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4 days ago
4 days ago
Stop leaving money on the table.
In this episode, sales historian and author Todd Caponi reveals why traditional negotiation tactics are destroying trust, eroding margins, and creating unsustainable business models.
Todd shares the revolutionary Four Levers framework that helped him close a $7.5M deal when the customer demanded 35% off - and they ended up with only 15% discount while paying upfront for three years.
What You'll Learn:
🟣Why building trust until the close, then "starting to lie" about pricing is killing your deals
🟣Negotiation Without the Games: Todd Caponi's Four Levers Framework
🟣The 115-year-old concept of "sound basis pricing" that buyers have been demanding since 1910
🟣How the 4x pipeline rule forces reps to waste time on garbage opportunities
🟣Why BANT qualification is outdated and what to do instead
🟣The Four Levers: Volume, Timing of Cash, Length of Commitment, and Timing of Deal
🟣How to stop discounting unilaterally andEducating buyers to squeeze harder
🟣Real data: 20-30% reduction in discounting, 7-8 figure profitability improvements
🟣Why every unasked-for concession (even net 45 vs net 30) signals everything is negotiable
Perfect for: Founders, sales leaders, and top performers who want to increase deal values, improve forecast accuracy, and build sustainable pricing models.
About Todd Caponi
Author of "The Transparency Sale", "The Transparent Sales Leader" and "Four Levers Negotiating," Todd is a longtime sales leader, self confessed transparency nerd, and the only sales history expert who collects artifacts from the 1800s-1900s.
His approach has been working for 17+ years across multiple organizations.
Get Todd's Book: "Four Levers Negotiating" - https://amzn.to/4jPmjG9
Connect with Todd:
🎙️ The Sales History Podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-sales-history-podcast/id1571354113
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/toddcaponi/
💡 Found this valuable?
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📊 What's your biggest negotiation challenge?
Drop it in the comments.
#SalesNegotiation #B2BSales #SalesLeadership #Pricing #RevenueGrowth
Saturday Jan 17, 2026
Saturday Jan 17, 2026
Most B2B deals don’t end in “no”.
They die quietly. No decision. No movement. No momentum.
In this episode, Marcus Cauchi speaks with Karl Schmidt,one of the leaders of the research teams that helped 100s of companies take advantage of the insights from The Challenger Sale.
Buyers now do most of their thinking before they ever speak to a salesperson. Buying committees have doubled. Information is everywhere. Confidence is not.
This conversation explores why traditional sales approaches struggle in this reality, and why the best sellers are no longer pushing solutions. They’re helping buyers make sense of risk, complexity, and internal politics. You’ll hear:
• Why decision confidence matters more than solution confidence
• The fears that quietly kill deals
• How sellers unintentionally strip buyers of agency
• Why “no decision” is the real competitor
• What framemaking looks like in real sales conversations
If you’re a founder, CEO, sales leader, or an aspiring top performer, this episode will change how you think about discovery, deal reviews, and what it really means to help a customer buy. This is not about tactics. It’s about leadership in the buying process.
Monday Jan 12, 2026
Monday Jan 12, 2026
Are you settling for "good enough" while your sales organisation invests in an 85% loser rate?
In this episode, Marcus Cauchi sits down with David Brock, author of "Is Good Enough Good Enough? Mindsets and Behaviors for Sales Excellence," to challenge the traditional "metrics madness" that keeps founders and sales leaders trapped in cycles of mindless activity.
Dave shares his pragmatic, scientific approach to performance, revealing how top performers achieve their goals by being "intelligently lazy" and cutting out the "dead work" that consumes the average workday.
They explore the "Three-Pile Strategy" for auditing tasks, the high cost of customer churn, and why personal accountability is the ultimate differentiator between top performers and those who make excuses.
A major highlight of this conversation is David’s contrarian take on AI. Having used Claude AI as a "thought partner" and "debate partner" to co-author his book, David explains why AI is a "profound amplifier" that makes deep thinkers better but makes "lazy idiots" fail at scale.
Learn how to use discovery-based prompting to internalise strategic ownership and why curiosity remains the foundational behaviour for the next generation of leaders.
Key Topics Covered:
• The Trap of Activity vs. Outcomes: Why being "busy" is often a mask for underperformance.
• The Three-Pile Audit: Examine tasks and reclaiming 40% of your team's capacity. • Retention vs. Acquisition: Why the obsession with new logos is a recipe for wasted effort.
• AI as a Debate Partner: Moving beyond automation to elevate your strategic thinking.
• The Sacred Habit: Why scheduling 20 minutes of reflection daily is non-negotiable for excellence
Contact David Brock on linkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davebrock/
Email: dabrock@excellenc.com
Website: http://partnersinexcellenceblog.com/
Read the book: https://amzn.to/4brvQku
Contact Marcus https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcuscauchi/
Saturday Jan 10, 2026
Saturday Jan 10, 2026
Why do so many sales teams stumble despite talented hires?
In this episode, Peter Wheeler, serial entrepreneur and expert in scaling revenue velocity for early-stage organisations, explores the decline of apprenticeship in modern sales and the impact it has on team performance and long-term growth.
We examine why the traditional player-manager model often fails, how role siloing prevents junior staff from learning the ropes, and why leadership needs to move beyond administrative tasks to actively coach and support teams in the field.
Peter highlights the systemic dysfunctions caused by shareholder primacy and short-term thinking, including the hidden costs of high sales turnover, conflicting departmental metrics, and the erosion of trust and integrity in organisations. He explains why senior executives, not just salespeople, must engage with customers to understand real-world challenges and make informed strategic decisions.
We also discuss practical solutions to restore apprenticeship and learning in sales, including aligning teams around customer outcomes, leveraging AI as a personal coaching tool, and fostering a culture of trust, integrity, and long-term thinking.
Listeners will gain insights into how to build high-performing teams, reduce churn, and develop sustainable business growth, even in times of uncertainty or economic turmoil.
Whether you’re a founder, sales leader, or executive looking to improve team performance, this episode offers actionable advice, fresh perspectives, and strategies to thrive in a sales environment that too often sacrifices learning for short-term results.
Key Takeaways:
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The hidden costs of high sales turnover and short-termism
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How role siloing and player-manager models stunt growth and learning
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Why senior leaders must be actively engaged with customers
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Strategies for aligning departments and prioritising customer outcomes
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Leveraging AI for coaching, personal effectiveness, and customer-centric entrepreneurship
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Thriving through market uncertainty by focusing on what you can control
Contact Peter on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/peterledgrowth/
Contact Marcus https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcuscauchi/
or email team@principledselling.com
Wednesday Jan 07, 2026
Friday Dec 12, 2025
Monday Nov 17, 2025
Monday Nov 17, 2025
Steve’s journey was marked by sheer graft and some brutal personal blows. His first five years were, in his own words, madness. Eighteen to twenty hour days, six days a week. Then came a messy divorce, COVID and throat cancer.
The Founder Dependency Trap
Like many founders, Steve found himself in the classic trap. Everyone relied on him to make every decision. He sought help because his sales team was struggling and he realised he needed to learn how to step out of the way so his business could run without him.
The Uncomfortable Mentorship: Facing the Tormentor
Steve brought in Marcus and very quickly discovered this was not a cosy training course. He describes it as counselling for sales, full of uncomfortable moments, direct questions, and role plays that forced him to confront his own habits.
The turning point came when he learned to challenge and filter prospects properly. At first he thought it was rude to push back or walk away. In reality, detaching from the outcome stopped him wasting hours on buyers who were never going to buy.
The Measurable Transformation
The discomfort paid off. In spades.
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Efficiency: He went from putting in 100 percent effort to about 25 percent, yet was selling four times as much.
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Asset Growth: Between 2020 and 2024, while battling both COVID and cancer, the company’s net worth grew from £750k to £2.5m.
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Profitability: Pre tax profit rose from nearly £200k to just under £500k.
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Final Win: He closed his career with a £1.7m order. As he puts it, he started selling paper yachts and ended selling a battleship.
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Personal Return: The negotiation skills he picked up even saved him hundreds of thousands in his divorce settlement.
The Outcome: Freedom
When he sold in February 2025, Steve felt absolutely floating. The win was not just financial. He had finally proved the business could run without him.
If you are a founder trying to build a saleable asset and escape founder dependency, Steve’s story is well worth your time. It is honest, hard won, and full of lessons for anyone walking a similar path.
Contact Steve on Linkedin
Sunday Nov 16, 2025
Sunday Nov 16, 2025
Why Trust Breaks Down and What To Do About It
In this episode, Marcus talks with Charles Green, one of the genuine heavyweights in the world of trust and commercial relationships. If you lead a mid market scaling tech firm and you suspect your sales or GTM function is underperforming for reasons no dashboard can explain, this conversation will feel uncomfortably accurate.
Together they explore how fear, uncertainty, and internal pressure quietly poison performance. Forget the usual talk about activity ratios and pipeline hygiene. This is a candid look at the human drivers behind buyer reluctance, stalling, and ghosting, and why most attempts to “solve” these problems only make them worse.
Charlie argues that instead of trying to measure trust, leaders should focus on spotting and removing the behaviours that actively destroy it. If you are grappling with the tension between short term targets and long term customer value, this episode will challenge how you think about leadership, incentives, and your culture.
Key Takeaways for Scaling Founders, GTM Leaders and Sales People
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Trust is lived, not conceptual. It is emotional as much as rational. Charlie draws a clear distinction between thin, institutional trust and thick, personal trust.
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Trust is often built in moments. Reliability takes repetition, but intimacy is created quickly. How you pause, how you listen, and how you look at someone all matter more than your slide deck.
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Over promising is lying twice. One promise on the way in, one on the way out. It corrodes trust faster than anything.
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Fear drives most distrust. Buyers who feel uncertain catastrophise. That is what creates anticipatory buyer remorse and pipeline ghosting. The antidote is to name the fear out loud. Once spoken, it loses power.
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Repair beats perfection. A relationship that has been broken and then repaired well is often stronger than one that never faced a test. Repair requires vulnerability and accountability, not ego.
The Trust Equation and Why Most Firms Focus on the Wrong Bits
The Trust Equation helped popularise the components of trustworthiness. Most leaders obsess over credibility and reliability because they are convenient to measure. Charlie explains why they are nowhere near the strongest drivers.
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Intimacy. By far the biggest factor. It is about making the other person feel safe, understood, and genuinely heard. Nurses top trust rankings for a reason.
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Low Self Orientation. The second strongest factor. Hard to measure and impossible to bribe into existence. Fear drives self orientation. Freedom from fear frees you to focus on others.
Scaling, Money, and the Uncomfortable Truth About Culture
Charlie and Marcus tackle why trust based, customer centric selling so often collapses once a company grows beyond 100 or 200 people.
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Money permeates culture. Investors and boards often prioritise valuation over outcomes. This shifts intent and corrodes trust without anyone noticing.
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Ideology shapes behaviour. Modern management is built on economic beliefs that favour short term gains and things that are easy to measure.
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Mixed messages destroy conviction. Telling teams to “do the right thing” while driving absurd stretch targets creates confusion and cynicism.
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The Bill Green example. When the former Accenture CEO was challenged about incentives conflicting with doing the right thing, he told the room to do the right thing first, then fix the incentives later. That clarity changed the behaviour of forty senior leaders immediately.
Practical Trust Based GTM Moves
These are the actions Charles Green recommends leaders adopt straight away.
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Be transparent on price early. Withholding price to “build value” creates anxiety. Give a ballpark early to remove fear.
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Stop using discounts as currency. It destroys trust. Offer only standard, published discounts such as volume or non profit rates.
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Protect existing customers first. Expansion and net new wins come after that. Repeat business is far more profitable and far less stressful.
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Measure Time to Value, not NPS. Buyers rent an outcome. How quickly they reach it tells you more about your trustworthiness than a score.
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Build your trust muscle. Make many small promises and keep every one of them. It is astonishing how fast this compounds.
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Model the behaviour you want. Trust others first and show your workings. A simple line such as “I could be wrong, but it seems this is an issue. Is it?” creates space for honesty.
Final Thoughts and What Happens Next
Trust is built in tiny moments. Charlie encourages listeners to choose two or three insights, write them down, and let them settle into daily practice. Marcus points out that a 0.1 percent daily improvement compounds to roughly 30 percent over a year. The benefits start immediately.
Listeners are invitated to join Sellers Anonymous, a community helping salespeople strengthen their trust muscle
Subscribe to hear the next episode: Marcus and Charles will dissect how the Trust Equation applies to negotiation, objections, and winning second and third waves of business.
Links to books discussed
Adam Smith
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
Frederick Reichheld
Peter Boghossian
How to have impossible conversations
Contacts
Connect with Charlie on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/charleshgreen/
Connect with Marcus https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcuscauchi/
And if you'd like to be a guest contact me https://www.linkedin.com/in/suzannecauchi/
Friday Nov 14, 2025
Friday Nov 14, 2025
In this episode, Jordan Corn and Marcus Cauchi dissect the deeply flawed traditional approach to employee performance evaluation, the "Annual Festival of Fiction". They challenge the idea that reviews serve their intended purpose and share actionable frameworks for leaders to build continuous growth systems, rather than just checking boxes.
Key Themes for Leaders and Managers
1. The Broken System: Checking Boxes vs. Driving Growth
Traditional performance reviews are often theatre: they replace truth with formality and create anxiety instead of growth. When managers simply mark a three on a scale to avoid justification, they are "checking a box".
The problem is systemic: reviews often exist as a paper trail for pay decisions and compliance, not for meaningful reflection or planning. Some reflection is better than none, but if the process isn’t valuable or valued, it won’t change much.
2. Relationships Come First
Effective performance management starts with the manager-employee relationship. Reviews fail if the manager is a bully, a micromanager, or insecure.
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Psychological Safety and Vulnerability: Managers must earn the right to tell the truth by showing vulnerability, asking where staff need help and seeking their advice.
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Bidirectional Feedback: Feedback should flow in all directions. Employees need to feel safe critiquing management, and managers must be willing to listen without defensiveness.
3. Frequency, Focus, and Continuous Improvement
Waiting a year is too long. Annual reviews without ongoing feedback are "like washing once a year". Real performance management is continuous, like adjusting a plane mid-flight.
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Agile Coaching: Regular micro check-ins: monthly 15–30 minutes or daily three-minute updates keep everyone aligned.
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Focus on Strengths: Lean into what people do well. Reviews should energise, not dwell on weaknesses.
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Separate Compensation: Tying pay to reviews is "absolutely inane" and undermines their value.
4. Systemic Issues: Hiring and Alignment
Problems often start at recruitment. High turnover results from compromise, or searching for mythical “purple unicorns,” creating systems built to reject rather than select the right fit.
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Self-Awareness: Reviews can become "behavioral reviews," helping employees understand how they show up and how others respond.
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Preparation Over Ambush: Managers should prime employees a week in advance and encourage reflection from both sides. The goal is to synchronise reality, not sanitise it.
Final Takeaway
If you can’t run a review rooted in honesty, psychological safety, and growth - or if you limit them to once a year - Jordan Corn says, "throw the whole thing out". Instead, leaders should redesign the process around the human being first, then fill in whatever is required for compliance.
For teams stuck in the "Festival of Fiction," Marcus shares systemic models to "model and scale human judgment" and even measure trust as a hard metric, helping embed learning, dignity, and accountability into management practices.
Connect with Jordan on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordan-corn/
Connect with Marcus https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcuscauchi/
And if you'd like to be a guest contact me https://www.linkedin.com/in/suzannecauchi/
Tuesday Nov 11, 2025
Tuesday Nov 11, 2025
This episode of The Inquisitor Podcast features Parker Mills, Account Executive at ServiceNow and author of State and Local Government Sales: Beyond the Bid. Parker exposes the systemic dysfunction created when short-term sales culture sabotages long-term public value.
With 11 years in U.S. state and local government (SLG) sales, he dissects the brutal misalignment where enterprise is the tail that wags the dog, corporate GTM strategy, incentives, and collateral all built for the wrong customer profile.
For founders and C-suites, Parker calls out the dangerous internal pressure that fuels “optimism theatre” and quietly corrodes integrity and trust. His challenge: treat forecast accuracy as a measure of integrity, not compliance. Give your sellers the freedom to protect relationships from the distortions of quarterly panic.
Why? Because government sales aren’t built for sprints. The average deal runs 18 months, often tied to state fiscal calendars or biennial budgets. The only winning strategy is one built on patience, preparation, and principle.
For sellers in the field, we unpack how to move Beyond the Bid, from chasing RFPs to driving pre-RFP collaboration 2–3 years before the funding ask. Parker reveals the practical shifts that separate average from elite:
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Stop prescribing and start co-developing
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Learn the policy backdrop, especially around AI (many states still ban GenAI)
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Read public strategic plans like they’re account plans
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Map the second and third rooms to stop corridor kills before they happen
And the biggest mindset shift of all: stop focusing on winning the bid. Focus on deserving the renewal. Integrity is not a slogan, it’s a skill.
If you’re ready to dismantle a commercial-centric GTM and align your quotas to public sector reality, this conversation will challenge your thinking. Parker shares a blueprint for turning forecast accuracy into integrity, handling ghosting with composure, and learning why slowing down is the fastest way to sustainable growth.
Tune in to discover how integrity-led sellers shape the deal years before the RFP, and why that’s exactly what the public sector deserves.
Contact Parker: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pamills/
Email parkermills@stateandlocalsales.com
Parker's book 'https://amzn.to/445uJCz
The Framemaking Sale by Karl Schmidt and Brent Adamson: https://amzn.to/4jHYYpU
The Challenger Sale https://amzn.to/4qv7w63
Noise by Daniel Kahneman https://amzn.to/4pzcGwr
More resources at theframemakingsale.com