with it. Todd joined us on Decision Point to share how transparency is the key to winning today’s customers who want to understand the full experience they’ll have when using your product - the good and the bad. How can you train your sales reps to sell with transparency, quickly qualifying more deals in your pipeline in the process? Listen in to find out! Learn More About The Transparency Sale: https://www.transparencysale.com Follow Todd: http://linkedin.com/in/toddcaponi/ Learn More About MonsterrConnect: https://www.monsterconnect.com

Carol Krakowski, Director of Insights at PowerReviews, joins The CPG Guys Sri & PVSB to reveal the results of a new attitudinal report of over 5K shoppers as to their 2020 holiday shopping plans. The following questions are covered:What types of insights does PowerReviews provide to its brand and retail clients and what makes this different than its competitive class?PowerReviews just released a Holiday Consumer Report 2020, please share with us the details behind this including the sample size?What have we learned about consumer expectations this holiday season from the survey that you fielded?Any big surprises given what we are currently experiencing during this pandemic?From what the results show us, consumers are still planning to spend this holiday season. Why do you think there’s as much optimism/willingness to spend your results indicate?How should retailers and brands think about this dramatic shift to online and what can they do to adapt?Most of this so far has been “good news”, was there any “bad news” for brands or retailers?If 30% of shoppers aren’t concerned at all about the store - what do the other 70% think and what can retailers do about it?What does all of this mean for PowerReviews?What is PowerReviews looking to establish from a trending perspective in sharing this research with the omnichannel community?To download the report, please visit: https://www.powerreviews.com/insights/holiday-consumer-survey-2020/ 

This is my review for POWER SEASON 5. this is the Audio Only for my Podcast.#POWER #POWERBOOK2 #POWERSEASON5 #POWERREVIEWS #JAYMOOREREVIEWS #JATMOOREREVIEWSPOWER MEMBERSHIP AREA - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_qBs1sCxAu5p39RymrEiXw/joinPODCAST LINKSPODCAST - Mo Talk - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mo-talk/id1522691148 PODCAST - Entertainment World News - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/entertainment-worlds-news/id1522691086 PODCAST - News We Need To Know - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/news-we-need-to-know/id1522690925PODCAST - SPORTS TALK - https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=1522690980SUPPORT HERECASH APP - $JAYMOOREREVIEWS PayPal - http://paypal.me/JayMooreReviewsWebsite - www.jaymoorereviews.comPatreon - https://www.patreon.com/JayMooreReviewsVenmo - www.venmo.com/Jay-Moore-Reviews SOCIAL MEDIA LINKSINSTAGRAM - https://www.instagram.com/jay_moore_reviews/?hl=enGMAIL - Jaymoorereviews@gmail.comFACEBOOK - https://www.facebook.com/JayMooreReviewsTWITTER - https://www.twitter.com/jaystradamus78

This is my review for POWER SEASON 5. this is the Audio Only for my Podcast.#POWER #POWERBOOK2 #POWERSEASON5 #POWERREVIEWS #JAYMOOREREVIEWS #JATMOOREREVIEWSPOWER MEMBERSHIP AREA - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_qBs1sCxAu5p39RymrEiXw/joinPODCAST LINKSPODCAST - Mo Talk - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mo-talk/id1522691148 PODCAST - Entertainment World News - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/entertainment-worlds-news/id1522691086 PODCAST - News We Need To Know - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/news-we-need-to-know/id1522690925PODCAST - SPORTS TALK - https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=1522690980SUPPORT HERECASH APP - $JAYMOOREREVIEWS PayPal - http://paypal.me/JayMooreReviewsWebsite - www.jaymoorereviews.comPatreon - https://www.patreon.com/JayMooreReviewsVenmo - www.venmo.com/Jay-Moore-Reviews SOCIAL MEDIA LINKSINSTAGRAM - https://www.instagram.com/jay_moore_reviews/?hl=enGMAIL - Jaymoorereviews@gmail.comFACEBOOK - https://www.facebook.com/JayMooreReviewsTWITTER - https://www.twitter.com/jaystradamus78

This is my review for POWER SEASON 5. this is the Audio Only for my Podcast.#POWER #POWERBOOK2 #POWERSEASON5 #POWERREVIEWS #JAYMOOREREVIEWS #JATMOOREREVIEWSPOWER MEMBERSHIP AREA - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_qBs1sCxAu5p39RymrEiXw/joinPODCAST LINKSPODCAST - Mo Talk - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mo-talk/id1522691148 PODCAST - Entertainment World News - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/entertainment-worlds-news/id1522691086 PODCAST - News We Need To Know - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/news-we-need-to-know/id1522690925PODCAST - SPORTS TALK - https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=1522690980SUPPORT HERECASH APP - $JAYMOOREREVIEWS PayPal - http://paypal.me/JayMooreReviewsWebsite - www.jaymoorereviews.comPatreon - https://www.patreon.com/JayMooreReviewsVenmo - www.venmo.com/Jay-Moore-Reviews SOCIAL MEDIA LINKSINSTAGRAM - https://www.instagram.com/jay_moore_reviews/?hl=enGMAIL - Jaymoorereviews@gmail.comFACEBOOK - https://www.facebook.com/JayMooreReviewsTWITTER - https://www.twitter.com/jaystradamus78

Welcome to the first episode of Season 3 of the podcast! In this episode, we hosted Yoni Solomon, Director of Product Marketing & Strategy at G2 to talk about building a winning GTM strategy. Yoni Solomon is Director of Product Marketing & Strategy at G2 (formerly G2 Crowd), the world's largest marketplace for B2B technology. He has spent a decade launching new products, partnerships, and acquisitions for Chicago's top SaaS companies, including Vibes ($45M raised in 2016), and PowerReviews (#49 on Deloitte's Fast 500, #1 in Chicago in 2018). Check out the GTM Playbook by Yoni - https://learn.g2.com/go-to-market-playbook Product Marketing Personas - https://festival.productmarketingalliance.com/talks/the-5-key-product-marketing-personas-behind-an-award-winning-go-to-market-team/ Connect with Yoni - https://www.linkedin.com/in/yonisolomon/

In Episode 15, John breaks down product review strategy with Peter V.S. Bond, Vice President of Retail Strategy at Power Reviews. Peter answers questions like, “What are some creative ways to generate organic reviews?” and “How do you deal with bad reviews?”. The two lay out important strategies for brands to stay engaged with customers across the digital landscape. About the Guest: Peter V.S. Bond is Vice President of Retail Strategy at PowerReviews (www.powerreviews.com), a SaaS platform provider that unifies and amplifies the voice of the consumer through authentic feedback like product ratings, reviews, images & videos. In his role, Peter helps retailers and their brand suppliers accelerate the path to purchase through authentic customer content. Peter has a wealth of experience in the CPG/Retail industry, having worked for companies like IRI, dunnhumby and CVS Health and supported blue-chip clients like Kroger, Coca-Cola, General Mills, PepsiCo and Campbell Soup. He co-hosts a weekly video podcast "Consumer Engagement in an Omnichannel World" which can be found on linkedin and youtube under #sriandpvsb  Connect with Peter on LinkedIn _____   Connect with John on LinkedIn  Learn more about Orca Pacific

Listen to Sara Hassan, Director of People at PowerReviews, discussing how to help employees navigate uncertainty during Covid-19. What you’ll learn from this episode: How to communicate consistently during a crisis to provide your workforce some level of certainty. How to push forward efforts that help reduce stress and anxiety in the workforce. How to […]

It's quarantine season.There's widespread fear, the market is tanking, people are tightening up their wallets, and tons of uncertainty in the air.If you're like me, then your sales have been affected in some way.So what do you do about it?Do you cower in fear?No -- you dive in headfirst and figure it out.Todd Caponi is the author of the best-selling book The Transparency Sale, and Managing Director at VentureScale by Sales Assembly.He's also the former CRO of PowerReviews, and back in The Great Recession of 2008 he led another company, Right Hemisphere, to 275% growth in two years, winning the Worldwide VP of Sales Of The Year Award.When everyone else was experiencing losses, Todd actually experienced explosive growth.In perhaps the most timely episode this podcast has ever seen, Todd and I trade notes in an invigorating discussion about how to endure the current downturn and come out on top.Find Todd online at:Social Media: @tcaponiWebsite: www.transparencysale.comToday's episode is brought to you by Sales Hacker. The world's smartest community of forward-thinking B2B professionals. Grab their latest expert-created articles, webinars, and podcast episodes at www.saleshacker.com See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Jim Morris coaches product teams and leaders at startups and corporate clients. Previously, he co-founded PowerReviews (sold for $168 million) and was an early employee at Fogdog.com ($66 million IPO). Since graduating in Computer Science from Stanford University, he's held a variety of roles in tech startups, most recently CTO. In this episode of the Product Science Podcast, we talk about how Jim's approach to product management and development has evolved and what he's learned from implementing a continuous discovery process at multiple organizations. Read the show notes to learn more.

If you are in sales, you need to read the Transparency Sale and you must hear episode 528 of "Cool Things Entrepreneurs Do"  Author Todd Caponi joins the show for a deep dive talk about sales.    Todd Caponi has spent a lifetime in sales and been the VP of Sales and / or Chief Revenue Officer for several companies.  Through his real life experience he has created this amazing content that will help you and your company succeed more.  In this episode he shares great advice for entrepreneurs and others about how to get things done in the world of selling.     Who is Todd Caponi?   Todd's book, The Transparency Sale has been recognized as the best book of 2019 in the category of "Business: Sales" at the 17th annual Best Book Awards. His focus is as a speaker & workshop leader as Principal of Sales Melon LLC. and also serves as the Managing Director of Chicago’s VentureSCALE.     Previously, he had spent almost 4 years building the revenue capacity of Chicago’s PowerReviews from the ground up as their Chief Revenue Officer...turning it into Illinois’ fastest-growing tech company. Prior to that, he's held sales leadership roles with 3 other tech companies, including ExactTarget, where he helped drive the organization to a successful IPO and a $2.7B exit through the acquisition by Salesforce.com.     He's a former American Business "Stevie" Award winner for VP of WW Sales of the Year, and also once owned & operated a sales training company.   https://thomsinger.com/podcast/todd-caponi

Welcome to episode #703 of Six Pixels of Separation. Here it is: Six Pixels of Separation - Episode #703 - Host: Mitch Joel. He's an old friend and someone who has experienced a tremendous amount of success in the technology and startup world. While many know his name... most do not. Let's change that. Brett Hurt is the CEO and co-founder of data.world (of which I am an advisor), a Public Benefit Corporation focused on building the modern catalog for data and analysis as well as the world's largest collaborative public data catalog. data.world helps you tap into more of your company’s collective brainpower—everyone from data scientists to nontechnical experts—so you can achieve anything with data, faster. Brett is also the co-owner of Hurt Family Investments (HFI), alongside his wife, Debra. HFI are involved in 72 startups and counting, mostly based in Austin. HFI are also invested in 21 VC funds and multiple philanthropic endeavors. Brett founded and led Bazaarvoice as CEO from 2005-2012, through its IPO (it hit over one billion dollars), follow-on offering, and two acquisitions (PowerReviews and Longboard Media). Prior to Bazaarvoice, Brett founded and led Coremetrics, which was rated the #1 Web analytics solution by Forrester Research and, like Bazaarvoice, expanded into a global company and category leader. Coremetrics was acquired by IBM in 2010 for around $300m. A three time winner in the startup and entrepreneurship world, Brett is also the author of the freely available, The Entrepreneur's Essentials. Enjoy the conversation... Running time: 1:05:14. Hello from beautiful Montreal. Subscribe over at iTunes. Please visit and leave comments on the blog - Six Pixels of Separation. Feel free to connect to me directly on Facebook here: Mitch Joel on Facebook. or you can connect on LinkedIn. ...or on Twitter. Here is my conversation with Brett Hurt. The Entrepreneur's Essentials. data.world. Hurt Family Investments. Follow Brett on Instagram. Follow Brett of Twitter. This week's music: David Usher 'St. Lawrence River'.

E-commerce enabled an unprecedented wave of bottom-up community-sourced information, which created a scalable decentralized trust mechanism.  This episode is about how we decide what's worth our trust; a story of the word-of-mouth becoming the wisdom of the online crowds. You'll hear from Guy Kawasaki (Former Chief Evangelist at Apple), Pierre Omidyar (Founder of eBay), Tim O'Reilly (Founder of O'Reilly Media), Baroness Onora O'Neill (House of Lords), Erik Brynjolfsson (Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Kevin O'Connor (Founder of DoubleClick), Benedict Evans (Partner at Andreessen Horowitz), Jim Morris (Former CTO of PowerReviews), and Jane Winn (Professor at University of Washington School of Law).

It's not everyday A-list celebrities give a workshop on B2B sales. But Tyra Banks did just that when she coined the term “flawsome.” For B2B sellers, flawsome means this: Be transparent, and lead with your flaws. Todd Caponi joined us to tell us exactly why transparency sells in B2B. Todd is the Managing Director for VentureSCALE, an accelerator for B2B tech companies. He's also a speaker, trainer, and author of The Transparency Sale. What we talked about: Statistics show that people don't listen to 5-star reviews Buyers want predictable relationship outcomes The IKEA example: great at one thing (not so great at others) Don't go out and say, ‘Our company sucks' Checkout these resources we mentioned during the podcast: PowerReviews & Northwestern University study  PowerReviews 2016 study This is an interview with Todd Caponi from VentureSCALE. To hear this episode, and many more like it, you can subscribe to The Sales Engagement Podcast on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or on our website.

Todd Caponi is the author of the award-winning book, The Transparency Sale. He is also a keynote speaker, workshop leader, and trainer as Principal and Founder of Sales Melon LLC. Up until 2018, he spent nearly four years building the revenue capacity of Chicago’s PowerReviews from the ground up as their Chief Revenue Officer. Through his efforts, he turned the company into Illinois’ fastest growing tech company. Prior to that, he's held sales leadership roles with three other tech companies, including ExactTarget, where he helped drive the organization to a successful IPO and a $2.7B exit through the acquisition by Salesforce.com. But how did Todd get to where he is today? On this episode of Sales Secrets From The Top 1%, Todd explains his top secrets to sales success and how to start implementing them in your career immediately!

Todd Caponi is author of the award winning book, The Transparency Sale, a speaker & workshop leader as Principal of Sales Melon LLC, and Managing Director of Chicago’s VentureSCALE. Previously he served as the CRO of PowerReviews, building them from the ground up into Chicago’s fastest growing tech company. He's also held sales leadership roles with 3 other tech companies, including ExactTarget, where he helped drive the organization to a successful IPO and a $2.7B exit through the acquisition by Salesforce.com. @tcaponi

Yoni Solomon is Head of Product Marketing at G2 (formerly G2 Crowd).  We talk about the importance of Product Marketing and  Yoni gives us his 5 step product launch process.  Yoni has spent nearly a decade launching and enabling new products, features, partnerships, and acquisitions for Chicago's top SaaS companies, including: Vibes ($45M raised in 2016), and PowerReviews (#49 on Deloitte's Fast 500, #1 in Chicago).

Mark Godley talks with Brett Hurt, CEO & Co-Founder of Data.World. This is a great, informative show because Mark and Brett’s data values align. Brett believes that data is liberating and data can lead to all types of epiphanies...which is what the team at LeadGenius preaches daily. Tune in to hear how your company, B2B or B2C, can leverage data.world’s open data sets that make up the largest collaborative data community...oh and it has a user-friendly interface that was not built for gurus and quants, just normal sales and marketing folks. They discuss: Why data is liberating The definition of a graft database How data.world is the world's largest collaborative community How data is transforming the way F500 do business The future of a database-driven culture in retail, healthcare, and B2B  How to catalog your data Learn why you must build a data-driven culture How to wake-up your hidden workforce About our guest: Brett is the CEO and co-founder of data.world, a Public Benefit Corporation (and Certified B Corporation) focused on building the platform for modern data teamwork. data.world helps you tap into more of your company’s collective brainpower—everyone from data scientists to nontechnical experts—so you can achieve anything with data, faster. Brett is also the co-owner of Hurt Family Investments (HFI), alongside his wife, Debra. HFI is involved in 65 startups and counting, mostly based in Austin (see http://lucky7.io/portfolio for details). HFI is also invested in 19 VC funds and multiple philanthropic endeavors. Brett founded and led Bazaarvoice as CEO from 2005-2012, through its IPO, follow-on offering, and two acquisitions (PowerReviews and Longboard Media). Prior to Bazaarvoice, Brett founded and led Coremetrics, which was rated the #1 Web analytics solution by Forrester Research and, like Bazaarvoice, expanded into a global company and category leader. Coremetrics was acquired by IBM in 2010 for around $300m.

Mark Godley sits down with Brett Hurt, CEO & Co-Founder of Data.World. This is going to be such a great, informative show because Mark and Brett’s data values align. Brett believes that data is liberating and data can lead to all types of epiphanies...which is what the team at LeadGenius preaches daily. Tune in to hear how your company, B2B or B2C, can leverage data.world’s open data sets that make up the largest collaborative data community...oh and it has a user-friendly interface that was not built for gurus and quants, just normal sales and marketing folks.   About our guest: Brett is the CEO and co-founder of data.world, a Public Benefit Corporation (and Certified B Corporation) focused on building the platform for modern data teamwork. data.world helps you tap into more of your company’s collective brainpower—everyone from data scientists to nontechnical experts—so you can achieve anything with data, faster. Brett is also the co-owner of Hurt Family Investments (HFI), alongside his wife, Debra. HFI are involved in 65 startups and counting, mostly based in Austin (see http://lucky7.io/portfolio for details). HFI are also invested in 19 VC funds and multiple philanthropic endeavors. Brett founded and led Bazaarvoice as CEO from 2005-2012, through its IPO, follow-on offering, and two acquisitions (PowerReviews and Longboard Media). Prior to Bazaarvoice, Brett founded and led Coremetrics, which was rated the #1 Web analytics solution by Forrester Research and, like Bazaarvoice, expanded into a global company and category leader. Coremetrics was acquired by IBM in 2010 for around $300m.

How does coding for fun lead to becoming a category king? On today's episode, Brett Hurt joins Christopher Lochhead in a riveting discussion about his story of serial entrepreneurship, the future of data, and the power of community. “There's just this serendipity that occurred in life where these things really drew me.” - Brett Hurt on how entrepreneurship pulled him in Three Things We Learned Wired to do big things Brett has always had the knack for creating things that spelled massive success from when he was young. His parents had taught him to slow down when he finally becomes successful the way he defines it. For a time he tried out his parents' lifestyle, but entrepreneurship has always pulled him in. A figure to emulate He took a three-year break from being the head of his company to be more hands-on as a father to his children. It surprised him when his ten-year-old daughter walked up to him one day to ask when he was going to start another business. He realized he was most inspirational to his daughter when he was working and not being on every field trip, and his children became data.world's first investors and are very proud of chipping in their toy money when they did. Serendipity of success He got into his first big success as an entrepreneur when he started an e-commerce site with his wife on a whim. He was feeling bored one day so he began coding an e-commerce package that he and his wife utilized for an online store. There weren't many people online back then, but a community eventually built around it. The serendipity of building the e-commerce site directly led to the first category that he entered into, which is e-commerce analytics. Hence the birth of Coremetrics, rated the #1 Web analytics solution some years later. Bio: Brett is the CEO and co-founder of data.world. It is a Public Benefit Corporation (and Certified B Corporation) focused on building the platform for modern data teamwork. data.world helps you tap into more of your company's collective brainpower—everyone from data scientists to nontechnical experts—so you can achieve anything with data, faster. Brett is also the co-owner of Hurt Family Investments (HFI), alongside his wife, Debra. HFI are involved in 59 startups and counting, mostly based in Austin (see http://lucky7.io/portfolio for details). HFI are also invested in 15 VC funds and multiple philanthropic endeavors. Brett founded and led Bazaarvoice as CEO from 2005-2012, through its IPO, follow-on offering, and two acquisitions (PowerReviews and Longboard Media). Prior to Bazaarvoice, Brett founded and led Coremetrics. Forrester Research rated Coremetrics #1 Web analytics solution and, like Bazaarvoice, it expanded into a global company and category leader. IBM acquired Coremetrics in 2010 for around $300m. Links: data.world LinkedIn Medium Facebook Twitter We hope you enjoyed Brett Hurt on this episode of Legends and Losers! Christopher loves hearing from his listeners. Feel free to email him, connect on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and subscribe on iTunes!

If you're a medical practice, 4 major industry waves are rocking your boat. New demands bring new opportunities for fast practices that can quickly get physician alignment around a strategy that will maintain physician autonomy and increase reimbursement. Equally as important, the patient expectation has changed. They demand convenience and flexibility and want to interact with their care in new and innovative ways. Physicians can accept this, or ignore it at their own peril.  I'm fortunate to be joined today by Ken Comée, CEO of Carecloud who will shed some light on these 4 waves: Migration to a modern, cloud-based infrastructure Practice consolidation Value-based care Consumerism and the new patient expectation We break down what the 4 waves are, what they mean for practices and how practices can capitalize on the change. Enjoy!   0:56 What does CareCloud do and who do you do it for? 2:40 The smartphone has changed everything. What do doctors need to do to modernize? 4:00 Who are your customers? How has that changed as your company has grown? How has consolidation in the Health IT marketplace affected you? 6:08 The 1st Wave is a migration to a modern and cloud-based environment. It creates efficiencies and is needed for an interconnected, interoperable future. 9:30 The 2nd Wave is acceleration towards consolidation and rollups of physicians. You need IT infrastructure to rollup brick and mortar medical practices. 12:58 Hospitals need to re-evaluate what they are offering to compete with outpatient surgery centers. 14:33 The 3rd Wave is Value-Based Care. VBC means physicians are required to be more active in terms of outcomes. You must engage with patients earlier, more regularly, and over a longer period of time. Independent medical practices will be able to thrive if they can build an active and loyal patient base. 16:23 What do you see with people trying to prepare for a VBC future while still living in a Fee For Service now? Outcomes of medical care need to be thought of as if the consumer has options and can go somewhere else. They can. Attract. Serve. Retain. 20:00 What is the patient's experience with your practice from the first second they know you exist? Must have a holistic approach to end to end experience. Cloud infrastructure lets physicians thrive. 22:31 The 4th Wave is patient expectations and consumerism. Average out of pocket expense is going up and your patient experience could make or break you. I mean, Clipboards? Really? 25:50 Patients need to find info with as little friction as possible. Put your hours and prices on the web. Provide as much decision-making information as possible to prevent the patient from having to call and ask a question. 28:55 What do the 4 Waves mean for the practice listening? Every practice has different pain points. The Cloud can solve those pains and set you up for future growth. 31:22 What does all of this mean for CareCloud? Their platform is an all-in-one solution that can generate data that allows you to provide better care and proactive care for your patients. 33:55 What are the big tech giants up to? What are they going to do that impacts midmarket practices trying to stay independent? Amazon is going after the consumer experience. Their biggest impact is on facilitating the expectation of ease and simplicity for patients. Physicians need to be aligned with that. Amazon is doing it with their employees to show that it can be done. 36:29 Opening their own clinics? Amazon/Apple. Smart players are sometimes not the one that goes in first. They're watching innovative companies like Forward and OneMedical to see how they do and whether they should build or buy. 38:11 To use CareCloud, do you have to use both front and back office software? We're flexible. It's very easy for pieces to integrate with your current system. We ask, “How do we get you on the path to a cloud-based infrastructure with the least disruption so we can ensure success." 43:00 What is your biggest opportunity as a company coming from the 4 Waves? Interoperability. Carecloud is FHIR API certified. Going deep in cloud infrastructure means we can partner with Amazon and apply machine learning so practice systems get smarter. 45:02 Where can you find us? If you're a partner and want to integrate with our platform we have a robust partner program where you can download our APIs and work with them in real time. Our service and training side of the business is looking to expand. 46:19 What's your partnership model for apps on your system? Open system. Nothing but. We can't build everything. We integrate with care coordination, pop health, telemedicine, service or product side as extensions to our platform. Contact us for a discussion then apply. ...  About Ken Comée Ken Comée is CEO of CareCloud, the cloud-based software and services platform focusing exclusively on supporting high-growth medical groups. Ken joined CareCloud as CEO in 2015 after serving on the company's Board of Directors while an Executive-in-Residence at Norwest Venture Partners. Ken brings to CareCloud a track record of building high performing organizations and helping early-stage companies reach their full potential and value. Ken is a seasoned technology industry executive who has had a successful track record leading growth companies to achieve high-value strategic exists. Prior to joining CareCloud, Ken led several technology companies spanning the software, big data and analytics spectrum. Among these companies was Cast Iron Systems, a platform for integrating cloud-based applications from SaaS providers with on-premise applications. Ken managed Cast Iron's turnaround, successfully positioning the company for its sale to IBM, which bought the company to serve as a foundational element of its cloud strategy. As CEO of PowerReviews, which provided technology and tools for retailers and e-commerce companies to host product reviews on their websites, Ken orchestrated the company's acquisition to its largest competitor, Bazaarvoice. In addition to his roles as CEO, Ken has served as an executive advisor and on the board of directors for several new ventures, including BeyondCore, which was acquired by Salesforce.com, and Simpplr, a social intranet company focused on improving employee engagement. Ken's role as an advisor reflects his personal mission to help shape the next generation of CEOs. In addition to mentoring up and coming entrepreneurs, Ken also is committed to supporting philanthropies and non-for-profits that are making a meaningful difference in promoting health and quality of life. He most recently participated in the “Real Men Wear Pink of Miami” campaign to support the American Cancer Society. Ken earned his MBA from the London Business School and a BSc from Santa Clara University. A recent transplant from Silicon Valley to Miami, Ken enjoys spending his free time on the water and exploring South Florida. ... About CareCloud CareCloud is the leading provider of cloud-based revenue cycle management, practice management (PM), electronic health record (EHR), patient experience management (PXM), and telemedicine solutions for high-growth medical groups. CareCloud helps clients increase profitability, streamline workflow and improve patient care nationwide. The company currently manages more than $4.2 billion in annualized accounts receivable on its integrated clinical and financial platform. To learn more about CareCloud, visit www.carecloud.com. Links: Twitter: @CareCloud LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/carecloud/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/carecloud/ Website: carecloud.com ... Related and/or Mentioned on the Show The New Patient Journey and its Impact on Healthcare Marketing | Carrie Liken | Yext ... Subscribe to Weekly Updates If you like what we're doing here, then please consider signing up for our weekly newsletter. You'll get one email from me each week detailing: New podcast episodes and blog posts. Content or ideas that I've found valuable in the past week. Insider info about the show like stats, upcoming episodes and future plans that I won't put anywhere else. Plain text and straight from the heart :) No SPAM or fancy graphics and you can unsubscribe with a single click anytime. ... The #HCBiz Show! is produced by Glide Health IT, LLC in partnership with Netspective Media. Music by StudioEtar

Meet Theresa O'Neil - the leader of Showpad’s global marketing team, responsible for increasing awareness, generating leads, and supporting all channels to grow revenue. She has delivered marketing, sales and business development strategy for companies such as PowerReviews and IBM. In this episode we dive into more advanced marketing channels than those applicable to early stage startups. You'll learn why Showpad has chosen to go global at this time, the lessons learned so far, and why combining marketing and sales to align KPIs is the most powerful growth hack you can ever do. We also go into essential marketing ideas and concepts that you need to know for SaaS. It's definitely a very deep episode. Notes: 02:20 Empowering to Sell The Way Buyers Want to Buy 04:28 Getting All That Data Back 06:39 Messaging, Attribution, Analysis and Alignment 07:23 Data Challenges 08:22 Defining The Marketing Qualified Lead 09:20 Challenges of Global Companies 11:39 Innovative Selling Experiences 12:58 When and If To Become A Global Organization 16:05 The Impact of Global Effectiveness In Marketing 18:25 Global And Regional Goals and Metrics 20:38 How to Prioritize in Marketing 22:12 Global Approach and Regional Focus 23:01 Shift Your Focus from Activity to Impact 24:47 Lightning Questions

The Transparency Sale Part 2 with Todd Caponi #222 This is the second of a two part series interviewing Todd Caponi, the former Chief Revenue Officer at Chicago’s PowerReviews. Todd is in the process of authoring a new book titled “The Transparency Sale”. This book is in response to the changing influence of social media in selling and the failure of former challenger sale strategies. Todd has held leadership roles with three tech companies, including ExactTarget, where he helped the organization to a successful IPO and a $2.7B exit to Salesforce.com. Reality of Decision Making Customer decisions are filled with imperfection, tied to subconcious decision making and feeling. People make decisions with feelings and back them up with logic. Sellers who understand this fact quickly learn to focus on feelings first to snag interest and then generate desire. Negotiation Strategy Negotiating policy commonly recommends holding your cards close. Todd disagrees. Play your cards immediately at the start of the negotiation. Consider the following values and leveraging them for discounts. How much you buy How fast you pay How long you commit When you sign Discounts are based on what you’re willing to agree. Each buyer can optimize their deal by applying the levers in tandem. This is a very tranparent way to negotiate. Never use any one lever by itself. Presentation Mistakes Consider the thinking of the audience attending your sales presentation: Ugh I don’t want to go I hope they can help my problems today Ugh they are only talking about themselves (First three slides talk about the vendor) I think I’ll check my Facebook account and see what my friends are doing Have empathy for the people you’re talking to. Start with their problems and find out their challenges. Provide no NASCAR slides showing what a great vendor you are, Nobody cares. What they want to know is HOW you can help THEM. Transparent Contracts If you have terms and conditions in a contract, lead with transparency. Point out sections in the contract where some customers have had an issue. It’s very honest to call these out. This will speed up the signing the contract. If you hide stuff it chips away at trust e.g. auto renewal (explain the value to your company honestly). Parting Thoughts We can no longer be bartenders and serve people what ever they want. The Challenger Sale recommended  we become personal trainers with advice on how to be better. Now we need to be doctors and neuro scientists to understand root causes. Lead with transparency. How To Connect With Todd Caponi Website: www.transparencysale.com Twitter: @tcaponi LinkedIn:  www.linkedin.com/in/toddcaponi/ Books Mentioned: The Transparency Sale is slated to be published in Fall 2018 The Power of Social Selling Here are some previous episodes on the power of social selling. All Sales Start With a Why with Michael Manzur #205 The Art of the Help with Larry Levine #182 7 LinkedIn Strategies for Generating Qualified Leads with Janis Pettit #176 How To Generate Leads with Relationship Selling with Michael Ross Take Command of the New LinkedIn User Interface with Brynne Tillman #151 Myths on Social Selling with Mark Hunter #142 How to Power Prospect with LinkedIn Groups with Liam Austin #135 How To Be An Awesome Sales Professional with Thomas Ellis #102 How To Generate Sales Leads Using LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter 7 Habits of Highly Successful LinkedIn Users with Dennis Brown The post The Transparency Sale Part 2 with Todd Caponi #222 appeared first on Sales Babble Sales Podcast | Sales Training | Sales Consulting |Sales Coaching.

The Transparency Sale with Todd Caponi #221 Todd Caponi Is the former Chief Revenue Officer at Chicago’s PowerReviews. Todd is in the process of authoring a new book titled “The Transparency Sale”. This book is in response to the changing influence of social media in selling and the failure of former challenger sale strategies. Todd has held leadership roles with three tech companies, including ExactTarget, where he helped the organization to a successful IPO and a $2.7B exit to Salesforce.com. Challenger Sale No Longer Effective There is a false narrative that consumers have all they need online to make buying decisions. Sellers still have tremendous value adding insight and help to enable the purchase at the end. The Challenger Sale  teaches the following: Recommends sellers to provide insights and challenge prospects thinking Demands sellers to become industry experts Challenges buyers to think a different way but…… Due to Social  Media, sellers need to be on top of what buyers are saying about them. Now there is a need to add transparency sale processes. Social Media in Sales Sellers must look at feedback from social media and control that conversation. Sellers must be awake to what’s being said about their companies, products and services. The Internet provides a feedback economy. Control the feedback Take Power Reviews finding: People read reviews first Sales goes up for reviews at 4.2-4.5 ranking Sell as if your NOT perfect. You can’t be FUD’d (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) with transparency Sellers need to sell as they are NOT perfect. Neural science is starting to get applied to sales. People make buying decisions with feelings, then back it up with logic. Sales process is too focused on the close. Should be focused on the opportunities of buyers to lose interest and regain momentum. When buyers reach 100% trust, they stop asking for more information. When buyers don’t trust and keep searching, deals never close. Email Take Action Tactic Create a feeling with an email subject line then the first few sentences.   Don’t say I and Me but You.   Your email needs to speak specifically to the reader. It must be short. Think Twitter!  Have an easy link for more information below your signature. How To Connect With Todd Caponi Website: www.transparencysale.com Twitter: @tcaponi LinkedIn:  www.linkedin.com/in/toddcaponi/ Books Mentioned: Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain – by Antonio Damasio The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less – Barry Schwartz The Transparency Sale is slated to be published in Fall 2018 The Power of Social Selling Here are some previous episodes on the power of social selling. All Sales Start With a Why with Michael Manzur #205 The Art of the Help with Larry Levine #182 7 LinkedIn Strategies for Generating Qualified Leads with Janis Pettit #176 How To Generate Leads with Relationship Selling with Michael Ross Take Command of the New LinkedIn User Interface with Brynne Tillman #151 Myths on Social Selling with Mark Hunter #142 How to Power Prospect with LinkedIn Groups with Liam Austin #135 How To Be An Awesome Sales Professional with Thomas Ellis #102 How To Generate Sales Leads Using LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter 7 Habits of Highly Successful LinkedIn Users with Dennis Brown The post The Transparency Sale with Todd Caponi #221 appeared first on Sales Babble Sales Podcast | Sales Training | Sales Consulting |Sales Coaching.

On this episode of the Sales Hacker podcast, we talk with Todd Caponi, CRO of PowerReviews about how to sell enterprise software solutions with increased transparency in the sales process.

On this episode of the Sales Hacker podcast, we talk with Todd Caponi, CRO of PowerReviews about how to sell enterprise software solutions with increased transparency in the sales process.

Perché si dice che la reputazione è ora la moneta corrente online? Quali sono i fatto che rendono così importante la credibilità in rete. .Servizi menzionati: Upwork.comAltre Referenze.Servizi di raccolta di recensioni e testimonianze:Google, Facebook, Amazon, TrustPilot, Trustadvisor, Producthunt, G2Crowd, Sitejabber, ResellerRatings, Yotpo, PowerReviews, Feefo, Ekomi, TrustedCompany, TrustedShops. .Musica: SeizetheBeat - Reddingtonhttps://soundcloud.com/seize-the-beat/seizethebeat-reddington-free-download

Nadim Hossain is the Founder and CEO @ BrightFunnel, the startup that shows marketing true impact on revenue. They are backed by many past guests of the show including Matt Garratt @ Salesforce Ventures, Tim Kopp, and James Cham @ Bloomberg Beta. As for Nadim, prior to founding BrightFunnel, Nadim was VP of Marketing and Sales Development at PowerReviews, paving the way to a $170M exit. He was also a product marketing executive at Salesforce.com during their hyper-growth years. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How did Nadim make his way into the world of SaaS and come to found BrightFunnel? To what extent is marketing an art or a science in today’s data driven world? How can marketers use and analyse data to drive decision making? How can founders determine which channels are a must have as opposed to a nice to have? What metrics should determine this? Does brand building not count in the revenue driven world today? Nadim has previously said, ‘marketing is eating sales’. What does Nadim mean by this? How does Nadim evaluate the expansion of the marketing funnel? What are the biggest mistakes B2B companies make in today’s environment? How can they rectify this and sustain a brand that will deliver for the long term? 60 Second SaaStr If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Nadim Hossain

The effectiveness of your sales team to drive revenue determines if everything else in your business will be successful. It’s easier to keep track of the status of your sales team and what needs to be tackled next by using the Five F’s: Field, Focus, Fundamentals, Forecast, and Fun. By keeping these categories in mind as a sales leader, you can see where your team is working well and where things need to be improved. In this episode, Todd Caponi, Senior VP of Sales at PowerReviews, talks about how he uses these five categories to create scalable growth in the sales organization at PowerReviews.

Product reviews on ecommerce sites improve conversions. But they also help with customer relations and, recently, even physical-store merchants have used them. But merchants, both online and in physical stores, should carefully plan the use of product reviews, and develop ideas for soliciting valid ones. To help us sort through the use of product reviews, we welcome Pehr Luedtke, the CEO of PowerReviews, a leading product-review provider. He joins Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.