Episode 89: The Best Negotiation Framework I’ve Seen in My Time in Business, with Brian Dietmeyer

Hi everyone, I'm Ben Wright, successful entrepreneur, corporate leader and expert sales coach to some of the most talented people our amazing planet has to offer. You're listening to the Stronger Sales Team podcast where we bring together and simplify the complex world of B2B sales management to help the millions of sales managers worldwide build, motivate and keep together highly effective sales teams. Teams who grow revenue and make their businesses actual profits. Along the journey. We also provide great insights and actionable steps to managing your personal health. A happy and productive year is not only better for your teams, but everyone around you. So if you're an ambitious sales leader who wants to build the highest performing 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. Today, all the way from Chicago, and I will say halfway between Chicago and Fort Lauderdale, dodging hurricanes and wild weather and everything that goes with it, we have Brian Dietmeyer with us. So Brian is a man with a very interesting background. He at the moment is CEO of ClotheStrong, which is a brand really trying to pioneer some growth around AI coaching, particularly around the negotiation space. A little bit different to what we've spoken about before. But before Clothestrong, which I think is really important, Brian was CEO of Think Inc. Now, Think Inc. Was a negotiation consultancy that he had a great business partner who was actually a Harvard Business School professor mine you in there with him. And they did lots and lots of work around deal shopping and deal negotiating. But along the way, Brian, I think learned a lot of those skills through his position in Marriott. Now. Interesting, right? Brian started, like lots of us, when he worked at the Marriott, started busboy right behind the bar during all those things you do in the early stages of your career. But by the end of his time with Harvard, he was actually the VP of National Account Sales. So that was a pretty significant role. And essentially, Brian's now had a career 20 years across 47 countries, which is pretty powerful. He's an author. Strategic Negotiation, B2B Street Fighting and Negotiating, Blueprinting for Buyers. They're three of his books that he's written and lots of degrees and qualifications that come with that. But something I like about Brian, which for me and those who know me is really important in people that come onto the podcast is he's lived a real life. He's been a dump truck driver, a mechanic, laborer on construction sites, and, you know, all the way through to a seriously experienced negotiator so, first of all, Brian, welcome to the podcast. Nice to have you today.

Thank you. And thanks for covering those latter skills. Those are among my favorite.

Yeah, well, it's a way that we live a rounded life. Right. When we have perspective across different types of industries. So before we get into today and we're talking about price negotiations and particularly how we deal with really tough buyer negotiation tactics. But before we get into that, could you please tell our audience a little bit about yourself?

Sure. I am born and raised in Chicago in the city proper, which for those who are at all familiar with the states, or if you're listening and you are from the States, I meet a lot of people say they're from Chicago and they might be from the outskirts, but I grew up in a small neighborhood in the south side of Chicago and my dad ran a tavern down there. It was like the local, you know, you think about the, the blacked out windows, the little storefront, it's just a little local tavern. And my mom cleaned houses and that's again like the dump truck driving and the rest. That's the roots that I'm really proud of.

Fantastic. And so these days it's clothestrong. So could you tell us a little bit about clothestrong and what you're doing there?

Yeah. Thank you. You know, when I ran thinking, we did negotiation training and deal coaching. And I was always frustrated that, you know, we did global rollouts for Microsoft, Google, FedEx, Lucent, Honeywell, and as you said, we worked in 47 countries, you know, and I was always very frustrated that our consultants would come in, they would run these two day classes. We'd get, you know, the evaluation form. Hey, you know, we, we loved Carrie. She was our consultant. We love the content. But I knew that 24 hours after the class was over, people went back to their jobs and probably didn't use what we taught them. And at one point, Microsoft asked us to coach on a billion dollars of renewals. And we had been doing some deal coaching, but not at that scale. And there's a number of things that happened when we were coaching on those deals. I realized that, like, I felt much better about that than the training events is when you and I were working on, I'm helping you get this $10 million renewal done. And we have several sessions over several weeks. I knew that that had huge impact, but I also learned that was very difficult for me to scale. They wanted more of it. We added people. We didn't necessarily always add a players. Right. That's the Problem with scale. It was also very expensive for them. So I spent some time thinking through, you know, how do we provide that skills and that training environment that people need. What we did in the two day classes, but with the focus and the rigor of this one on one, which is to scale. So that's where Closed Strong came from, is how can we use technology to scale 1 to 1 24, 7 support for like every rep on every deal at every stage of a deal cycle. To say it's sort of like you have this real time, super intelligent assistant who understands your value proposition versus whatever competitor you're up against at this moment and can provide the kind of coaching that we used to do, you know, in the human services environment. So that's where closedron came from is really the desire to say, I want to have this impact, but at scale. Right. So everybody gets access to it, not just the top reps, you know, renewing the biggest opportunities.

Yeah, yeah. I really love that idea around having a 247 concierge that can help you find different perspectives on how you close deals. So fantastic. Well, today we're not going to talk about that. We're actually going to talk about some of the fundamentals behind closing deals and negotiation tactics and dealing with difficult buyers. But before we do so, I'd love to hear your perspective around negotiation skills. Are they something that people are born with, born with that ability to negotiate, or do you think it's a skill that really is learned over time?

Yeah, I think it's something. I have really strong feelings about this. People have misdiagnosed, you know, kind of what negotiation is. And like, like a doctor or a mechanic, if they misdiagnose the problem, they're going to prescribe the wrong solution. Right. You know, there's books out there, 101 Ways to Win in Negotiation, which is a book title, the 53 Truths of Negotiation. And I think those are all wrong. In a moment I'll talk about some patterns. So no, negotiation is highly predictable. It's a business process. It's analytical. You can employ game theory approaches and decision sciences to doing deals. So I think the approach to. It's been broken for way too long.

Yeah, right. So, okay, so I'm hearing you think that it's certainly a skill that you can learn by applying some really common rigor or some repetitive rigor to how you'd structure out your approach to a negotiation, for example.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, people think a number of things. One, there's a lot of moving parts and they Also think, well, you never know what's going to happen. It's all very, very unpredictable. And it isn't. I've been doing this for almost 20 years and working on live deals in real negotiations. Right. In addition to research that we've done, like actual, you know, buyer tactic research and that sort of thing. So I'm here to tell you that there's not that many moving parts. It's really not that tricky. And you can be built as a great negotiator. In fact, people who don't think they are are usually the best. You know, it's like I've been in classes where we have teams negotiating and they get, you know, maybe it's Brian or Ben, the guys who are really comfortable speaking, and go, let's have them be our front person. And my argument always is, no, no, no, no, no. We've got sue over there in the corner who's quiet and analytic. Let's put sue up front. You know, and it's like all that contrary things that people don't really think about.

Yeah, okay, excellent. Well, let's get a bit of flavor here. What are some of the really difficult buyer tactics that you've seen from your end over those 20 years in more than 40 countries?

Yeah, so the most difficult one that I've ever heard. So I was consulting to a company in Silicon Valley, California, right. And they were selling to intel. And my client always had the best new services and software to help improve chips quality and reduce defects and improve, you know, production volume and that sort of thing. And because they always had the newest and the best tools, they almost always had a gun to their buyer's head to say, look, I have this new software that's going to reduce defects by 3%. Right. And that means whatever $100 million to you. So you're going to pay 10 million for it. And the buyer has always had to do that. So at one point they put that gun to the head of intel and intel came back to this account team and said, you either play ball with us on this negotiation or I'm going to fund a startup competitor for you. And so, like, I don't have an alternative, I'm going to build my own. And they of course had the resources to do that. Right. And so to me, you know, there was an immediate reaction from the account team who was selling to them, like of panic. It was like, okay, we've got to get on this late night phone call. We've got the whole team here and we have to talk through this. And you know, honestly, Ben, it took like 15 minutes of talking through to say, let's think about the reality of that. What's it going to cost to. They have to design this, they have to fund it, they have to build it, they have to prototype it. And by the way, like, are they really going to do that? How long is that going to take before they're producing software and tools that are equivalent to what this company did? But that's the problem. You know, you asked me the question early. That's the problem is that people sort of panic in negotiation. And it's much more fact based. It took again, maybe even less than 15 minutes working with a really senior account team to say this is just ridiculous. But on its face, that was the most brutal tactic that I've ever heard.

Yeah. Wow. And sometimes you can rationally say, I don't think that's going to happen. I think they're bluffing. But the emotional part of your brain can still take over and say, look, what are we? We're at 2 or 3 or 4% risk that that's going to happen. But this is 10% of our business and if we do lose this deal, then it changes the whole forward landscape of our business. So you know what, I'm just going to play the game here and pull back whatever I need to pull back on to get the deal done. It's a logical part of being human. Right. Sometimes emotion does get in. So when you're hit with a really difficult buyer, tactics, whether they be something as simple as putting the sun in your eyes, right, One of those old school ones, or whether they're actually really genuinely looking at your competition and looking to move to someone else over some really valid reasons. What can you do as a seller to take some insights from that that help you be better prepared for what's coming?

You know, obviously we do deal coaching. A lot of those deals are end of the quarter. Right. With very senior salespeople, it's end of the quarter and the customers know. We've taught the customers when our quarter ends so they know to come put pressure on us. And I watch routinely watch these really seasoned professionals get rocked by. And it's usually, hey Ben, your competitor just came in and Undercut you by 10% and you either match this or we're going away and it's the end of the quarter. You have this thing forecasted at 80% and they panic. So I think one of the things that will help to answer your question even more directly is to back up Many years ago, we did this global study, and we had a couple questions in there that I thought were throwaway questions. And it was what we asked. It was 19 countries over two years. We asked salespeople all kinds of questions about doing deals. And one of the questions we ask is, what do you hear from buyers that rocks your world, knocks you back on your heels. And we didn't use that part of the data. And just on intuition. Many years ago, I asked my wife, who worked for us at the time and is a data scientist. I asked her, I was like, do we still have that database of really mean stuff that buyers have said to sellers in all these different industries all over the world for two years? And she said, yes. I say, can you do me a favor? Can you go in there and just find out if that follows any kind of pattern? And again, this was all over the world, you know, all kinds of industries. And she came back to me and said, oh, about 51% sits in this bucket. And about. I don't know what it was. 47% sits in this other bucket. And then there's a couple points of stuff that I don't. I couldn't understand illegible comments. And I made the huge mistake as a boss and a husband of saying there is just no way that buyers giving demands to sellers all over the world falls into two categories. It just isn't possible. So I went back and recoded it, and it did follow the pattern. So I, of course, had to go back and say, you're right, I was wrong. And then I sent that off to my partner, Max, at Harvard at the time. And our research was never good enough for him. And I sent it to him, is this true? And he said, yeah, it is. It's valid. And so every. And, Ben, I'm spending some time on this because it underpins everything we do when we think about negotiation. So here are the patterns. Every new customer, we sign up, we survey the reps, and say, what do you hear at the end of the quarter that kills you? And it's always the same thing. Buyers do two things. They refer to their alternative, and then they use that alternative leverage for concessions, right? To either lessen something or give something away. In fact, this is a fact. The most common tactic globally is I can get the same thing cheaper from someone else. So refer to that alternative and then use that. And you know the words are going to change. It's, oh, you're so much harder to deal with than your competitors, which means I want you to be Easier on contract terms or something, you know. Yeah. There are no surprises when I've done this steel coaching. At the end of the quarter, it's always, I can pretty much tell the rep what the customer's saying. And it's not always a named competitor when they refer to the alternative. You know, when we work on renewals, a lot of times the customers are just like, I'm just not going to do anything. I'm just going to let the thing expire, you know, or the words change. But. And I'll stop and let you ping me with more questions. But that is back to my point about there's not that many moving parts. This isn't really that tricky. And I've got 10 or 12 years, not only the original research, but every new client we've signed up from their sales teams all over the world. It all follows the patterns. And I still get nervous, Ben, every time the survey comes back saying, is this going to be the one country or the one segment where it doesn't follow the pattern?

And it does.

Japan, Japan, Korea, India. It doesn't matter where we're at.

I love that for me, place huge value on moving the gray into black and white. And what I've heard from you is as buyers, we're hearing I've got an alternative and I'm going to leverage that alternative against you.

Yeah.

Loud and clear. And you made that really succinct in. In your messaging. So you're a seller or you're part of a selling team. What can you do to prepare around those two levers? I think they would be terrific insights for people listening today.

Yep. Yeah. There's. In our approach to negotiation, believe it or not, is only three questions. And this is sometimes on 10, 20, $30 million deals or $10,000 deals. It doesn't matter. The first question is, you know, what are the consequences to both sides if we don't reach agreement? Right. So in advance, by the way, if we already know this is coming, then we know generally this is going to come. We've got to figure out what is that alternative they're going to leverage and what is it they're going to put pressure on us for. We call it changing the conversation. I already know what the conversation is going to be six months from now when we go to renew this thing or we try to get it signed. So let's now think through what is that most likely alternative. They might have two or three. So let's start with the most likely. And we know they're going to Say that they're the same or better. In fact, we need more facts than they do on their alternative. So that's the first part is determining which is the most likely one. Thinking through and you know, one of the kind of constructs we use is thinking through the hard and soft costs and benefits for the short and long term if they go to that alternative. And you notice in there too, Ben, I talked about benefits. So we don't want to just look for the stuff that's bad. We want a good objective analysis of the hard and soft costs and benefits for the short and long term. Because in many cases the buyers may not have done that due diligence. Like they believe that it is better, cheaper, faster, somewhere else. And one, they either don't know or they're lying. They know when they're lying to us and it doesn't matter because the prescription or the antidote for that is still the same. Better facts like we look at multiple influencers in this organization and say, okay, okay, it's either me or it's this alternative. Let's go through each influencer and think about if they're making a decision between us and choosing do nothing or a named competitor. What are the hard and soft costs and benefits for the short and long term. And then the even trickier part is using that data in discussion with Ben in a diplomatic way, taking some of that data and putting it into questions. You know, and I think about this was many years ago, so I'm comfortable using the name. Is it Dun and Bradstreet, One of their big clients was threatening to kick them out and like embed all their own sort of Duns numbers into an organization. So we did the analysis of what that looked like and put it into questions and say, you know, have you thought about, have you thought about, you know, we went to design implementation, maintenance and rolled it all out and had these dialogue with the buyer. And sometimes we call this signaling that maybe they haven't thought about what that alternative really looks like. Well, I'm going to get that in front of you and maybe you have thought about it and you're lying to me and I'm going to make you aware now that I know. And it's kind of a consultative approach, actually. I don't see it being like a tough guy approach or anything like that. It's saying, look, I'm going to provide you some insight. I have taken the time to think through this and there's nothing more important. I will add one thing to that. We had a Gentleman at thinking, Hugh McDonald, who led our win loss analysis practice. And he was very understood. And we were having lunch one day and he said, yeah, like, I've done this win loss analysis for 12 years on $20 billion of wins and losses, and I can pretty much tell you why winners win and why losers lose. And then he went on to something else and I, and if we were driving, you could have heard the tires squeal when I hit the brakes. And I was like, no, no, no, like Ben, Ben, me, you, anybody who's in sales. It's like, yeah, why do we win? And he said, winners win when they show buyers how they meet their needs at higher confidence and lower risk than some alternative. And this is based on big deals and many, many levels of analysis done over many, many years. And that's what we're looking for when we're saying, what is that most likely alternative? And at a granular level, what are the reasons why we can give them higher confidence of achieving their business objectives, the reason they're buying this thing at lower risk than some alternative? And the more we do that, by the way, the more we can command price premiums and that kind of thing, which we can get to in a moment. But there's not important than this. You better know the other side's alternative better than they do. And by the way, you're seeing this over and over and over again. There's. There's a lot of distributed knowledge in your company about what it's like to come up against this alternative. And it's pulling that distributive knowledge together and saying, you don't have to recreate this to say, oh, we're going up against GE again with this product. We already have this analytics of the hard and soft cost and benefits for the short and long term of, you know, this client choosing GE over us or whoever it is.

Yeah, okay, excellent. So, number one, understanding the consequences from both sides to not proceeding. Number two is being able to roll that data into questions.

I think that's kind of part of number one. Part and parcel of number one is. Yeah, diagram that all the one thing we didn't talk about is, and you just said it is, understand the consequences to both sides. What we've watched from being in the middle of, you know, billions of dollars of live negotiation is we as sellers go in with our consequences most readily available in our brain. And our consequences are, we're going to lose the deal. I'm not going to make my number. I'm probably not going to get my bonus and my kid's not going to get her braces and my kids are going to have crooked teeth. I mean, so they're like, they're going into these things selling what one of my consultants says all the time is selling scared. Right. Because what's readily available in our minds is the consequences to us, which are rarely ever good. Sometimes they are. Sometimes we're better to walk from a deal for sure. But when we do the analysis for the other side, we balance out the power. That's where the power comes from. And we find out, yeah, we might lose the deal, but if we can't find some reasons why us higher confidence and lower risk, we're screwed. But we usually can. Yeah. Question one is that what happens to both sides if we don't agree and ours is less important than the other side, the other side's more important. And then use that data to get in front of the Question two is what does a great deal look like for both sides? And the reason we bring that up is the most common thing. You know, I've worked with buying organizations as well and wrote a book with a supply chain expert on buyer negotiations. And what they love doing is focusing on maybe there's 10 items we have to agree on. They want to focus on one item at a time, like price. And here's the funny thing. The reason we have question two is to say no deals are holistic. All those moving parts for the commercial terms, you know, what's the price, what's the volume, what's liquidated damages, what's liability look like? Those are all interconnected, right? And I think this probably makes sense to you and hopefully anybody who's listening, you set your price based on all those other moving parts. What's the volume going to be? What's the length of the term of the contract? Right. Are they buying more value added services? You know, do we have a high probability of renewing? And so when a buyer says to us, well, let's focus on this one line item, we cannot, it doesn't make sense. I mean, even if you look at CPQ pricing systems, that's not how they make decisions. They look at 10, 12, 15 variables and come up for the price. And if you mess with one of those variables, it comes up with a new price. So machines do it better than us, but every time we respond to one thing out of context, badness happens, right? If you tell me to lower my price by $10 and I agree, all I've done is taken $10 out of my wallet and given it to you and you put it in your wallet. We didn't create any value. We just shifted money from one side to the other. And I've also taught you that in future deals you should do that to me again because you'll get 10 bucks from me. But if, you know, I learned so much from our consultants and one of them uses the language, there might be a pathway to that. And instead of concessions, which is one item and zero sum, it's trading, okay, you want 10 bucks? There might be a pathway to that. Can we increase volume? Can we increase the length of contract? Can we reduce the amount of service? You know, sla, we're providing you that sort of thing. And so we've Question two is, what are all the moving parts for both sides and kind of force ranking those a little bit. What's most important? And it usually comes down to if there's 15 things we got to agree on, there's four. That's going to be the sticking point. And so we need to anticipate. One, they're going to push back because of their alternative. Two, they're going to put pressure on commercial terms. Which ones we already know. We've seen this over and over and over again. Of the 20 things we have to agree on this four or five that always get pushed back. So what's our quid pro quo, right, for that to say, all right, we know we're going to get pressure on this, so what's our backup? You know, how will we trade to move from concessions to trading? And that really makes a huge difference. And that's where we start creating value as we start trading stuff varying, you know, it might be. Sure, sure, I can do that. Can you give me an intro to these three other divisions or can the intro Media Asia, pac, Geo, doesn't cost you much, but I value it a lot. So, yeah, I'll give you 10 bucks off per unit if you can do these other things. So that's the second question is getting crystal clear on moving parts.

So tell me about number three.

Number three is my favorite, actually. So number three is can I prepare three paths forward? And I don't know, Ben, if you've ever done this in selling stuff, but you know, what most of us do is we come back to the customer and say, here's our proposal. And the most likely human response is I want that cheaper or I want it with, you know, easier legal T's and C's or something. And what happens with. When we present three solutions, what we Call multiple solution options. There are three different ways to solve a customer's problems at three different effectiveness and investment levels. And so I would come to you and say, hey Ben, I've got three paths forward and let me talk about your business. Each one of these three, how it's going to impact, you know, who knows, your throughput, your defect reduction, whatever it is you're trying to get done in your business. That's what I'm leading with. I'm rebranding the conversation from what it is I'm selling to business impact on your end. So one of the most important part of these three paths forward is the titling of them and business impact as it relates to your business. Right. Not the products I'm bringing to bear. And then the second part of those is saying, okay, and here's three different solutions I'm providing with each. And here are the commercial terms associated with each. Very rarely do customers take any one of those three. And I learned this from my old business partner Max, where he did this to me once. You want to talk about a tough negotiation. I was negotiating with the vice chair of the Harvard Negotiation Project when I bought him out of my last business and I was scared to death. He's quite good at this. And he presented me with multiple solution options and it was the first time I had heard them and I couldn't quickly, you know, I should take that deal when it's better than my alternative, better than my consequences of not agreeing. But I couldn't do the math against this three quickly enough. And he said, you know what, force rank these for me. Which in fact, in fact his exact quote was, which of these three do you find least offensive? And second and then third. And he said, I can tell by the way you ranked these things that you value long term equity more than short term cash flow. He diagnosed my needs by giving me these three offers and force ranked. And then we co created the fourth and final one. By the way, the way most sales teams use this is they come to their customers with kind of a straw man of three different business impacts, three different solution configurations and some of the key commercial terms and you know, deal approval, deal desk might have to glance at these, but these are not the final deals, it's the fourth co created one that they had then have to bring back and run it through the deal approval process. You know, unless their company just lets them run and do deals. But most companies don't anymore.

Yeah, well, I love the power of choice. It really does bring a higher level of Engagement from both sides of the table. Okay, so we've got three. Before we finish today, we've got three. Number one is know the consequences to both sides of a deal not going ahead. Number two is all about understanding what a good deal looks like. So that you have that essentially is talking about. We talk about Herb Cohen's model. That's the knowledge piece right around how you're going to negotiate for. And then the third and final is to prepare multiple solutions. And in your case, it's three, with an understanding that often you won't be any of those three, but you get there with your fourth. So. And we've covered a lot today in a really short and punchy podcast. So thank you, Brian. I'm really grateful for that. But we've understood there's some really difficult ways that buyers negotiate. We've had a discussion around how we prepare as sellers from our approach. Right. So being methodical, having repetitive systems that we can use. And then we've also gone through and talked about the three ways that we can use the most impactful negotiation skills against buyers who are typically going to pretend or confer they have a better solution and then leverage that against us. So show notes. I think for everyone, listening today are going to be really important because there's lots of ground you can recover there. But, Brian, before we go today, could you tell us where can they find out more about you or closest strong?

Yes, thanks for asking. It's clozestrong. One word. AI. So C L o S E S T R o N G AI Excellent.

Fantastic. So I'd really encourage anyone if they're looking for some deal concierge work or just to tap into that brain of Brian's that has a lot of knowledge around negotiation. And I can tell you, I've done a lot of negotiations over the last 20 years, and it's very rare that I hear people put it into a structured format. So, Brian, I think this has been a really fabulous episode and great listening for me. You know, good luck with Clothestrong over the coming months. And for everyone listening today, please keep living a world of possibility and you'll be amazed by what you can achieve. Bye for now.

Thank you, Ben.

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