The Transparency Sale - Summary and review

Todd Caponi was CRO of PowerReviews - a company that provides online review services for retailer sites. During this time, he found that prospects were MORE willing to buy a product whose reviews are in the 4.2 - 4.5 star range than a product with a perfect 5-star rating.

Why?

All products have flaws. Therefore, only having 5-star reviews is suspicious. Prospective users will look to find these flaws. The unknown is what is scary, so once these flaws have surfaced, prospects can relax.

Counterintuitively, telling people what your product is bad at, along with what it’s good at, allows you to close more sales, faster. Share what your competitors do better, and don’t be afraid to even recommend a substituting solution if that suits the client better - that will give you incredible trust as the “unbiased expert” and often lead to the prospect opening up further.

“The buyer brain” looks for red flags, tries to avoid being influenced, prefers the status quo, and resists change.

People base their decisions on feelings and emotions, and then want to rationalize to find logical explanations for their decisions. Just like Way of the Wolf suggests talking about logical and emotional certainty.

Thus, Caponi suggests not just hiding your flaws, but rather laying them right where everyone can see them.

Flaunting your flaws does two things:

1. It pushes people out of the typical sales resistance.

2. It builds immediate trust. Honesty and integrity are effective sales strategies.

This affects your entire sales pipeline - increasing the number of qualified opportunities, the average deal size, and the likelihood of closing the deal. Finally, it decreases the length of the sales cycle.