Todd Caponi: Lessons from Sales History to Predict the Future of Sales Success

Book Authority had my first book, The Transparency Sale, listed as the sixth best sales book of all time. How awesome is that? And it's complete horseshit. Hey everyone, welcome back to Make It Happen Mondays, where we talk about sales, business, entrepreneurship, personal growth, mental health, and everything in between with guests who I truly respect and I think make a positive impact on the world around us. And today's guest is my good friend, Todd Capone. He's been on the podcast a couple of times. I always enjoy our conversations, but this one was about the history of sales. So he is a self-proclaimed sales nerd and loves everything about the history of sales. And I've seen a couple of posts that he's done on LinkedIn recently that sparked my interest here and piqued my attention because he's posting a lot of, you know, AI is coming for us and it's going to fundamentally change sales and all this other stuff.

And he would post headlines from like 1918 or 1920 or whatever it is, basically with the same sentiment when it came to like the phone or, you know, direct mail or whatever it might be. And so I thought this was a good chance to get some perspective on where we've been so that we understand how and why and where we're going. There's a lot of things we can learn from our past and I don't look at the past enough to learn from them. And we need to level set a little bit and remind ourselves that this used to be actually one of the most sought after and prestigious professions in the world, sales, especially here in the States. I used to teach it in high schools, but then we lost our way because we stopped doing it in the service of the client and we started to really do it to make money and profits and everything else.

And so if we can get back to that service, I think we're going to be all right, but we got to figure it out. So I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Well, let's make it happen. Todd Capone, welcome back to the Make It Happen Monday podcast, my friend. It is great to see you. Hey, man. It's great to see you. I think my only concern is that I'm only a couple of episodes following Guy Kawasaki. So I'm glad he set the bar so low for me so that we can really excel here. All right, dude. Thanks for paying attention. It's actually funny because I have a gauntlet coming up here of interviews. One was with Guy, which I'm releasing today with the comparison, which I think actually is going to tie into our conversation at the end.

The next one to next week is Alex Lieberman. So the morning brew, the guy writing and all that cool stuff. That was a fascinating. And then with Ted McKenna, the guy who wrote Jolt Effect. Wow. Yep. So I had him on. And so those are three just like, okay, yep. And then it was funny. I just, I think it was last week, late last week or no, Tuesday last week. This guy pops who does whiskey tasting events. Yeah. So he shipped me like a bomb, like four different whiskeys with like a wheel that had all the flavors. And we did the podcast while drinking whiskey. So it was actually pretty interesting. So yeah, but you're, dude, you're always a fan favorite here. So I got, I'll bring you back as many times as you want here on this one.

That's awesome. We can skip the intros. People look up Todd. He's fucking fast. He's awesome. He's got two awesome books, the sales transparency, transparency sale and transparency leader. And are you working on another one? Not yet, dude. I've got two in my brain, but I'm not there yet. So. Okay, cool. But the main reason I wanted to bring you on here, Todd was, is like I was saying in the pre in the prep here, I think everybody needs a little bit of perspective on, especially with all the, Oh my God, AI is going to replace sales reps and we're all doomed and everything else. And, and so history, even though I'm not a history buff in any way, shape or form, I think that's one of the things I think is why I have a bad memory is because I don't like to think about shit in the past.

I only like to think about things forward, but I do think there's a lot that we can learn from the past. And so if you, if it's cool, a little background of why you're such a sales nerd when it comes to this stuff and what got you into it. And then if you start with like, I guess, what was the first milestone? Because I tend to reference, um, uh, AI ADA as the first thing to put in any structure into sales. And I kind of have the spiel 1898, the guy by the name of St. Elmo Lewis came up with it. And these are the four major categories y'all need to think of. And I use that to align sales and marketing. So that in my mind is 1898 is kind of the, the birth, if you will, of formal sales. But I don't know, I might be talking, you know, out of my ass here.

So talk to us a little bit about why you're such a nerd when it comes to this stuff, which I love. And then talk, then let's start with what your perspective is, is, is kind of the foundation of sales as we see it today. Yeah, man, there's so much. So for anybody who's watching this and not listening, I'm building almost like a Gittimer-esque sales history museum here that I'm on eBay, just scraping every history book. I mean, I've got behind me is a fully restored 1908 cathedral style telephone. It rings. It's awesome. But I've got books from the 1800s, early 1900s, magazines, all kinds of paraphernalia here from the past that I just find fascinating. Basically what happened was, you know, when COVID hit, I had a book from 1945 and it's from a guy named Percy Whiting called the five great rules of salespeople or of sales successor.

I don't actually, I don't remember exactly the words, but I, I dug it up because I was bored. I'm reading it. And I just, I became so fascinated by the fact that all the things that you read on LinkedIn were talked about in 1945. Now, the cool thing was that it referenced books that were older. So I kept tracking them back. And then I basically made friends with somebody at the Library of Congress to help me track down digital versions to help find this stuff. And I got back all the way to the 1880s. One of my books is from 1886 there. And I found it to be amazing that so many of the things that we deal with today, the processes, the objections, the compensation, the quotas, the sales kickoffs, the sales kickoff.

You name it. They all existed back in like 1890. And so it's such, it was just fascinating to me. And so now I joke that my nerdery knows no bounds because I'm literally dug into this stuff. Every morning when I get up, I'm reading something and it's made me better at thinking about not only what sales was supposed to be and should be, but you know, the old axiom that history repeats itself. We can see it repeating itself over and over again. And if we can use that to predict what's coming, we should be in a better position to be prepared for that. So that's a little bit about the background. Have you always been a history buff? No. I mean, my high school history teacher, one time he literally, I was such a dumb ass in history in high school.

I think I said something. I don't remember what, but he literally slapped me from both sides of my head once because I was a history idiot back then. So now I like it. Mr. Zygman. I remember him well. He was great. But, um, yeah, old school teachers. Exactly. But if you, by the way, back then, if you went home to complain to your mom, she probably would have smacked you upside the head as well. Like what did you do to deserve that? I may have done that. That's exactly right. So now I wasn't always, but I've become one, I guess, as I'm getting older here, but man, it's fascinating stuff, dude. And I'll tell you the other thing about these books. I, so I was honored to see that book authority had my first book, the transparency sale listed as the sixth best sales book of all time.

So awesome is that? And it's complete horseshit. And here's why. I mean, literally the top 100, 91 of them were written in the last 10 years. There was only a couple that were 1970 and before. And I argue are the top 100, probably 80 of them were written before 1980. And we just forgot it and omitted all of that stuff because these people, dude, they were not only the originators of everything we talk about and think about today, but they could write. And that's part of why I also am into it is that I think my writing has gotten better as a result of reading some of the stuff. Like there's a book here from Oris and Swen Martin. It's called Pushing to the Front. It's 1916. It was originally written in the 1890s by him, but that dude wrote how to win friends and influence people 20 years before that book came out.

Like literally that book is just like Carnegie's book. And so it's just amazing writing and fascinating to me. Hey, I hope you're enjoying the conversation so far. I want to take a quick minute to share with you what I'm working on these days with my new JB sales membership. It includes live monthly training delivered by me on my two signature courses, which are filling the funnel and driving a close that cover all aspects of the sales process. It also includes monthly workshops that I'll be running on specific sales skills and different tech skills like ChatGVT and how to leverage AI throughout the entire sales process. Finally, the membership gives you access to my entire online catalog with every course and every tip I've ever done.

And as an exclusive offer to my podcast listeners, if you go to jbarrows.com, click on the individual membership link and use coupon code podcast at checkout, you'll get 25% off. Now let's get back to the conversation. Yeah, that's, that's kind of what's weird to me, right? Is again, it is such an old profession that, you know, a large part of the history has been erased because we think of it in its current construct and we still, you know, me, I'm, I'm the biggest proponent or preacher of this, you know, it's not educated in schools. So it's finally, you know, I say, oh, you know, you can't get your degree in sales, but finally you're starting to be able to get a few. But back then that was the thing to do.

Yeah. And so I think that's, what's really curious in my mind. Like, obviously we're all, you know, used to what we can see and what we can touch and what makes sense to us. And rarely are people looking to go to that X level, but it is, there's a lot of mistakes that I see people are making today with this evolution of AI and, and coming up with excuses that in a few of your posts really stood out to me. I'm like, they were dealing with the same shit back then, same challenges, same problems. So where actually, before I get there, is sales a uniquely American thing? Like from a history and forget about where we obviously, where we are now, but you know, again, dumb talk track here. Hey, we were basically founded on sales because we were over there in England and we're like, you know what?

I don't like you. I'm going to go this way. I had no fucking idea where we were going and landed on something and was like, all right, let's keep exploring. And to me, sales a lot about exploration. So I think we were founded that way, but could you help me understand like where the profession was formally started? Yeah. I mean, when you think about where the informally started, I've gone back, I've got a podcast called the sales history podcast, right? And it's just, I researched the crap out of a topic and then monologue on it for 12 to 20 minutes. I've got an episode talking about selling during the Roman Empire. So, you know, BC, post BC, you know, AD type stuff. And, you know, back then it was basically merchant selling where you would set up like a town square and everybody would come because everything that could be bought was going to be bought there.

And then you'd go back with it. And that started in the Roman Empire. And then as basically there was too much, you know, not enough demand for the supply, those merchants started to travel elsewhere to the point where like when they went into other regions, they were considered so gross that literally there were cities and towns and other countries that were wrangling those salespeople together and killing them, like literally exterminating sales. So like that grossness of sales has been around for, you know, since the beginning of time. But to your question about when the modern sales profession started, you know, for the most part, if you look at late 1880s, early 1890s, a guy named John Patterson, who he bought the NCR corporation and it was basically, you know, some guys that had developed some cash registers.

He got in, bought it. And then he was the guy that started just about everything. By 1910, it was widely considered that 80 to 90% of sales organizations were somehow influenced by John Patterson and NCR corporation 20 years earlier. He was the guy that said, listen, now that in this progressive era of the industrial revolution, we can't sell using independent bag men drummers, you know, the people that are basically manufacturers reps selling a bunch of products from a bunch of different people. Now he thought, hey, listen, I've got to bring people in. I got to train them. I've got to give them dedicated territories. I've got to give them some foundation from a salary perspective. So like salary plus variable cop started with Patterson.

He literally had the first sales kickoff. I've written and did a whole podcast episode about his first sales sales kickoff in the 1890s. He wrote the first sales playbook. I wasn't him. It was actually John Crean, who was his like nephew who did it, wrote it. But all of that stuff started with him in the 1890s. Your point about Elias St. Elmo Lewis, 1898, just to give a little more color on that. For anybody that doesn't know, Elias St. Elmo Lewis was more focused on marketing, but he had theorized in 1898 that all buyers go through four stages on their journey to making a purchase. They first pay attention, A, and then they become interested or they don't. And then they develop a desire or they don't.

And don't mistake that with Alec Baldwin and Glengarry Glen Ross, who switched desire with decision. He had got that part a little wrong. I saw that too. That's why I edit that every time. I'm like, he got it wrong. Exactly. And then the A was action. Am I ready to take action? Now, why that's so important? Elias St. Elmo Lewis theorized that. Arthur Sheldon in 1902 then took it and salesized it. And then it became the foundation for every sales process and every sales forecasting methodology from that year until at least the 1920s, the mid-1920s. Now, what's so interesting about that? And I just want, I'm going to get ahead of myself. I'll hear a little bit, but you know, a hundred years ago, forecasting wasn't a problem for sales managers, which is weird because they didn't have a CRM.

They didn't have conference calls. They didn't have any view into what was going up because all the salespeople were in the field. It wasn't like they were in the office making calls. There was no telephone. How are they getting forecasting right? I believe it was because of AIDA that every seller was brought up looking at the forecast, but looking specifically at their sales process through the lens of recognizing buyer behavior. AIDA was about recognizing, are they paying attention? Are they interested? Have we generated a desire and are they ready to take actions through their words and their actions? You know, you fast forward to the 1980s and 90s when, you know, Siebel comes out and then Salesforce and then HubSpot.

Out of the box, every sales process, every sales forecasting methodology is based on what sellers are doing, right? Qualify, discover, propose, demo, negotiate. And as a result, we lost our lens to actual buyer action, buyer activity, what buyers are doing. We became conveyor belt focused on our own processes. And as a result, who knew we can't forecast when a buyer is going to buy because we're so focused on what sellers are doing like that. So that kind of brings it all together there a little bit, but still, I just think Elias St. Louis, Arthur Sheldon, John Patterson, those three were really the ones that kicked off what we today consider the modern sales profession. Super interesting. So, all right.

So we kicked it off. It's become a profession. Then it gets pretty respected, right? For a period of time. So, and talk to us about like when and how it was taught in schools. So that, you know, in what stage, right? Was it elementary? Was it junior high, high school, whatever? Because I think that is a big problem of what we're faced with today is that they don't get exposed to it at a younger age, right? That's again, you know, that's why I wrote my book, why I want to be in sales when I grow up, because I want to introduce it to kids as something that they could see themselves growing up and being. And so I guess start, let's unpack where, you know, where was it educated? How was it educated?

And, and the prestige that it had. And then we could talk about the downfall of it, but I'd love to understand how it got integrated and was such a revered profession. Yeah. So this Arthur Sheldon cat that I mentioned, I believe he is the goat of sales philosophers of all time. Like the guy, literally what you and I do job as a profession, it started with him in 1902, just North, I'm in Chicago, just North of Chicago, a town called Libertyville at the time it was called something else. But Arthur Sheldon was a guy that he was going to school in Michigan to become a lawyer, paid his way through school by selling books and then realized, Hey, I love selling. And why am I going to school for four years to be a lawyer?

And basically I taught myself for four minutes to be a salesperson. That's crazy. Maybe there's an opportunity here. And so he put together processes and put together correspondence course. He ran out of an office North, you know, in Libertyville and started creating these correspondence courses. By the 1910s, he had bought 800 acres of land and was planning to create a full sales university in Libertyville here in Illinois. He had his own post office because literally tens of thousands of people from around the world were signing up for Arthur Sheldon's correspondence courses. Now, like that's where it started. Now, the thing about Sheldon, he also has one of my favorite sales quotes of all time, which leads to why sales was trusted and respected.

And the quote is this, true salesmanship is the science of service. Grasp that thought firmly and never let go. He was a believer that sales is supposed to be a service profession, that we're the ones bringing the news and teaching people and doing right by the customers. Because when they succeed, all boats rise, right? The economy rises, we all make more money. So we've got to be selling the right solutions to the right customer at the right time at the right price. And if it's not a fit, get out, right? And that was always his lens. And as a result, everybody kind of lined up behind him. And that was Patterson's lens at NCR too. Now, to your point about university education. By 1910, most universities had sales curriculum, right?

It was taught, you know, Wharton and Harvard and, you know, all of those places, they were teaching it. It also had made its way into the high schools. So, you know, where you are, Boston area specifically, they had 11 high schools that were teaching sales by 1911. Now, keep in mind though, like that sounds amazing. Why aren't they doing that today? Well, a lot of people didn't go to college. So they were trying to get to them early. And given that sales was at the time seen as a trusted, respected type profession, it was admired because good salespeople made a lot of money doing right by their customers. You know, you're growing up, you're like, Hey, I want to learn those skills. Right. And so that was pervasive from 1911 until really around 1918.

World War I screwed up a lot in terms of the way that we perceived sales, the way that people taught sales. We can talk a little bit about where we went wrong here next, which is I'm assuming you're going to want to go, but I'll leave you with this one last piece. 1916. So we see sales conferences today. Well, 1916 is known as the first sales conference of all time. It was held in Detroit, Michigan. It was attended by 3000 people from around the world. And the keynote speaker was then president Woodrow Wilson. Now imagine a sales conference today where the sitting president is the keynote speaker. When the rest of the world is getting sucked into a world war, he wants to go speak to 3000 salespeople in Detroit.

But the other piece of that is that the whole motto of the sales conference, the whole entire motto was one word service, right? So that speaks so much to the way that they were really trying to push the sales profession to be very much service oriented. See, and I think that we absolutely have to get back to that. And I, and I think there's an opportunity to do it here with the predictable revenue model with a shift, right? Because the whole idea of inbound and then, you know, outbound and then AE and then potentially CS, I think is a broken one because the SDR only gets exposed to such a small fraction of the sales process. And then they get promoted to an AE and it's like, all right, you know, good luck, run, run, run the rest of it.

It's like, what the shit? Right? So instead of that, in, you know, moving an SDR, I still think there's value in an SDR gathering information, doing, you know, whatever, maybe tripping over a meeting every once in a while, but then once they're ready and they've showed, they put in the work, put them over to CS or put them over account management and let them work with customers. See what it's like when a bad sale gets, so see when expectations were misset, see what issues there are. So you have empathy for that person in that situation. And then if you want to move up to an AE, then you can, but the service part of it, I think is, you know, I'm screaming from the rooftops right now to sales reps, stop being a sales rep and be a problem solver.

Right. Just be a problem solver, look for problems, dig for them, figure out. And by the way, sometimes that problem isn't something that you're going to be able to get paid for and that's okay. And, and I think it's, you know, it's a leadership issue. It's a quota issue. It's a forecasting issue and all these different things, but I'm almost to a certain degree glad that the tech industry got the shit kicked out of it as much as, as painful as it was for me. Um, I'm glad it was such an abrupt, like, holy shit, money isn't free anymore. What do you mean? Because I think it woke a lot of people up to what, you know, like me, I've been through some leadership before, you know what I mean? You and I have been through some crazy recessions and, and that type of stuff.

It's like, all right, you know, seen that, been there, done that. Um, but now it's just like you falling apart. Um, I'll tell you the, the piece about that, that jumps out is you hear so often that sales has changed so much in the last 20, like to hear all this stuff. And I look at it, I'm like, yeah, but not how you think. And here's why when I had this kind of revelation around transparency and how, you know, we as human beings, we seek out negative reviews first when we're buying something online, that a product that has negative reviews sells at a higher conversion rate than a product that is nothing but perfect five-star reviews. And that's not just when a website's acting as a salesperson.

It's when a human is like, we need the negative and imperfection. Understanding the downside actually helps us process the upside, all of that stuff. We've always known that, right? We've always, my favorite sales quote of all time, 1921, Arthur Dunn. So another Arthur, his book, scientific selling and advertising. In it, there's a page that's blank except for one sentence because he wanted to make a point. And that sentence is, if the truth won't sell it, don't sell it. Right? If the truth won't sell it, don't sell it. Now, we've always known this, right? Transparency sells. We need to be honest. We need to be truthful. Oh, Todd, it feels good to be truthful. Got it. But here's how sales has changed so much in the last 15 years.

You know, in the 1980s and 1990s, you'd sell the deal and you'd move on, right? Like somebody, you sell a crappy deal, what are they going to do? Call an 800 number or write you a letter? Who gives a crap? Maybe tell their buddies at a party. Today, A, the proliferation of feedback and everything we do buy and experience means the truth prevails faster and louder than ever. And then B, the deal is no longer the peak of the sales relationship. It is merely an early milestone to having customers that buy, stay, buy more, advocate, take you with them to their next company. This as a service economy that we're in is the big game changer here. It's why the CRO and client success functions have grown so much.

It's because we have to play the long game because the long game's always won the long game, but the long game in today's world wins the short game too. We've got to play that. Yeah. It's, it's messy. Yeah. And it's funny that like, we talk about tech, we talk about all these things that are changing up. No, they're not. And that, that stat that drives me nuts is 72% of buyers prefer a rep free experience. Who are these 28% that want a rep, right? Like if you go to the airport and you have to talk to somebody that day, it means you're having a shitty day. If I can buy something without anybody's help, I want to, everybody wants to, I don't want to deal with a rep if I don't have to. And if I deal with a rep, that's not adding value, they're actually making it harder.

Of course, I'm one of those 72%. I can't believe it's not 98%, right? Maybe some people are lonely and they want to deal with the sales. All right, cool. Good for you. But I just think that that stat is misguided and it has been the same since the beginning of time. 1912, Thomas Herbert Russell in his book, Salesmanship, there was a line in it and it says, buyers no more nowadays. Buyers no more. 1912, it was during this rise of the proliferation of mail order catalogs in advertising and this worry that why would buyers want to deal with salespeople anymore? That's a 1908 Sears robot catalog right there. It's like Amazon in print form. You can buy everything from a house to, there's a section called the Department of Human Hair.

Like, I mean, you could buy everything, right? 1912, they were worried about this because buyers don't want to deal with salespeople if they don't have to. The issue is more information hasn't made it easier on buyers. It's made it harder and that sellers through the lens of service doing the homework for the buyer are why this profession continues to grow, continues to flourish. Those salespeople that do it right, they thrive and the ones that don't, we don't see them along for very long. Yeah. And that's like, again, kind of goes to my fear of what's happening with the AI stuff because it's making it that much easier to skip the line. It's making it that much easier to, I mean, I was just having a conversation with another colleague and I genuinely believe that the old school sales rep is actually going to be coming back and vote because you got old gray hair, gray beard here, you know, like me and you, you know, who are maybe sick of being out in the field, you know what I mean, have done their thing, but have such a wealth of knowledge and business acumen and ability to communicate with people.

And then you just use all the AI shit to service up intent and blah, blah, blah, give it to that person. They either make the phone call, have the meeting, it gets recorded, puts in a CRM, gets updated. And so I think, you know, tell Rob, you're not going to get replaced by AI, you're going to get replaced by sales reps, you know how to use AI. And that, unfortunately, is such a small portion of the population, they're even willing to try that out. And so, you know, I used to think that all history, you know, this has always happened, whatever, but I do think there's something different about this AI stuff. I do think as far as the speed that it is, it is learning and getting better. I mean, I'm, I'm, I will have a full-blown chat GPT version of me that you can ask any question to at any time.

And it'll give you better answers. Just like the guy Kawasaki conversation I had. I said, guy, you know, I already have this conversation with you and you were right. Your, your answers in your GPT were better than your answers were live. And he goes, well, kind of jokingly, cause he's a surfer. And he's like, well, why am I not still out surfing? And I'm like, guy, that's actually my question to you, man, is if, is if I can have a better conversation with your GPT, what is the value of this conversation? And that's what I'm trying to wrap my head around here. I think you and I are always going to want human interaction, right? Cause we grew up with it and we strive for it. We like it. But my daughter is 13, you know, is it going to matter that she's talking to the real Takaponi here?

Or is it going to matter that she gets the information that she wants out of Takaponi? I think it's the latter. And so with sales being squeezed, right? Cause marketing is coming upstream really, really fast with all this AI stuff. And then, you know, you have customer success where the customer wants to talk to them more than they want to talk to us. Cause where does that leave us? We'll get back to the history lesson in a second, but where does it leave us? Do you think, um, and how we can add value to the equation with all that happening to us? Well, yeah, I mean, I, AI is proving to be really, really valuable to me and being more efficient with the goal of being able to serve more customers, create better outcomes for them and do it at a faster pace where I'm spending less time in the less value add stuff.

And that is truly valuable to me. I think, you know, my lens on this, and I'm no AI expert by any means, but you know, I just look at this idea of, are we looking to curate and provide information that's already been created or are we just going to forget about creation? Now through the lens of history, there really are no new ideas. There's just new ways of presenting those ideas. And that is where AI becomes really, really valuable. But you know, for me, I'm going to like, I want to keep creating with the aid of AI to make me better at creating. And as long as we see it through that lens, I will take you history though a little bit here just to help everybody know what's going to happen. All right.

Because basically there's four stages in every new technology that's ever come out. You know, it's funny. Um, I, I just had done my last episode of the sales history podcast. It's called how founder led sales changed the world. And basically I went all the way back to, you know, like the guy that created the reaper that, you know, does all the farming for people. He created this thing. He loved, it was, he was so excited about it. He took it to a fair in London, the London times reported. It was like the stupidest thing they'd ever seen, right? Like this guy, he, you not only have to be a good creator, you've got to be a creative salesperson. The same thing with the guy that, um, you know, Henry Ford, for example, as he was building it, he was told by his boss that it was some absurd, like he had some like absurd idea here and like, he'd stop it and read, stop it.

Right. Like he needed to do something else. The guys that created the refrigerated train cars, right before you'd have to actually, if you're shipping out meats or whatever, you had to ship the whole cow in a train car. Now you have refrigerated train cars where you could take care of all of it and send it. And people were like, well, we bought the cattle cars already. You want us to start over and buy something three times as expensive? Screw you, right? Like all of these things have gone through the stage of first, that's never going to work. And then there's guarded optimism. Hey, you know what? This might work here and here. And then there's, Hey, I think this is going to be awesome. Like we should all try this.

And then every single time it goes to let's put that shit on everything. Right. And let's just go nuts with it and destroy it. We did it with the telephone, right? Telephone, there's incredible gift to the sales profession. We don't even have to leave our house. We can make calls. How awesome would that be? We ruined it by thinking scale and let's get really dirty with this thing. We needed technologies created to prevent people from using it, right? Like Dr. Shirley Jackson, creating the foundation for caller ID. And then when that didn't work, we needed the do not call registry that as of a couple of years ago, had over 221 million phone numbers on it. Alexander Graham Bell would be rolling over in his grave.

If he knew we destroyed it like that. We did it with email. We did it with LinkedIn. Just look at my connection requests. We started doing it with video. We're doing it with AI. AI is going through those same stages where technologies are going to have to be created, already are being created to recognize AI before it gets to you. And at some point, the government's going to have to get involved and put regulation around it because salespeople, marketers, whoever else, they ruin every one of these great advancements. Do you think we have to put, so my fear on regulations is that, you know, China and India, they're not putting any regulations on this shit, right? So, you know, would we, that's a big debate on, you know, if this was iRobot, right?

With Will Smith, that movie where they created the AI robots and they put the three laws in them already built in so they couldn't break them type of thing. Okay. Now I feel a lot more comfortable. The Pandora's box has already been opened, man. Right. So, you know, I think the, uh, controlling it or regulating it is going to be a very, because also half the people that write laws are so fucking old that they, they don't have any concept of what this shit is. I mean, to watch them interview one of the tech execs on Congress is like, I mean, honestly, it's embarrassing. It's like, you, uh, like you're not even asking questions my daughter would ask as it relates to technology. You still have a flip phone for crying out loud.

Why are you having this? Why are you trying to pick this apart? So, um, I do think regulation is important. Obviously, I just wonder how it's going to get implemented. So it doesn't, uh, dilute our, our advancements with it, if you will. Well, yeah, I think we need to ruin it first. We need to ruin AI before people go, all right, here's the harm and the hell on earth that we're creating from it. We got to get some controls. And I would, uh, I would assume that common sense will prevail. Now, historically it doesn't always, but it took us a long time to get to the do not call registry. It took us a long time to get to the can spam act. It took us a long time to get to some of these other regulations that, I mean, do not call registries kind of works.

Not really the can spam act. You know, it only is controlling about 45% of the email sent. Like it's working. Right. So you're, you're right. But I still think, I think we need to ruin stuff before we get into this period where somebody is like, Holy shit, we got to fix this. Yeah. Yeah. It's I, I agree with you. And I mean, look, they all went through it. Like when I brought up crypto and those types of things, they all had their, okay, reckoning, sorry, got ahead of our skis, crash it down, rebuild it the right way based on those learnings. Um, so I agree with that. So, so I guess 19, let's go back to 1910, right? It was respected. It was taught in colleges and universities. Where did it remind me where again, did it fall off and start becoming seen again?

Like what it, like a lot of people see it today. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny that, um, you had world war one. It wasn't funny, but, uh, 1918. Um, and they also had the Spanish flu at that time, which amazingly like in my doc, my magazines and all that stuff from the time, nobody even talked about it. It was like, Oh yeah. That seems weird to me, but here's, we, we literally repeated history here with COVID by the way, you know, that we had slow and steady growth from 1914 to 1917. Then we had an event that basically shut off the economy. So it sets the pendulum here. Economy shuts off. Didn't take long. We in the U S were not in world war one for very long. When we came out of it, the economy swung the complete other way.

In 1919, 1920, we had a booming economy. We had basically the great resignation almost exactly to where we had it today. We have essentially voluntary salesperson turnover in the 50 to 60 percentile range. You get to 1921, we suddenly, the pendulum swung back hard. We had a depression that nobody talks about. It's a forgotten depression of the early 1920s. Salesperson turnover in 1921 was 77% and that was involuntary. 1922 was 85%. Organizations purge their whole sales teams. Right. And I was screaming this in February of 1920 or of 2021. I was like, the end is near the end of like a note. Everybody's like, screw you, Todd. There's so much dry powder money. It's coming. And sure enough, we hit that hard time.

We came out of it, but we came out of it slowly. Now, if you think of 1923 to 1923, that's seven years of the people that were service-oriented had basically moved on, they were doing other stuff by 1923. In 1923, sales was hard. And as a result, the concept of high-pressure sales started. This idea that our buyers are too stupid to make decisions on their own, we've got to basically force them. I've got a magazine here from 1923 that basically has the argument, low-pressure sales versus high-pressure sales. That became more of the norm. And then all of a sudden, you get to 1928, 1929, you got the depression. That last 10 years, come out of that 1939. What happened in 1940, 41? World War II.

You've got that for a few years. By that point, we had literally generationed out all of the service-oriented salespeople. They were gone. Those concepts were gone. Just like today, where we don't pay attention to books from the 80s and the 90s, they weren't paying attention to stuff from the 1900s and 1910s. And as a result, this new way of selling was upon us. I just read a study yesterday. Yes. That's what I do on a Sunday. I'm a nerd. I read a study in the university, 1940. So 1940 study where they surveyed college students and said, and that they checked first, like, do you have any sales experience? Now, if you, again, wartime economy, jobs are scarce. If you were given a sales job, would you accept it?

77% said no way, right? Like, they would rather be unemployed than be in sales. 1960s, it was gone from every university by the 1940s, by the way. But by 1960, literally, companies would go to universities to recruit upcoming graduates. The graduates wouldn't even show up for interviews. They'd rather be unemployed because sales was considered gross. And a lot of it started after the forgotten depression of the 1920s. Was, and was that a, the high pressure tactics? You know, you always find that one person that kind of stands out in history that didn't create whatever it was, but it definitely was the lightning bolt or the, the person that, you know, you could say, is there somebody like that in sales where there was somebody who was like the wolf of wall street douche, you know, at a certain point who was just like, you know what, fuck it.

I got to make some money. I'm just going to stuff this down people's throats. Or was it just a collective, I guess, how did it grow from, you talked about now the fundamentals were skipped because of that. Right. But I guess, how did that start? How did the high pressure tactics start? Yeah. I mean, a lot of it comes out of desperation, right? And this idea that if I sell somebody a piece of crap, sorry about your luck, you know, come find me, bro. Right? Like, you know, so it starts there and you start having success jamming solutions down people's throats, especially when you're talking about, you know, a lot of the economy was driven by these high, like mechanical manufacturing purchases where once it's put in, you ain't get it out anyway.

So as a result, you had this faction and I'm going to say challenge accepted and trying to figure out if there was one guy or one person that started this, because I don't know who that is yet, but you just start to see this kind of rumbling of, Hey, you know what? This high pressure stuff works. We should continue doing it. And short-term thinking is cool. All the cool kids are doing it. We're making a bunch of money. Let's go. Like I was reading an article from 1924 about an individual that was hiring. So he was recruiting people and his approach was high pressure to the candidates, but teaching them high pressure. Like, listen, you're going commission only. There's no salary. There's no draw.

You're going through our training training class. You have to pass it and you're funding your own training class. We're not paying you a dime. And when you come out, you're going to sell the way we tell you to sell. And like, there was a lot of that. And in these magazines, these guys were proud of it. They're like, yeah, I'm a jerk and I'm going to drive you these people, but it's commission only. So go sell and we don't care what happens. That's kind of, so it's almost that fork in the road that a rep, that almost, I think every rep has to, to face, which is when you get out and you realize, and you think that this is a profession, right? And you're young, you don't have a lot of training, a lot of insights.

You know, you can go one or two paths and it, a lot of it has to do with your influence and who you're watching and who you're following on social these days. But it's, you can go down the douche bag path, you know, Grant Cardone style all day long, or you can go, you know, the thoughtful, like, I want to do this for service. Problem is, is the Grant Cardone approach looks a lot sexier and happens to your point a lot sooner in a lot of ways than the long, you know, the long game does. And so, you know, trying to, trying to catch a kid right when they hit that point and say, no, no, no, no, no, I get, I get stacks of cash. I get Lambos and all that other shit. But if you want to actually be able to sleep at night, maybe just find something you believe in and get it out there to people.

Well, yeah. And if you expect to be doing this job in 15 years, I mean, again, that blowhorn by which people can share their experiences, you've got to be able to go back to everybody that you've ever sold to with your head held high and know that you did them a service. Otherwise you're never walking back in there again. And that just can't continue. It's, it's not 1920 anymore. It's, you know, we're in the 2020s. Like we've got to play the long game. It wins the long game, but it wins the short game too. And we've got to start thinking that way. Let's finish up on this. How do you, how do you think we can? Cause yes, right. A hundred percent slow the fuck down, be quality, do your homework, all that stuff.

But I'm not a rep these days, right? I got my CEO who took VC money, who's pushing down my back, you know, whatever. And again, I think COVID was great. Um, and actually I think AI is fantastic for VCs because, uh, now they don't know what to do. And so now the money and, and interest rates falling through the floor, going through the roof. Like they, they're like, ah, what do I do? But there historically has been this massive downward pressure from, from the venture capitalists, whoever's the funding to the founders. And then the founders pushed to the city and they all get trickled down to sales. Um, so I'm sitting here as a rep, listening to this being like, yeah, Todd, fuck yeah, man. I want to do some homework.

I want, I want to be thoughtful on this, but I'm getting told to make $50 a day. I'm getting told to, you know, basically offer that discount that the client didn't ask for. So do I just say, fuck it? I don't want to work for a company like this and go search for one that, that fits my style. Or are there things that you can do as a rep to deal with that without pushing back significantly, but also learn the right way, the real way of doing it? Yeah. It's funny, dude. I was, uh, I was in, I had the honor of keynoting two events in Amsterdam a few weeks ago. And what I do when I'm going to all these different places is I always go into my archives and figure out like what happened in sales history in these different places.

Amsterdam, what am I going to find there? Well, Amsterdam's the problem. And here's why. 1602, the year 1602, that was the site of the first public stock trade. And the first stock exchange started in Amsterdam in 1602. Like I went to the site, right? And I did a selfie and it's the worst selfie guy in the world. Like no one's ever going to see that. But the point being that yes, the way that we've started to think about public funding of organizations has created this need for short-term focus. Like we got to hit our short-term numbers and we'll deal with the long-term later. If we don't satisfy those short-term investors right now, we're not going to have a job to deal with the long-term anyway.

So I literally, I did an episode of the sales history podcast called sales profession that can't be fixed. And it's not to be a naysayer because we can fix it. Absolutely. But we're always going to have those models, those short-term processes because of the fact of the way that organizations are invested in and measured. We take this short-term focus on it. Now I just continue to go back to the concept of transparency that it not only feels good, but it sells better. It sells better through the lens of, you know, we as human beings don't buy when we're convinced to buy, or if we are convinced, we're probably pissed about it 20 minutes later. We are prediction machines. We buy when we can predict.

And our role is to help buyers predict, predict how they're going to achieve outcomes, teach them how they might be able to achieve things they never even thought possible. And do that through the lens of service. Because that is when you differentiate, you know, you've got all your things you differentiate on your product, your, the way you service it, the way you implement it, the way you charge for it, all that kind of stuff. There's such an opportunity to create an extra differentiator. And it's differentiating in the way that you sell. Because when you do that, yes, the long game wins the long game. I keep saying that over and over again. But if you sell a solution to a customer that it's not the right fit, it's not going to work out.

Now you'll deal with that dissatisfaction later, right? Well, here's what you'll also deal with later. That one person talking to their buddies on the blow horn of Slack and their communities and all that crap. You're losing four or five deals that you never knew existed. Because that person talked to those other ones and they ain't calling you. And so that's the way we've got to think about it is the way we fix it is we buy when we can predict, not when we convince. So be a helper, do the homework for the buyer, help them predict. And in so doing, you will win the short game because they'll be calling you and they'll be telling their friends about it. That's in my own business. And I know you do this too, John, that I had a CRO of a large company.

So I got happy years when they reached out. They CRO once talked to me. It was sweet. I get on the phone. He immediately goes into a, like, we'd start talking about like, what are you struggling with? Like, why didn't you call me? And he's like, dude, we need top of funnel help, cold calling, social selling, prospecting, all that kind of stuff. I'm like, all right, cool. We talked through it. I then told him, I literally said this quote, listen, I could help you with that. I could do it. But if you made a list of the top 50 people that do that, I'd come in at about number 47. I've got a couple of buddies. Your name was one of them that I would love to connect you with. And they're the experts.

They're awesome at it. Go. And this guy was like, I would love those names. I would love those intros. That's awesome. But what do you focus on? And I took them through it. We ended up doing a whole negotiation program for tons of their agents, right? So being honest and that taking that approach builds trust, and it oftentimes brings them back around to you anyway. Almost. And thanks for saying that, because I've been preaching this. You know, I did this when I was in my first startup. Again, going back to being a problem solver, right? The tip that I've given to a couple of groups that I've worked with so far is, okay, look at your ideal customer profile, the persona. Like, who do you sell to most?

Now, what are all the other, forget about your solution here for a second. What are all the other vendors that touch that person, that sell to that person or that persona? Then group them up, like into different groups as, you know, IT versus even law and finance, you know, those types of things. Then find the vendor in your space, in your territory that does that. Call them up and ask for their best sales rep. Literally just be like, I want to talk to your absolute best sales rep. And then be like, hey, like if this was, hey, Todd, look, I'm new in the territory right now. I'm selling for JV sales at this point. We do sales training. I know you do this. Can I learn a little bit more about what you do?

And look, this is the type where you, I'm guessing you and I have a similar profile. So if anything ever comes up on that, man, I'd love to, you know, get a referral. If I come up with anything, I'll send it to you. And then we meet once a month just to talk about, okay, what's, what's happening in the territory? Who's doing what, whatever. And that now you walk into a client's office becoming a problem solver and start to dig and dig and dig and dig and dig. And you're like, actually, and I have the same approach as you. If I am not great at something, if I, if I don't fit these days, I will walk away a thousand percent of the time. I will recommend my top competitors like Richard Harris and Kevin Dorsey and you, you know what I mean?

Like be like, Hey, that's not my thing. Right. But you got, they're like same, same mentality or response that you get, which is, wait, what? Again, I'd love, thank you. Thank you. And they'll say, thank you for your transparency. Thank you for not trying to sell me on something. And I walk them through a little spiel of how, you know, I own my own business is not too much pressure from the top. But I think that theme right there is how sales evolves or, or revolves, or I guess, I don't know if that's the right way to put it. And I'll tell you in the 1910s at those sales kickoffs, they called conventions back then. Many companies invited their competitors to their own, like literally they would put them like, Hey, you don't have to share any of your secret sauce or anything, but let's make the world a better place because our solutions help people.

Let's figure out how to make sure that we're using our most valuable asset that we can convert to revenue. It's not all the products back there, it's our time. Like, and so we've got to be working on the opportunities where we can make the biggest impact and making sure that those ones where maybe it's not optimal, get rid of them quickly. We've got to move on. And again, that's the most successful companies I've ever been CRO for or like, you know, at any of these sales teams, the most successful ones are the ones that saw through that lens. And the ones that haven't have been the ones that think that they're total addressable market or their ICP is anybody that's got something other than lint in their wallet.

Yeah. And I encourage those companies that look like for anybody who's watching a company or a sales rep right now, who's quote unquote, killing it in that scenario, come back to them in about a year and see what their churn rates are as far as renewals are concerned. And I almost guarantee you it's extremely high. Exactly. Because that's, and that's why I think, you know, going back to Chris Voss, right? Never split the difference. And he talks about getting the yes. You were saying that earlier. Well, that's a bullshit book because it's, it's like you, you feel like you're being manipulated. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. You know, it's a bunch of tiny yeses to get the one big, but you feel that whether you know what's happening or not, you're like, okay, where is this going?

Where is this going? And I think when people think about sales reps and they roll their eyes, it has to do with the trust factor, not the likability factor. People say all the time, oh, I buy from, you know, people buy from people they like, no bullshit. They buy from people they trust. Yeah. And I don't need to necessarily, I don't, I mean, look, if you're a horrible person, you know, I, I have my morals and on my lines there, but I don't need to like you. I just need to believe that you can do what you were saying you can do and you can solve my problem. And I would rather deal with that all day long. And so I think trust to your point, there's little nuanced ways of building trust by recommending other people, taking a step back and say, that's not really us.

Those types of things that put us, you know, the real sales reps in a great position to be successful. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome, man. Well, uh, look, I could keep asking you questions all day long, but we're coming up in the hour here. Uh, any final thoughts on, on, I guess, perspectives on today that might make people feel a little bit better, um, about how this isn't like the, you know, Armageddon here in the sales world and it's actually happened before and you got to just power through it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we, if things play to the way they did back then, we are going to see a period of slow, steady growth, uh, that continues in a smart, profitable way. I can't help you though, in terms of seeing the future and saying that things are going to be good because we're going to forget that we're going to go into a growth at all costs again, because we've done it a hundred freaking times and then it's going to come crashing down and who knows what happens back in those 1920s.

When we came out of that little known depression, you know, there was a commission that was put together by the president, a bunch of people to say, how do we make sure that depression never happens again? They'd like, they spent months figuring it all out. And it only took five years for us to have the greatest depression of our lifetimes. Right? So it's hard to predict. It's hard to prevent, but you know, that we go through these cycles and we're certainly going to do it again, but enjoy the next couple of years. Yeah. I think, and pay attention, right? I mean, it's the ones who have their head in the sand right now that are just, oh, this AI thing's a fad and I can still add value. My Rolodex is still relevant.

These steak dinners are still legit. And I'm not saying they're not, but you have to have that bifocal view at this point. You have to have, that's why I think this generation of sales rep we've done such a disservice to. So, and again, you've heard me talk about this. I'm positioning 2010 to 2022 as the gold major of sales. And it's because we over-engineered this process. And so now these reps, when sales is hard, they actually don't have the fundamentals to fall back on. You know, you and me, it's like, oh, that sucks. I mean, I mean, think about it, right? I got to 6,020,000 employees and it went to zero within two months, like zero. Yeah. And if I didn't have the background or if I didn't have the sales skills, I wouldn't be here having this conversation with you right now.

I can't believe I beat you. I went down to 5,000. So. Yeah. And I mean, it was fucking slaughter, right? I mean, it was like, but I had all the confidence of the world because I'm not, I don't consider myself a sales rep. I consider myself a problem solver. Somebody, look, I tell people, you, sales is, if you're trying to convince someone in sales, you are doing it wrong. Sales is about helping people solve problems or achieve goals. Yeah. That's it. And if your problems aren't big enough and your goals aren't big enough, why the fuck are we talking right now? Exactly. Help them predict. Awesome there. Well, thanks for the history lesson here. You know, I think we do, I do need to learn a little bit more from our, from my past.

So I don't make as many mistakes as I continue to make, I guess, but you're always there to share a little bit of insights that get me thinking. So Todd, where can they find out more information about you, the stuff you're working on, right? You're doing some killer keynotes these days to really wake people up. So where can they find out more? Yeah. I mean, toddcapowney.com. I have links to all my nerdery there. And again, if you thought history stuff is interesting, I don't monetize that at all. It's the sales history podcast. And then it's at sales historian on Instagram and Twitter, where I share a lot of the little clips and things all over the place. Again, I just do that for fun. I need an outlet for this nerdery.

And then of course you can follow along on LinkedIn where I share a lot of my nonsense there. Yeah. I love it, man. So wealth of knowledge and I appreciate that, you know, cause, cause what you're doing is, is, is that middle ground for me of the charlatans, you know, like the bullshit guy up there just cause he has a book talking about hit the list and dah, dah, dah, dah. And you're not really giving a shit. Right. Right. Um, but having substance that gets people to think, but also actions that they can do, you know, you're one of those that I think can, can really command a crowd, obviously with your experience and the way you tell stories, but it's almost everything that you talk about is backed up by science, by research, by those types of things, which I think a lot of people need to hear, um, these days because it's just, it's not getting any easier, but when you can pick up on stuff and tweak and add, and you're willing to put in the work, uh, it, this is, I think the opportunities are limitless.

Let's put it that way. Exactly. My wife is a saint for putting up with all the nerdery that I've got here, but I really do care about this profession. And like I said, transparency sells better than perfection. You gotta do it anyway. It'll feel good, but I think your wallet will feel better too. And guess what? It's a lot easier. It is. Yeah. When you don't have any myths truths to hide, life becomes so much easier. Doesn't it? I'm sorry. People say like, oh, John, you're so authentic about that. I'm like, it being not inauthentic is I can't think of it because it's so much effort to lie. It's so much effort to not be you. Like I'm just being mean. If you fucking like me, you like me. If you don't, you don't.

If it fits, it fits. If it doesn't, it doesn't. Like I last point, Megan on my team, she's my COO. She's the only one left standing. She is literally is and always has been my best sales rep because she doesn't sell. I tell her when an inbound lead comes, we already, we have a form you fill out because all the data, you know, all the qualification stuff goes to her. She asks a few questions to dig to what the problem is. Tells them what the package that is most valuable or viable. And then the price and that's it. And I told her if they start pushing back on price, send it over to me. I'll have that conversation with them, but she's got like a 75% close rate because she doesn't fucking sell.

Yep. That's it. That's it. That's not as hard. People make it same to me, even though it is still very hard. The grind is real, you know, percentages are brutal, but I think too many reps overcomplicate this. So thanks again for reminding us to keep it simple here, Todd. Appreciate your brother. Thanks for having me again as always, my brother. Absolutely. And everybody, I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did as usual. And like I always say at the end of all these podcasts, go out there and make somebody smile today. Cause no matter how bad your day is going or how bad you think it went, you make somebody smile and you know, you had a good day and the world needs a lot more of that right now.

So thank you all very much. And I will see you on the other side. Hey everyone. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did with your support and our incredible guests. We're one of the top sales podcasts out there right now. And I can't thank you enough. Now to keep the momentum going, it would mean the world to me. If you could go and leave a five-star review on your favorite podcast platform and share some of your favorite episodes with your network. Also, I am super excited to be launching my new newsletter where I'll be sharing everything I know and everything I'm learning along the way while I'm out there selling every day, just like you go to jbarrows.com slash newsletter to sign up today.

Let's all level up and make this happen together. Bye.