REVIEW: Todd Caponi — The Transparent Sales Leader (BOOK)

What’s so easy to like about Todd Caponi’s new book is the unusually emotive angle he takes as one of the read’s key focal points. The Transparent Sales Leader is essentially an ideological and methodological toast to communication — and related behavioral concepts attached to said ‘communication’ nexus points.

TWITTER: https://twitter.com/tcaponi

As the titular nature of the words themselves suggest, the book is about improving job performance in a leadership role, ensuring a sort of seamlessness and fluidity when it comes to navigating customer bases and varied employee echelons. Naturally with such a set of responsibilities, whether personal or professional to the individual, emotional responses don’t always prove contributory. It’s when the narrative successfully fixates on these sort of nuanced, intangible milieus that Caponi really cements himself as ideologically sound. One can’t help but judge a read less by the passages directly addressing its themes and focal points, but rather with how it handles the potentially tangential.

“When you are experiencing a state of feeling like stress, joy, fear, or confidence, similar to germs, others around you can sense it both consciously and subconsciously. When we, as human beings, sense the state of another person, that state also lights up in our own brains. As a result, we feel what the individual we’re interacting with feels. In other words, the individuals who are sensing your stress experience stress as a result,” Caponi states. “Transferring confidence to your sellers is a key function of your role. Ideally, to be an optimally effective sales leader, understanding this effect is, well, everything! As a sales leader, you are responsible for transferring confidence to your team. The salespeople on your team are responsible for transferring confidence to their potential clients.”

It’s through this willingness to think somewhat outside of the box, maybe even at times being pragmatically whimsical, that Caponi makes himself and the book stand out. A lot of leadership and business advice reads are tarred by a pretty broad brush. Words like staid, dry, bland come to mind. Caponi exudes a sense of self-awareness about this, and as such the read even feels a bit witty and self-deprecating at times. You definitely get the sense Caponi is confident enough in what he preaches that he can have an appropriate amount of fun with the presentational value.

AMAZON: https://www.amazon.com/Transparent-Sales-Leader-Sincerity-Structure/dp/1646870646

“Does our traditional approach to sales leadership stomp on the brains of those trying to be creative at work? Considering the office environment, when you look out across your sales team and see one of them staring aimlessly out the window, does that upset you? Would you prefer they pretend to be working when what they need is a shot of air-headedness to allow the brain to do some free association?” he writes. “…You can’t force it. Your brain is less active when you are concentrating. Its gates and filters are relaxed. It’s not a completely useless activity. You are accomplishing something. And that warm water splashing across your neck? It hits all three — no distractions, high relaxation, and dopamine.”

Colin Jordan