ISEs3 Ep14: Todd Caponi – Sales History Nerd + Transparency Evangelist @ Sales Melon

Hello everyone and welcome to Inside Sales Enablement Season Three Enablement History, and joining Me in the Orchestrate Sales Studios. Today is someone who knows a lot about history, a lot more than me sales specifically, but it's Mr. Todd Caponi and he is the founder, speaker, not just speaker, but CSP. Certifiably speaker. He'll probably share a little bit about that. Amazing to me. I didn't know such a thing existed, CSP. And he's a workshop leader for his own, very successful company sales melon. In addition to, as I alluded to, he is the sales history, nerd and host. Sounds familiar. Just got to add the enablement, right? For the sales history podcast. And man, Todd's great to meet you. We had a pretty fun pre show and we were like, we got to start recording. This is gold. So Todd, anything I missed before we dive into the questions, you've got such a broad, deep and wide history, my friend.

Now it's funny. I when cool people are doing cool things on the weekends, I'm digging into late 1800s, early 1900s books on sales and sales management. I've got, I'm building basically a museum for sales. I've got triggers set up and eBay and all kinds of places, anything that comes up. I'm buying it and like my wife and family are saints for putting up with, it smells like the deepest corner of grandma's basement in here from all the musty books in here, but I love it.

That's great. And for those of you who can't see the visual we do in fact have an entire library of phenomenal books, including two of his own. I don't think I mentioned author among those. And he is the author of both the transparency sale and looking to click up to the sometimes forgotten leader of sales, the transparent sales leader. So I'm sure we'll get to a little bit of more of that in a minute, but let's start off Todd with okay. Sales history. Where did sales enablement come in?

It's funny. I'm going to share a quick story for you because it's one of the most amazing stories I'd ever heard about. You call it sales training, you call it sales enablement, call it whatever you want. We all have probably heard of Mark Twain, right? Mark Twain, the author of the adventures of Tom Sawyer, the adventures of Huckleberry Finn. And then you may have heard of a U S president Ulysses S Grant, right? So Ulysses S Grant, war hero, president. When you're the president back then, you didn't get a pension. There was no 401k. He had made some good money. Him and his son connected up with another guy and they created like a wall street investment firm. That other guy turned out to be a crook, absolute crook of the worst kind. Ulysses S grant 1884 had lost all of his money. None of it. He also smoked like 60 cigars a day and ended up getting diagnosed with terminal throat cancer. Yeah. And so he's sitting there and he's listen, I want to write my memoirs. I need to be able to leave some money for my family. What am I going to do? He signs on with a publishing firm that didn't give him the best terms in the world. Mark Twain considered Ulysses X Grant to be an absolute hero. Jumps in and it's wait, I will publish this book for you. I will do, I'll put together programs. I will do this. And Ulysses X Grant's I already signed. I'm like no. You can get out of that. Come with me. Mark Twain then helps him. So Ulysses S. Grant writes morning, noon, night on his deathbed. There's pictures of him, curled up in he's shaking doing this, he's dying, he gets the book done. In the meantime, Mark Twain creates a publishing house. He finds 10, 000 people to go sell this book. And most of them were former pieces of Ulysses S. Grant's military. He taught

a true customer facing frontline.

absolutely and enabled them all to go door to door. He created something called selling the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. These 10, 000 go door to door. They're taught exactly how to message this, how to do it all in the end. The book comes out. He dies somewhere between three and seven days later. All right, but within the next year, Mark Twain was able to hand his widow a check that in today's terms would be 12 million.

Holy sucker.

is, and I consider it the first true product launch enablement program that is done, and this is 1885. And some of those stories that I see and I hear, I'm like, Man, people got to hear these stories. Who would ever have associated Mark Twain with being a pioneer for sales enablement and product launch. But there we go. Ulysses S. Grant at the time was that book was the second highest selling book of all time behind the Bible. Amazing. And there's more from a history perspective, by the way, we can dig into people like I'm a big fan of john Patterson. You may have heard of him, Patterson was really his the way his brain worked. He created so much of the foundational structures of what we use still today. First dedicated territories, first quotas. He did the first sales kickoff in 1887. And I've got some of the details around that. His brother in law created a play, a sales handbook for the team. It was called the NCR primer at the time. It was how I sell NCR cash registers. That was written in 1925 on Patterson and it is fantastic.

Outstanding. What great story already. So that's the first time in history, arguably with sales enablement. How about the first time you heard those two words?

When I first got my first sales leadership role in 2008, My lens was always, Hey, listen, everybody, we're peers. Like I'm nobody's boss. But we have different responsibilities and you help me. I help you. This is what we're going to do. And one of the ways I'm going to help you is I'm going to try to make you better at what you do when you walk out of here than when you are right now. That was always my lens. I ended up going to a company called Exact Target. That's an email marketing unicorn at the time. If you want to call it that based in Indianapolis, I was one of the four people running the country. So I had a big region, most like the central region and then half of Canada.

Wow.

I got hired, my boss, this guy, Andy was like, Todd. When you get here you're going to attend something called nest, which is new employee sales training. And Todd, I know you, you're going to hate it, right? Like you're going to, but you got to go through it, take notes. If you can come back and coach us a little bit on what we can be doing better. All right. And he did warn me.

Don't leave the nest, Todd.

he is not only don't leave the nest, but don't take it over. I didn't make it. By the first Thursday. This is not going where I went back, I met with him, met with our guy that was running ops, and I was like, guys, if we're scaling this company like I'm gonna be hiring reps. I can't have 'em go through this. This is just, it's broken. Fast forward a few months. I'm running the region. We're doing really well. They tap me on the shoulder and they're like, Todd, we want you to rebuild enablement. It doesn't matter the cost. Just go. We've got to be prepared for this. We're taking these big rounds of funding. And so we want you to run enablement and that sounds like fun. That's cool. And then I left and I was like, all right, Google, what is enablement? What is this word? I literally never heard the word enablement before. And the people that come came up, people like Scott Santucci. And he had an event coming up in. California in San Francisco Forrester event. I remember him walking out. He's got his like Superman shirt on under a sport coat and sat next to Jill Rowley, who's another classic enablement professional.

Jill shows up every episode. I love it. Of course you sat next to her.

And I learned I soaked in as much as I possibly could there about what enablement is. And then when I got back to the office, I had a revelation through a friend of mine. Who had told me about a guy in Columbus, Ohio, who had a doctorate in just adult learning and how people learn. I was like let's go spend a half a day with this guy and just soak it up. We did. And then came back with kind of a new chart for how enablement should be run to be of the scale at that level, all adhering to how the brain takes in information, truly learns and truly is able to apply it. And it turned out to be a raging success. We got acquired in 2013 and it was one of the things that went really well post acquisition was making sure that we were able to enable Mark Benioff and his 2000 salespeople. As quickly as possible to figure out what they just spent 3 billion on.

A little bird told me, in fact, speaking of Mr. B himself, He had a nice word or three to share with you on a kickoff call in the combined companies.

Yeah, it was one of those proud moments We had these conference calls where all the leaders were on Europe, like all the sales leaders, enablement leaders, operations, they would talk about Hey, how's comp planning going? It's a disaster. How's operation? It's horrible. How's enablement planning going? Listen, we got to get these 2000 reps speaking the exact target language in the next, you got 60 days. And I was like, I don't want to sound arrogant, but I could do it in 15, right? Cause we had it all. We had created these on demand e learning modules that we could just turn into their LMS and they could start taking the classes right away and start getting familiar with the language. We were doing recorded role plays. Using your webcam back in, 2012. We found a company that was doing it for recruiting and we're like, could you do it for enablement? During that call I took everybody through that and one of the things like Benioff said was wow Like enablements the one thing that seems like it's going really well thank you.

That's the exposure to sales enablement. What about the society itself? You shared that your first encounter with Scott who ended up founding the society not too long thereafter. But the sales enablement society now revenue enablement society. Have you been a part of that? What's your history there?

Not a whole lot. I've been familiar with it. I remember back then, there was some. But there was some like enablement heroes at that thing. I learned so much from those people and I've always kept close with Scott over the years and I love what they're building and these communities for sales enablers, they're so important. So one of my books back here from like 1912 had talked about this. idea that as the economy gets tight, as it gets harder to sell, you need two things. You need better sales leadership and better sales enablement. They didn't use the word enablement. You need both. Now, what tends to happen when the economy tightens? For whatever reason, our subconscious knee jerk reaction is, Hey, let's train our leaders less. Like they, they just got to get to work. We don't have money to be training leaders. And number two is let's downsize our enablement because that's overhead. That's insane to me. Like that to me is the craziest thing that we know. That as things get tougher, those investments need to go up, but ironically, they've gone down historically over and over again. We've seen it again recently. And those sales enablement societies are just such great opportunities for the people that are in those roles to find each other, to find the roles to up level so that reputation goes away as it should.

Those are great points. Todd and 1 of the things that I'm hearing consistently, in fact, coming out of the digital now conference in Chicago with corporate visions and Emblaze and the revenue enablement society as a partner, by the way. The main theme for enablement was having a seat at the CRO table, CXO table, being able to speak CRO.

in my second book that you mentioned, the transparent sales leader, I've got a section that I talk about enablement for leaders because there's this always been this misnomer of what the role is really. Designed to be. This idea that, Oh, enablement, that's training. All right. Maybe a little, but I tried to break down the responsibilities in the book, also with my enablement teams. When I left exact target, I went to a company called power reviews in Chicago. I was their CRO and, it was immediately a fight with my CEO, a guy named Matt Vogue. Matt had an old school perspective of enablement And so I had to go in and really fight for what needed to happen. I broke it down into three core responsibilities. First of all, the first responsibility the word I used amalgamate meant that I wanted my enablement leader to go and constantly survey our leaders and figure out what our priorities needed to be right and go amalgamate all of that, right? Because everybody's got different issues. Look for those consistencies, look for the things and then we're going to prioritize them and then we're going to go. They're going to enablement leader is going to sit down with me and a couple of my lieutenants and we are going to create a priority of top five Right? Here's the five things that we are going to accomplish. Now, as the random crap pops up. I needed to empower that enablement leader to your point about sitting at the table with the CRO to be able to say, Hey, you need that. All right, cool. Which one of these five is going to come out then and to be able to have that conversation. Then the number two responsibility was the word orchestrate. Which meant I didn't need my enablement person to be the trainer, right? They're not always the best person to do it. The classroom's not always the best way. And so orchestrate was based on that priority, putting together plans to orchestrate what needs to happen in the most optimal way. And that's, through people it's e learning versus books versus classroom. Like we need to figure that out for each one, put together a plan and find the best people for it. One of the guys that I hired at exact target. His name was Steve. He was a super nerd and he was not afraid to be a jerk. He's a self made dude. He didn't even need a job. He just liked doing this. And so little funny story. We'd have product come in and teach a class. And so product would come in with all their slides. And Steve would be like, we're going to go through these first. We're going to optimize them. And the product is guys like they need to learn all of this stuff. And Steve would be like then you're not teaching. He wasn't afraid to tell him this is garbage. These 40 slides. They only need these five. We're going to X those out. We're going to opt like he was awesome and people hated them. And I think they still talk about what Steve guy, dude, but it was fricking great. But that was orchestrated, optimizing the path of getting those priorities into the brains, into the actions of our revenue organization. And then number three was evaluate, right? I always felt my enablement team had a closer eye into The successes, the failures, the struggles, the strengths, the weaknesses of my team before any of us did. Even new managers hiring a new rep, my enablement team could see that before the manager themselves could see that. And I needed to be able to create a mechanism so that they had a seat at the table to say, Hey, She's awesome. That dude sucks, right? And be able to do that in a way so that we could see those holes before they formed and became canyons. So amalgamate, orchestrate, evaluate. That was the role. And once we really got that nailed down, things started to get controlled. We were hitting the priorities that we needed to, and we were seeing those holes before they formed. So that's my rant on what enablement is and how it always worked in our organizations.

Outstanding. And in the orchestrate piece you said across the revenue organization. What does that mean?

Yeah. When you see things on LinkedIn or whatever about sales has changed so much, the buyer knows so much more. No, they don't. Like most of what is said about how sales has changed. Trust me, it's incorrect, right? Like buyers know more nowadays, those four words. 1912 Thomas Herbert Russell's book, Salesmanship, referring to the fact that we had catalogs. Nobody can see this, but this is a 1908 Sears Roebuck catalog, which is essentially Amazon, right? Like you could buy, there's a department of human hair if you need any human hair, but it's got like tractor, you could buy everything in here, right? This is Amazon 1908. Buyers have always had access to more information than salespeople felt comfortable with, right? What do they need us for? More information available to buyers has not made it easier. It's made it harder, always. And salespeople doing right by customers focused on a service oriented mindset where we're helping them achieve optimal outcomes, things maybe they thought they couldn't even achieve, whether it's with us or with somebody else. As fast as possible that is always the goal, right? So that part of sales hasn't really changed buyers doing more homework before they talk to the rep. I got a story of 1926 where they would have basically interns call companies and ask for catalogs so executives can read the catalogs and not be bothered, right? That's always been the same. What has changed the as a service economy, right? That back when I started in sales, we were, you get the deal and good luck. See ya. And then if they had a complaint, what are they going to do? Write a letter, call an 800 number, like talk to their four friends that have, who cares? Today, the as a service economy means that the deal is no longer the peak. It's basically an early milestone to having customers that stay, that buy, stay, buy more and become advocates for you and take you with them to their next company, which again, there's a lot more movement now than there was in the 1920s. And so you need to create long term value for these customers. And that's that long game helps you win the short game too. And so my client success team needed to be an extension of everything because they were actually more important than my new business team, not less important. So I always looked at sales client success Hey, we need to be all doing this together and all in lockstep. As a matter of fact, client success, you're going to hate sitting next to our sales team, but you're going to do it because they're obnoxious. But you're like, we need us to all be like, like this. When I think about enablement, it was uplift everybody together and create those connections and make sure that there's, consistency in everything we're doing because that long game wins the long game, but it also wins the short game too.

Yeah. And it sounds a lot like revenue architecture. I'm a big fan of Jacco -over at Winning By Designs -bowtie. Let's turn the funnel on its side. You literally had that going on in real life where that demarcation point, that's the middle of the funnel turned on its side, which is, Hey, we signed a deal now goes over to the other side of the floor. Literally the baton is passed physically in the office. I love that visual over to now we need to get that first impact and make sure that transparently everything we shared comes true. We show that impact and now it's recurring impact and we keep turning them through that right hand side of the bow tie and customer success. And maybe even it goes back across the aisle and you bring sales back in.

Yeah, exactly. For our deals maybe not with the smallest deals, but some of our, mid to larger, there was basically a requirement before a contract could be signed that client success was a part of the deal there, at least for the last parts of it to make sure that there's pure alignment. Like my favorite sales quote of all time. A guy named Arthur Dunn, his book, Scientific Selling and Advertising, the year is 1921, and his quote is simply, and there's a whole page dedicated to this one sentence. So you're reading the book, there's a page, it's blank, it's got one sentence on it, and the sentence just says this, if the truth won't sell it, don't sell it. Right? I like, it's a beautiful line, 1921, but that's really what we had to drive in our organizations. Again, in this as a service economy. If you need to lie to get a deal done, you probably should go find another job, right? That's the reputation that goes along, like the blow horn by which people can share negative experiences means that maybe you get that one deal, but it costs you four that you never knew existed because they're hearing in the back channels about how you suck and they're not coming to you. One other little semi rant that sales leaders need to pay attention to. When I was a revenue or sales leader, one of the things that I would look to my team for one of the metrics was, Hey, listen, at all times, You need to have four X, your quota and pipeline, right? That old four X you got to have. And so that's like the bow tie being a big floppy one, like a clown. And so what we ended up doing is we'd measure to it. And what would happen? My reps would fill their pipelines with four X, the quota filled with crap. And we'd lose slowly. We'd hang on to deals that we shouldn't be working. And our most valuable asset that we can convert to revenue is our time. What are we doing? And so that's a lot of where this transparency element comes into is we need to reveal what we give up to be great at our core early, like a pricing range. If you're talking about a six figure deal to a four figure buyer, One of you is in the wrong room, like you better figure that out, right? And we need to clear that out so that big clowny bowtie becomes more like a cylinder and then spews out at the end. That that's the ultimate. And I think enablement plays just such a key role in that. And it starts with leadership. A lot of our measures drive the wrong behaviors and we need to wind that back up.

Yeah. And so that evolution that you did naturally enabling the customer service group. We've seen chief sales officer to chief revenue officer. We've seen sales ops to rev ops. And now we've seen sales enablement to revenue enablement society.

That's a natural evolution to the one big thing that has changed in the world of sales, which is the long game of everything as a service. Product as a service. Sales as service. Services, as a service, like whatever. If you're not focused on long term value of your customer. You're going to lose. And my business today, I do keynotes. I do workshops for lots of companies. I had been almost solely tech companies and now my business is about 50, 50 tech and then outside of tech, the tech world seems to get it right. The outside of tech world seems to be a little behind. We're getting them across that chasm that it's not. Hey, sell the deal and deal with the consequences later. It's we need to think about revenue, the revenue names in all the things that we're doing and look across all elements. And make sure that we're creating these long term value customers because that's where the profitability comes in. And otherwise, it's just not sustainable. I'd love your opinion on that.

Yeah, to me, it's been fascinating that I've really only delved into the SAS space and startup space over the last four or five years. I've spent a lot of my career knocking down silos in businesses that have already been built, a lot of which have stood for years. You have the opposite effect when you have these greenfield companies where there's are there's a natural no walls, but they start to build up. So there's still that opportunity to orchestrate cross functionally and to build that design. But exactly to your point of what I've been seeing the last few years have been a trend towards growth at all costs. Without really thinking about how do we keep that recurring impact that recurring revenue and that has changed seemingly to me overnight and especially in the sass space they're like the lightning rod for that because of how dependent they are on that recurring revenue there are huge changes in the go to market motions down to hiring individual positions.

Yeah, it's history repeating itself, literally. If you look at this is nerdy, but if you look at the period of 1914 to 1923, we are in 1923 right now, because 2017 to 2024 is exactly a match. 1914 to 1917, you had slow and steady, like regular growth, right? It was good. It was a strong economy. We lived that basically 2017 to 2020, like things were humming along. The economy shut off in 1918 when we went into world war one. Like just shut the, like off manufacturing, stop, take everybody, throw them to the war effort. But we didn't stay in world war one long and the economy opened back up pretty quickly and then took off exactly like mid 2020 through 2021, where you had high turnover, voluntary turnover among sales reps, literally in 1919, salesperson turnover was 65 percent and it was largely voluntary. As reps went chasing money, like they'd go to a job and then go to another job, go to another job because there were so many jobs and not enough people and money was pouring into sales. Then what happened? Inflation spike, inflation went up and I saw this in 2022. I wrote an article February 2nd, 2022 saying, Here ye, hear ye, the end is near! And people were like, shut up, Todd. You don't know what you're talking about. There's too much private equity. Okay, Inflation spiked. And sure enough, in March of 2022, inflation spiked. And then what happened? The bottom dropped out. 1921. You had 77 percent salesperson turnover. Almost all involuntary 1922, 85 percent salesperson turnover in companies were purging their sales organizations because the economy had dropped out. It was the forgotten depression of the early 1920s. Now that's exactly what happened in 2023, right? Where we suddenly, we had this dip and all of a sudden you'd saw across SAS and tech, like salespeople getting purged everywhere, and then it slowly starts to come out. When we go from revenue at all costs. 1919 early 1920 to depressionary recessionary to Profitable growth. Guess what though? We're going to do it again, dude. Like we're gonna we're gonna start going back to revenue at all costs. It's going to happen What I hope doesn't happen is that we don't hit 1929 here which was the start of the Great Depression that lasted almost 10 years. We got to make sure that we learn these lessons But right now we're in this profitable growth stage that we experienced exactly In 1923, it lasted for a couple of years. And then we started to get a little shady again. And we had the roaring twenties later on the 1920s before the depression.

I don't know that a whole lot of us can wait 15 years for that, Todd. So

Exactly.

I'm cheering for the light at the end of the tunnel is the actual end of the tunnel coming up here.

Yeah. Let's hope that we just continue to be smart about profitable growth and get back into. A sustained period of time where that matters. But man, when you shut off an economy, it's like you took a pendulum and you pulled it and then you released it, right? So it's off and then it swings and then swings and it takes a while to get back. And then we're here. But if somebody shuts it off again, we're bound to have the same situation happen again. God willing, let's hope that doesn't happen.

Yeah, perfect timing. Cause we're rounding the corner here and shifting from past to present. Anything else specific to transparency, the title of both your books, right?

The concept of transparency? Like I said, Arthur done 1921 talking about honesty, right? Transparency is an overused word. Here was the trigger for me. I was the chief revenue officer of PowerReviews here in Chicago. We're a reviews company, right? So You've probably experienced it before. Retailers, brands, you go to crocs. com. You're looking at a product, scroll down, there's reviews. There's us doing the collect and display for them and a thousand other retailers and brands. A few years ago, we partnered with Northwestern University here in Chicago. When a website's acting as a salesperson, what do people do? That was the study, right? Had nothing to do with outside sales, or so I thought. It came back with three data points. Thanks. Two of which changed my life like it only happened to a nerd. The one data point that didn't change my life was that we all read reviews today, right? The number now is there's 99 percent of us when we're buying something we haven't bought before. We're going to do our homework, right? But here's the two that changed my life. And again, this is what a website's acting as a salesperson. Number one, we're up over 85 percent of us read the negative reviews first. We skip the fives, we read the fours, threes, twos, and ones first. Most of us, when we're reading reviews, we'll go read the negatives before we go read the glowing positives. And the last data point, and this number is skewed a little bit since the original research, but the original research said that a product with an average review score between a 4. 2 and a 4. 5 on a five point scale That's optimal for purchase conversion, meaning that a product that is negative reviews right under it sells at a higher conversion rate than a product that is nothing but perfect five star reviews. Products with perfect five star reviews sell at about the same conversion rate as a product that's got a 3. 25, which sucks. And so I looked at that and I was like, wow, that's, why does that happen? And then I looked at my sales team. It was about 60 strong at the time. And I'm like, we've been teaching these reps to basically present our solutions as 5. 0. And hope the customer doesn't find out. And maybe should we be the ones doing that homework? Should we lead with what we give up to be great at our core? Our biggest competitor is bigger, stronger, publicly held, better logos. Why would we wait? Let's share. Where we are. And if they're not cool with that, let's take that most important asset we have to convert to revenue, which is our time and optimize it. And so we started leading with what we gave up to be great at our core, whether it's technology, whether it's something like our pricing model. Like I said, if you're talking about a six figure deal to a four figure buyer, one of you is in the wrong conversation, figure that out now. And suddenly magic happened. Win rates went up. Cycle lengths shrunk considerably. Our qualification in was better. Our qualification out was faster. And we disarmed our competitors. They couldn't message against us because we already did it, right? And we became Chicago's fastest growing tech company from 2014 to 2017. Now, sure it feels good to be transparent, right? But my argument is you got to do it anyway today, right? The blow horn by which people can share their experiences, they can do their own homework when you're coming in five Oh speak and hope they don't find out. And they do trust erodes when rates go down, that status quo loss number goes way up. I believe that the future of sales is two things. Number one is going back to that service oriented mindset that we're providing a service to our customers. Arthur Sheldon in his 1911 book, which is right here. This is a fricking beauty. His, my favorite quote in this book is true. Salesmanship is the science of service. Grasp that thought firmly and never let go, right? We need to get back to that. And then number two is we've got to have this long game thinking about doing the homework for the buyer. Remember, as Thomas Herbert Russell said, buyers know more nowadays in 1912, while they know it more now, and that hasn't been good for buyers. It's been bad. Do the homework for the buyer, lead with it. And you'll find that all that magic starts to happen and you'll have customers for life.

Love it. Let's go future. What's next. In the enablement evolution? Where do you see this thing going?

Throughout history, we've taken every piece of technology and we've ruined it as salespeople. Right behind me, there is a phone from 1908. It is a old cathedral phone from the Swedish American company. The telephone, when we talk about like sales technology and we're in a sales technology revolution. Okay, cool. But yeah, The greatest one happened on March 10th of, 1876, when the notorious AGB, Alexander Graham Bell, made the first telephone call, right? By the 1910s, it was becoming pervasive, and it truly changed everything in sales. And by the mid 1920s, we had ruined it. Like we had created, we've gotten blinded by scale and we use the technology for evil instead of good. We needed technologies created to prevent its usage. And then, AGB would be rolling over in his grave if he knew that the Do Not Call registry as of two years ago had 221 million phone numbers in it. We screwed that up, right? The government had to get involved. We did the same with email, my LinkedIn connection requests, dude, they make you want to like, it's they're terrible. Like we started ruining video. I'd get these video outreaches from people that are like, hello, you. Your background's really impressive. And they'd have in the background, like my LinkedIn pro gosh, stop ruining it,. AI, like AI is now all the rage. Oh my gosh, it's going to change everything. We're going to ruin it. Like we're going to figure out ways to use it best, but there's going to be a percentage of people that ruin it. But my future lens is this. We are all going to be needed in the future. If we continue to embrace that service oriented mindset. Enablement professionals, if you're creating that and optimizing that service oriented mindset throughout your revenue organizations that you help and that you aid and you help achieve optimal outcomes with, there will always be a place for you. You will always be valuable. You're in a great profession. And when we're doing things right, it should feel really good too. And my perspective is don't be worried about technology. Just keep doing the right things. Control what you can control. There's always going to be a place for you. And I think it's going to be highly valuable and maybe even more valuable into the future.

love that. What a great note to end on and i'll double down on it through a Hashtag I threw together at some point which is AI curious human enthusiast And through the lens of what an awesome opportunity for enablement to both in their own role, get rid of the administrivia with the robots, right? Lean into that, help sales do the same so they can focus on that relationship building. And the additional bonus to me is to lean into back to the Santucci and the S on his chest. What your superpower, what is your unique human being superpower? If you can take the administrivia off their table and focus on what makes you special and unique, it's empowering!

For me personally, like before I do a discovery. I used to go read review sites for whatever the company is that I'm gonna go talk to. I look at the reviews. I'd read them all. I'd try to create an impression of my mind that you know what the pros and cons are. Now I just go to AI and go under what circumstances is company name a good fit under what circumstances is company name not a good fit. And then it would give me 200 words on both and I'd be prepped. That's fantastic. There was one of my customers, they compete with another company all the time. I went into chat GPT and I wrote, if I worked for competitor name, how would I message against my client. It came up with a whole playbook, right? That's amazing. That's so valuable that can be used for good, not evil, good, not evil. Not scale. I think the word scale is a dirty word when it's thought about in terms of, hey, let's just more monkeys and more typewriters. Think about, optimizing everything you do again, to your point about superpowers, like what's our role? Our role is to help customers achieve optimal outcomes as quickly as possible with us or with somebody else. That's our job to help be their Sherpa. Use AI to help make sure that you're able to provide that kind of consulting and advisory to those customers as quickly as possible. It's all there for the taking. I think that's a great opportunity. Don't ruin it. Do all of the above transparently Exactly,

Awesome, Todd. Thanks so much for your time. We'd love to have you back at some point in the future.

You've only touched the surface of my nerdery, my brother.

And that's a great reminder to the audience. Be sure to not only follow Todd, click into his YouTube channel. He's got a lot of entertaining stuff out there and of course his podcast and get both books. I'm only halfway through the first one and it is a mother load of thoughtfulness, not only on transparency, but on sales mastery. So again, Todd, thanks so much for your time. Any parting words?

It's been a pleasure. This has been a blast face hurts from smiling. Thanks for having me on.

Back at you, Todd. Appreciate you, man. Talk soon.