Episode 113: The Evolution of Deal Coaching with Brian Dietmeyer

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And engaged teams, stronger sales teams is right where you need to be. Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you develop super powered sales teams. Well, today we have Brian Dietmeyer all the way from the USA. Back with us today, Brian, was episode 89. So if you search back a few months, if your brain remembers to the episode that we had with Brian, we but we focused really heavily around negotiation principles. And in fact at that point in time, and I still stand by this, I said that the framework that Brian presented to us was actually the best negotiation framework that I've seen in quite a while. So I really encourage you before we dive into today, or perhaps after today, to jump back into episode 89, because that's actually the reason that I've invited Brian back. It's not often that I would have a podcast guest whose content would resonate with me beyond the podcast or beyond the first week or so post that podcast. But Brian certainly has. And look, Brian, I will say I actually have a post it note that's sitting here on my desk that talks about some of the seller skills. I won't read it out, but certainly there's seller skills and there's buyer tactics and I actually use some of that in my own thinking as I go about my day to day work. So I think for me that's certainly proof enough that what you're talking about is really valuable, particularly for this fellow sitting here on the other side of the podcast who does sales training, sales strategy, day in, day out, that you've had an impact on me. So first of all, thank you. But let me introduce you again before we jump into today's podcast. So Brian is the CEO of Closest Strong, which is a business essentially probably not pioneering anymore, probably was pioneering when it first started because there's so much AI around. But Brian has a really strong History in the AI coaching space, which I think is the most relevant piece here. And prior to close Strong he was CEO of Think Think Inc. Was a negotiation consultancy that he co founded with a fellow Harvard Business School professor from memory. So and then on top of that you've had lots of VP of national sales roles, national account sales, those type of roles. I think the most recent before that was with the Marriott big global brand that most listening will have heard of in the hotel space. But on top of that, really Brian, you've got coaching new and repeat type of clients across 20 years. And I think last time we spoke again it was closing in on 50 odd countries, 47 countries, correct me if I'm wrong. Yes, 47 countries, right. So there's this breadth of experience across lots of topics, lots of industries, lots of countries, geographies and so forth. He's the author of three books, Strategic Negotiation, B2B, Street Fighting and Negotiation Blueprinting for Buyers. So huge experience from Brian. On top of that though, he was a dump truck driver, a mechanic, a construction laborer, a done all types of things across his career. So Brian, that's a longer intro than normal from me but I think it's worth doing because you have such a breadth of experience. So welcome back man, I'm honored.

One thing you didn't add about the dump truck mechanic, iron worker, laborer is that none of those things are current. The CEO one is but yeah, those are all. Yeah, I'm not so good at those anymore.

Well, I'm pleased with that because you're good at what you do when it comes to sales strategy and everything that's around it. And I'm pleased to have you back back on the show today. So Brian, today we're going to talk about guided selling. Well, we're certainly going to start talking about guided selling and we're going to evolve the conversation from there. So before we get into the topic, can you help those that are listening and look, I asked you the same question actually at the start because it's been a long time since I've had exposure to guided selling. But can you talk me through what is guided selling? Certainly in a traditional form, yeah, it.

Is new, you're right, AI is not new. But the notion of guided selling in a B2B environment is relatively new. Way back in the day their B2C marketers used guided selling to guide the buyer journey for consumer products, that sort of thing. So we've just kind of rethought that through it's guiding the buyer journey in the B2B market.

Right. Okay. And so close strong, you really focus on the next evolution of guided selling, which I think you're calling precision guided selling, correct?

Yeah.

Okay, so tell me, how is that evolving guided selling from where you sit?

It helps me to go back to my previous experience running negotiation training classes all over the world for Google, FedEx, Lucent, Honeywell, Microsoft. And my frustration as a CEO of a global training company was that I knew. And Ben, you probably know, and people listening probably know that, you know, someone in a company says, hey, we got a sales problem, and then they look at all the levers they can pull, and one of those levers is sales training. So they're like, let's fix that sales problem with sales training. So they go out and they find a provider, they maybe announce it at sales kickoff and then they roll it out in groups of 20, right. For two day classes all over the world. And I lived and breathed that business forever. And quite honestly, laying in bed at night, I was frustrated with the part that these companies were writing these huge checks for this sales training. And I knew, you know, and the research is out there, that about 30 days after my consultants left, 80% of what we did in those two days was gone. And so that can maybe a kind of weird way to answer your question, but that's what led me to say, well, I could add to that that one of our clients asked us to coach a billion dollars of renewals in their pipeline. And some of These deals were 50 or $75 million.

Right?

So a billion sounds like a lot of deals, but it wasn't that many. And so they said, you know, you've been teaching us how to do this stuff. Come in and fish with us, you know. So we did. And I realized, Ben, that that one on one, when you and I were working together trying to get a $20 million renewal or even a million dollar renewal done, that was really, really effective. However, it was very difficult for me to scale. This particular Fortune 50 company asked for more and more and more of it. I added more consultants. Those consultants weren't as good as my original team. Right. Added BNC players. And it was very expensive for the customer. Like it didn't scale. So that led to this whole, you know, before we even call it guided selling, the problem we are solving for is that American companies spend $26 billion a year on sales training events. Right? And I call that just in case training. Let's roll it out to everybody just in case they need it, and then hope you know, Forbes called it spray and pray. Right? Spray it out there and then pray that people use it. And I realized that that just there has to come a time with technology the way it is to scale that one to one, that one to one in context, right? This isn't generically how to sell, which is what a sales training class is. This is how do I help you get this deal closed, given your company's current strategy. Right. How do I help you get this deal closed and scale that? And it's leveraging AI to scale, you know, 24, 7, 365, unlimited support for reps sort of on every deal at every sales stage in the pipeline. That's what guided selling does, is provide that sort of support at scale.

Right. Okay, so something resonated with me earlier on what you said, and that's we bring in the sugar hit. You didn't say the word sugar hit. I'm adding those in. But you bring in the sugar hit of sales training and 30 days later the benefits of it have dissipated. I don't necessarily believe that they've all disappeared in those 30 days. But I certainly am of the school that says unless you can follow up your impact event, which is your sales training event with some really meaningful implementation momentum, that a lot of that information's lost. So tell me, in your experience, how do we overcome that 30 day cliff that invariably comes in around sales training?

I agree with what you just said. And there. I know some guys that do this. John Flannery runs a small sales consulting company here in America. John will not sell sales training classes unless people do the pull through. Right. And managers are supposed to do the pull through. Sales enablement is supposed to do the pull through. People just don't have time to do it. So I think to answer your question, it's completely redefining this notion of just in case sales training events and then worry after the fact about how am I going to pull this through. Nobody's got the horsepower, you know, to pull this thing through. It's just been proven. So we had to rethink the model and bring in technology. When sales methodologies rolled out, these technologies didn't exist. Right? So the notion of a repeatable sales methodology, let's go train our people on it. And at the end of the class, they're going to fill in a form to kind of customize the training to their deal. Right? Fill in the blanks. We had to completely rethink that and say, no, we need 24. 7 support just in time, instead of Just in case. And it needs to be in context of what am I selling, who am I competing against, what vertical am I in? That's all available to us now. Right. And it's for about the same price as sales training events or sometimes even less that we can provide that full 24 7, 365 experience. So that's really it. Rethink the model, rethink the way we're doing. It still is a place for sales training. In fact, the AI we use, if someone's used XYZ sales training company, the AI can reinforce that in its coaching, right? As it's guiding the rep. If it knows it's using, you know, challenger selling or whatever, it can, it can, you know, guide with that. So there certainly is a place for it. But you have to rethink the model. If I heard your question right, I don't know how you reinforce it. There just isn't enough bandwidth for people, especially when you look at the larger enterprise sales teams.

Yeah, I absolutely agree that the human available man, or let's call it managed as a generic term, the human available manpower to follow up everything that you've learned within an impact training event. So when you sit down and you bring the team together and you really nut out where you need to get to and how you get there, it's just not freely available enough in a world where sales leaders in particular already have too much to do. Yes, right. More and more as I speak with sales leaders, they are increasingly feeling the pressure of a workload that surpasses their available time. So when we ask them to really invest their time into coaching, which is what we're talking about here, the training piece is the knowledge transfer. That's quite straightforward, right. We can we grab that event. We transfer the information we need to transfer. Right. But from there it's the coaching that becomes your enhancement piece. And that's the really important part, the coaching. There is simply not enough bandwidth across the majority of sales leaders in the majority of teams that they can consistently coach their teams to be able to improve. On top of that, we also have challenges whereby we have teams that are customer facing in environments that aren't necessarily easily recordable for future download. For example, we're face to face in a B2B premise, right? Very hard to record unless you take a wearable in and you get the customer's permission and so forth. Okay, so in your mind, how would. Look, I'm happy for you to talk about clothestrong here. We don't normally promote brands and I don't think this is a promotion of brands, but I think it's a really important topic to say how do we ensure that we are implementing that impact event? So how do you see precision guided selling or clothestrong? And I don't mind which one you want to refer to really. At a practical level, what does it do to take a team from where they are now to where they need to be?

Yeah. And by the way, on the commercial thing, I'm having been a sales leader and a sales trainer, I'm just really excited about how tech can change the way we enable reps. Right. So whether it's my stuff or if somebody else comes out with something like it, there is a new and better way to do this. So that's what I'm excited to talk about. And you know, something you said earlier, Ben, is that, you know, there's the skill acquisition piece and that's, that's what happens in a training class. Right. I'm going to give you the five steps, you know, whatever the methodology is and then maybe toward the end of the class we're going to apply that skill to a deal. You're going to fill in some blank forms and then we're going to try to pull that through and we can go directly today to deal app application. Let's forget generic skills. Let's immediately. So to your point, so you've got 200 reps. Let's immediately take the top two or three deals in each reps funnel and guide them. And we should talk about like what that guidance looks like because this is like conceptual until we really get into that. But that's the question is that's or not the question. But to me that's what we solved for is let's go directly to deal application. Let's start right now by learn by doing. And it's like, Ben, pull up your deal. Let's start with qualify. Let's go through every stage until close and let's guide you through it. And then let's do that again and let's do that again throughout the year. And all of that is in context. You know, we call this technology AI powered sales strategy execution platform. And that really is instead of training people how to sell, the question is how do we execute our sales strategy? We got some stuff that we want to make happen this year. Right. And you know, I can give you an example. And I think this does go back to like how does it take someone from A to B? I think that was kind of your question. Right. And and so, you know, in fact, one of our demo customers, Altamont Manufacturing, they were a contract manufacturer and they added design services, right? So they wanted to be more strategic for their customers as opposed to just being the commodity. Well, anyone can manufacture this telecom widget that you're manufacturing. So we're going to do integrated design and manufacturing so we move upstream. Well, they did that. They built the capabilities, marketing, built the decks, they rolled it out to all the reps. And then on Monday the reps went back to work and the customers were still buying contract manufacturing because that's what they knew Altamont as the reps. We're still selling contract manufacturing because that's where their comfort zone is. And any sales leader that's tried to get behavior change should be aware of that. So let's talk about guided selling. Forget even close drawn guided selling in general says, whether it's existing or new strategy, what are you trying to get done this year? So in this instance, we want to sell more of these integrated solutions. So when we're qualifying customers, what do qualifiers look like? How do we know an opportunity is likely to convert for this new integrated right value proposition? And that's where guided selling is going to present that to the replacement. So you're working on this opportunity right now. Let's qualify it. And I'm going to the AI and guided selling is going to help you qualify with actual custom qualifiers based on your business strategy. Then we're going to move to stakeholder engagement and say, okay, for selling this kind of a deal, what new stakeholders should we be talking to? What are the KPIs we can now be impacting with this new solution? And I'm going to guide you through that. Right? And then we're going to look at competing, say, okay, your competitive position has shifted now, right, because you're now doing this new thing. Who is the competitor? Let's go side by side and help you figure out where you can win on this deal. And the cool thing about guided selling is in those three areas, is it qualified? Are we talking to the right people about the right things? And can we compete? Right. Given what we're trying to accomplish in our company this year, it will pull out the red flags and de risk the deal. And this is what we did, Ben, when we were coaching live deals, a huge part of coaching live deals with de risking. Right? So if I was coaching you, it would be like figuring out not everything you know, but what don't you know? And so that's what we're doing is it qualified. Yeah. We're talking to the right people and can we compete? And wherever those red flags are, the AI is going to deliver like highly customized discovery right back to the rep to de risk the deal and say, okay, cool, you know, and it will actually score and say the probability of you winning this deal right now is 60%. So let's go after these 10 red flags we just came up with and here are the actual tools. Go ask this human this question to fill in the blank that you have right here. So to try to make the notion of guided selling come alive. That's why I say it's, it's really a strategy execution platform. What are you trying to get done this year? What do you want your reps, how do you want them selling? What does a qualified opportunity looks like? We can scale that as if you have your best Frontline coach available. 24, seven for every rep. Yeah.

Okay. Wow. So what I want to do here is I'm just going to, for those listening, because the AI space, I think the majority of people that I deal with in the sales landscape, they understand what the broad approach in the AI space is, how we can use it to either save ourselves time, upskill our teams, or increase our customer engagement. However, where it gets a little bit complex for me and my experience with sales leaders is how they actually implement it.

Yes.

So what I wouldn't mind doing here is really summarizing in a couple of sentences or what this type of approach that you're talking about is. And for me, it is on the job, real time deal coaching. So it is taking a deal that you have in front of you that is present, let's say it was the Marriott where you used to work. Right. A deal that is being prospected through with the Marriott, analyzing that deal and providing a number of recommendations and next steps that you can take that deal from being a 30% chance of close up to a 60, 70, 80% chance. Right. If you can get to 80. Wow. If you can get to 80 in any deal, we're all pretty happy. Right. But so close Strong is a tool that looks at, rather than holistic sales training and coaching implementation. It focuses on the deals that you have in front of you right now and how you can really maximize your opportunity to close.

Yes, it does. And I should talk a little bit about what the technology is. Since you mentioned AI Again, just outside of us, this technology, this approach is emerging, but there's two pieces to this. One is something that we call the Strategy center, which is the brain of the guide. And so what we can do first before you as a rep ever start getting guided, is we put everything into the brain of that guide. What's the strategy? What does a qualified opportunity look like? You know, who should we be talking to? All of our competitive positioning, it's all in there. So there's a unique and custom instance for every client that's super smart. And my human coaches couldn't even do this when they were moving from client to client to client. Like they couldn't have all that data in their head about how to compete and that sort of thing. So it's a two part, you know, one is populating the brain and making it the smartest, hardest working coach you've ever met in your life and then pulling it through. But back to the tech. Ben, you were talking AI. So we actually I asked my CTO a while back what we were building. I was like, is this an LLM? You know, are we training a large language model here? What are we building? And he said, I'm not really sure. This is kind of something that doesn't exist. And then Gartner put out a report that one of my partners stumbled on saying the demand is rising for intelligent applications. So as if AI weren't confusing enough, now I'm going to bring IA into it. An intelligent application. What Gartner says is that AI is a very, very, very broad solution to very, very, very broad problem set. Intelligent applications are a very precise, process oriented solution to a very precise problem problem. So when we talk about getting deals closed, intelligent applications are a combination of modern software coding sprinkled with AI to make them smarter. So that is, in fact, you know, what we've built and according to Gartner, what many other people are building and looking for is a much more dialed in process oriented solution. And that's where intelligent app comes in.

Great, Excellent. You mentioned something a minute or two ago that I just want to zero in on before we finish up for today, and that is salespeople. How are salespeople in your experience feeling about having their coaching shift from, let's be honest, sporadic input from their sales leader or those around them to omnipresent and in fact ever present AI support or IA support, whichever way you want to look at it. How are they feeling about having that support there?

Forget what I say for a moment. If you look at the research out there, there's a lot of things that salespeople say that we took into consideration as we thought about this. And one is that they don't want to fill out blank forms. And sometimes coaching requires that right before you go and see your manager, you know, answer all these questions for me. Give me a deal overview or something. Every study that I've seen in sales enablement says reps want more coaching. They also say there's a difference between skill coaching and deal coaching. And they want more deal coaching. Help me get this deal closed. This is where I make my money. They've also said, let's move to strategic. It's more firefighting. They said, well, usually we. When my manager comes in to coach me, it's because all hell's breaking loose and stuff's on fire, right? And we're about to lose this deal. And they said, so please do more deal coaching. Let's get to it in advance. And by the way, I want help. I want data, I want insight to move it to the next sales stage. I don't want you just auditing, right, and telling me what I'm missing. So I think in answer to your question, I mean, reps said, and unfortunately I can't find this study. They actually said, and the 70% of them did, did say, I don't want to fill in blank forms. But they said, I want guided selling. They want data and context to help them compete and help them win. Right? And they want it available when they want it. So what we've seen, and we've actually got a couple really senior reps on our advisory board. And because it's like, we don't want to build this, you know, didn't want to build it in a vacuum. And so it's just like we pull someone on there. And the first thing they said was like the guide was presenting data to them to say, hey, here's how you competing. You told me you're selling this against this competing alternative. Let me help you compete against that. Or let me give you some awesome discovery questions or let me help you qualify this thing based on actual qualifiers. That's helping them get deals closed. That's what they want. And they're not filling out blank forms. It's presenting them data and saying, here you go. So I don't know if I answered your question, but the rep reaction is, wow, you're using technology to deliver stuff to me versus ask me to fill in forms.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look, I think you certainly answered a part of it. I think there's multi phases to it. But what I'm hearing is if you're adding value, then individual salespeople are happy to play ball. If you're not adding value, then perhaps there's less engagement there. Great. So I want to round off today because I think the main message that has come through is that training is fantastic. Training is absolutely compulsory for teams. However, how we implement what we learn is a frontier that no sales trainer, sales leader, sales strategist has been able to really nail until now. Let's call it now ish. Right where we have software, whether it's AI or ia that is available to help us provide that coaching at those coaching opportunities. 247 right close strong is a variant of that. It is a type of deal coaching. There are lots of other ways in there. In fact, next week, our podcast next week I'm going to deep dive into three specific types of AI tools that we can use. So for those sales leaders who want to know more about AI, this is one to listen into. And no doubt Brian, you'll get a mention in that one next week. But for those who want to get in touch with you or want to know more about Clothestrong, what's the best way they can find you?

Website is clothestrong AI and my email is brian@closestrong AI.

Perfect. Nice and easy. Thank you Brian. We might have you back from time to time to talk about the wonderful world of AI and ClotheStrong. I do mean what I said earlier in the podcast. Your negotiation framework really did resonate with me. So I suspect you what you're putting into Clothestrong is also going to be as valuable. So thank you again for today, lovely speaking to you and for those listening, please keep living in a world of possibility and you'll be amazed by what you can achieve. Bye for now.

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