A Conversation with a CRO About the Evolution of Selling and Methodology

Speaker A: Foreign. Hello and welcome to another episode of Close Mode, the Enterprise Sales show. I'm um, Brian Dietmeyer, CEO of closestrong, the home of precision guided selling. And today I'm legit excited to be here with Chris Vercelli. Uh, Chris is a, uh, go to market advisor for tech companies and I've been leaning into his brain a little bit on that. Thank you, Chris. He's also, he's got huge chops in sales leadership and revenue leadership, having been a VP of global sales at Treasure Data, uh, VP of sales at uh, SalesLogic and CSO at California Technologies, et cetera, et cetera. Chris, welcome to the show.

Speaker B: Thank you, Brian. A pleasure to be here.

Speaker A: So last week we were chatting about sort of the evolution of selling and the uh, uh, evolution, more importantly about how we're enabling and helping salespeople in this new market. And we wandered into sales methodology and today's podcast is going to be a little bit different because I started talking to you about this new A.I. uh, native sales methodology we've built. And I typically don't talk about our stuff on the program, but you said, hey, I want to jump on and talk about this. So we're going to do that today. So let me tee it up for you this way, Chris. One of the things we were talking about is that American Companies are spending 26 billion a year on sales methodology events. And you know, leading up to the design of Close Strong, I interviewed 65 revenue, sales and enablement execs and uh, all of them were frustrated with their eye on sales training events. They pull that lever often. They look at a sales problem, they pull the sales training lever and then all of them to a T were like, yeah, uh, a few weeks after the consultants are gone, you know, the problem's not the methodology, the problem is the pull through and getting it to stick. The other thing they told me, Chris, and this is where I'm really curious, I'm telling you to a person, they said, uh, I kind of went through their, their forecast and their funnel with them and said where are you? Where are you stuck? What are you struggling with? And they, they were struggling with qualification multi threading discovery. They were frustrated that their teams were kind of reacting to what the customer was ordering and order fulfillment kind of motion versus versus prescribing solutions. And, and I so go back to what I was saying to you a moment ago and training to fix some of those basics. Why the hell are all of these leaders I talked to still frustrated with the basics after that massive investment that Was a long question.

Speaker B: No, but it's a great question. And the fundamental problem is we as sales leaders have been using traditional sales methodologies like Sandler Challenger selling for a long time, and we default to those because we've used them in our past.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: These programs, you know, they're based on a training workshop, and there's documents that follow in a process. And as, uh, sales leaders, we trust that our team is adhering to the sales methodology training and that our field leaders are inspecting the deals on a regular basis using that methodology. With regards to the training. The fact is, sales reps fall back into their old ways. Sales leaders fall back into their own ways. And we never realize this until it's too late. The sales rep and the sales leaders get caught up in the next deal in front of them and they skip the steps.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: It's, it's based on documents that follow. This is the problem with your traditional training and workshops. The stuff we've been using. If we really want the best sales methodology, in my opinion, AI is the new and improved way.

Speaker A: Yeah. And we're, we're gonna, we're gonna wander into that for sure. But one of the things we talked about last week and I'd like you to listeners is you and I were kind of, we even went back to the basics of saying, well, let's define methodology. And I think both of us agreed that the actual ip, which is what most people think of as the methodology. Right. The form you fill out at the end of the class, the purple sheet, whatever it is. But we define that more broadly. So before we introduce a new method, give me your sense of when we say methodology, when you say methodology, what is that whole system of methodology look like?

Speaker B: Well, we need to kind of go back to the, the components of the methodology, and we need to start thinking about it in a broader way. We need to consider the actual methodology itself. Is it worth anything? Does it breed success? How easy is it to customize to the customer specific needs? That's very important, the actual delivery of the methodology so that the team absorbs it and embraces it. And then really, in my opinion, this is where I've fallen down the post training, coaching and pull through to ensure the adherence of it. We also need to keep in mind we may have a strategy change in our business or there may be market dynamics that change. And how easy is that, uh, methodology to shift to those dynamics?

Speaker A: Yep. It was helpful when you and I talked through that. And so when we talk about a new native AI sales methodology, it is that whole system. That's what you and I were talking about. It's like the whole. The problem again is not just that IP. In fact most of those IPs are probably okay. It's this entire system of. You're right, Delivery, customization, pull through, application to actual deal strategy. So one other thing before we launch into AI native methodology. Uh, I know a lot of the traditional or legacy methodology companies are attempting to kind of retrofit their approaches and connecting with some third party AI methodology company. I think most of them agree with you. Hey, we need some kind of AI in our solution. But they're, they're retrofitting with third party. And that troubled you. Why is that?

Speaker B: Well, I think you just hit it. They're retrofitting. These legacy sales methodology companies are trying to achieve what I consider a me too solution. The problem is these legacy methodologies are frankly outdated and they're not an AI methodology platform truly built from the ground up. Uh, taking these approaches that we, we talked about previously into consideration. They're peeling apart their legacy program and attempting to insert some assemblance of AI. Why not go with a more modern sales methodology, Something new that it's comprehensive. It's built on an AI platform from the initial creation and will assist in building a successful methodology that will give them a better future for their sales training for their sales pull through and frankly to drive revenue.

Speaker A: Yeah. So we're gonna. You suggested, you became intrigued enough and again you and I were just chatting offline. You became intrigued enough about this idea, about this, this new sort of hyper, hyper relevant solution to today's market that we're rolling out and you suggested we turn the tables. And, and I think, I think you're going to interview me now. I like being on the receiving end. So have at it. You're the host now my friend.

Speaker B: Uh, I am going to interview because there's a few things that as we were talking through and getting to know each other that I had some questions about. So I was intrigued when we spoke about the new approach. What was your motivation after all these years, like 30 plus years there's been these methodologies. What was your motivation in uh, developing a precision guided selling system that's based on AI?

Speaker A: Yeah. So some, some of our listeners may know that uh, you know, I still run Think Inc. Which was a negotiation training and deal coaching company. Right. We, we did global rollouts in 47 countries. Microsoft, Google, FedEx and people loved the workshops. Uh, and at one point though, one of those customers asked us to coach a billion dollars of deals in their pipe renewals. And so we did it one to one. Chris and Brian working on a $5 million renewal. And I realized people loved the two day events we were running. They filled out the little smiley sheets and said yeah, Carrie was a great facilitator. We loved Chris. But when we did these one on ones it was so effective to work on this deal in context. Right. Just diving into it, I also found out that was difficult to scale. The customer liked it, wanted more and I'm um, embarrassed to say we ended up adding more consultants to the team and not all those were A players, right. We added some B and eventually by the time we added C players we told that customer we needed to cut back. It was also not scalable for that customer. I think we were charging ten grand a day for this in person, uh, coaching. But so to answer your question directly, that was that experience. I was saying we need to rethink sales training from you know, you go through this two day class, you do spend all this time on skills acquisition and then you try to customize it and jump directly. How do you scale deal by deal by deal, support for every rep at every deal for the next year in context of your strategy, right. With, with a coach or a guide who understand that's how we're trying to redefine sales training is that way is a complete redefinition of that whole system you talked about earlier. So let me, Chris, it might help. Let me give you a quick example. So when we talk about an an AI native methodology, I'll give you an example of a telecom company, right? And they were, they were parts kind of contract parts manufacturer, right. So telecom companies reach out, say I need this widget built. Here's the specs, you know, typical RFP crap. And they said, wow, we've got to get upstream into integrated design and manufacturing because the design pulls us upstream. Right now I'm working with the exact. Before we determine what it is we have to build, I'm helping design build it. So they built out all those capabilities. They rolled it out at SKO to the sales team and on Monday the reps went back to selling component manufacturing. The customers even more importantly because that's how they knew this company, the customers were still ordering component manufacturing. And so the question is to try to get this down into the level of application when you have an existing or a strategy shift. Now that we're moving into design and manufacturing, what does a qualified opportunity looks like? Because that's different than what we are selling before. And we've got to get into the weeds of what are the hurdles this opportunity needs to meet to raise our win rate, raise deal optimization, raise renewal. And so, you know, AI methodology is jumping directly to that. There's no skills acquisition. It's saying, all right, here's your strategy, here's how the accounts qualify. The next piece is, so which new stakeholders do we need to be talking to to execute the business strategy of the company? What KPIs can we now impact that we couldn't impact before? How now when we're going up against competitors, that competitive analysis has shift, right, because we're competing in a different way. Even discovery. Who do we need to be doing discovery with and what is it we need to be getting after to find the opportunities to sell this new solution? And then finally, how do we package the new solution, how do we configure the solution itself and the commercial terms? And then how do we get that in front of customers? That's what AI native sales methodology is all about, is saying, what is your strategy? Let's apply it for every rep, at every deal, at every sales stage.

Speaker B: Okay, so when we talk about that methodology, what you're telling me is that's the genesis of where yours came from, that whole situation, that process?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Okay. Yes. How is your customization different? I want to dive a little little deeper into what you said. How is Close Strong's methodology and customization different to customize that app?

Speaker A: Yeah, it's uh, this to me is so exciting because we, there's two aspects to what we do. We think of it as two kind of modules. One is the Strategy center, which is the brain of the guide who does precision guided selling. And the other is the close plan, which is where the brain is pushing data to the rep to help them execute the company's strategy one deal at a time. And the Strategy center used to be a place where we would go collect data from humans. I'd interview you and your executive team and find out what your strategy was and then translate that into, you know, qualification stakeholder mapping, you know, solution config, all that, and then put that into the brain of the guide. I won't get into why, because it would take too long. But our, our goal a year and a half ago was have the Strategy center create itself. Right. Using leveraging AI, of course. And it's taken us 18 months to get there and I can now literally within a push of a button. We just did this for a Fortune 500 and we created the strategy center. What deals should look like at every stage of the deal process. Again, qualifications, titles, stakeholders. And this uh, company rated the data at 87% accurate. So we fully customized a unique instance for this customer at the 87% level in a matter of minutes. And that their executives, product, deal desk, vp, sales enablement, they all looked at it and said, wow, you know, this is right on. We then interviewed those execs, we interviewed Chris, we interviewed the guy at the deal desk. I think with your CRO background you'll appreciate this. And I, and we record the interview and say, okay, what's your greatest frustration? When the reps are pushing deals into the deal approval process. You know, solution, configuration, commercial terms, uh, what frustrates the heck out of you, what do you want them selling? How do you want the solutions configured? How do you want the commercial terms structured? Record that interview, throw it into our strategy center which summarizes it and then puts it actually into a prompt. So when the rep is getting ready to configure the solution, the guide is. And this was so fun when we shared back. So we interviewed this gentleman, we through the recording in there, it went directly into the prompt and his unique instance. And when it was developing solutions when we went back and showed it to him, he was just like holy blank, you have just scaled me. This is a conversation I have 10 times a day. And our AI can now have that conversation 30, 40, 50, 100 times a day. And you know what, if you change your priorities, tell me and we'll update the prompt. So it's that unique instance for this customer based on their strategy. And that was just at the solution config stage. But this lives at every stage of sales cycle.

Speaker B: All right, so I bring close strong in. How's the delivery different? What is different with your delivery versus the ones I've used for 30 years?

Speaker A: Yeah, so I mean first is it's sustained, right. So it's 24, 7, 365, every rep, every sales stage. Right. For as many times as they want. So it's, I used to tell people when I ran two day classes, I had to. And you know, you've been on the receiving end of this. I had to drink through a fire hose, feed this content into this team of 20 for two days because I'd never going to see them again. But when I'm going to see you. And maybe we don't suggest 100% of deals in the piper are guided, but let's say I'm going to guide you on 50% of your pipe opportunities. I'm going to see you 25, 50, 75 times over the next year. Right. So I can just. In time. We think, we think of training events is just in case you roll them out in an industrialized man. Uh, but this is, this is just in time when you need it. Tuesday night, you're sitting home, you're at the stage of qualify, you can jump in and this guide can, can guide you. Right. And then pick up on it and keep the record going. So I think that's, that's really the biggest piece is, you know what, what's more effective two day events and hoping people lightly customize two day events or unbelievably in context. 365, 24, 7 every rep, every stage. That's how we're trying to completely redefine how we think about enablement. There, there used to be no choice other than which methodology do I choose. Now there's a choice to say there's an entirely different system of methodology. It's the same lever, it's just an entirely different solution to deliver that.

Speaker B: Right. And, and the team is getting it365.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: Where before it was just maybe for the first 30 days they'd act on it.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: All right, so now a couple more questions. How is the deal application different?

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, it goes. I was talking to a friend of mine who's been running a methodology company for many years, a good friend. And it's funny because he, I, uh, was showing him what we were doing. And it starts out with, I mean the training, if you want to call it that is. All right, Chris, what are you selling? Who are you competing against? What vertical are you in? Is it new or renewal? And then it reaches back into the strategy center, into its brain and it pulls out that data specific to this deal. The, uh, guide does and has it right in its brain. And, and then. So the first thing we're going to do is, okay, cool, I now have all that customized information in my brain. I'm going to guide you. Let's qualify this thing. Here's, here's what a qualified opportunity looks like. Let, let's go through these six or seven qualifiers and some of those are even weighted. These two are more important than others. Let's do some analysis of your deal. Okay. The uh, the guide will quickly say, all right, you're 47% qualified. And in order to get to 80 or 90% qualified, here are the red flags. Here are the risks associated with this deal. Here are the actions, the specific actions, some sometimes even specific discovery questions for specific stakeholders to get rid of these red flags and get your deal qualified. And so that's really the difference. And so I was bringing up my friend in the methodology business and he kept saying, but where's the training? Where's the skills acquisition? And I was like, it's immediately. Anybody in adult learning knows we jump direct to deal and direct to sales stage and direct to application. In context of your strategy, right? There's no filling in blank forms. They're saying, here's your qualified criteria, let's do the analysis of this deal. And that I found this person's head exploding because I kept wanting to know where the training was. I said, this is training in the 21st century. This is it.

Speaker B: All right. When we first started this, I mentioned some areas that uh, were a concern to me. Most important, we would do the methodology, we do the two day workshop. They'd have documents that we'd send them home with, blah, blah, blah. My biggest frustration, and I am guilty of it, is how the coaching and more importantly the training pull through is different because this is where I fall down. This is where the reps get complacent, go back to their old ways. We talked about that. I'd really like to understand because this is what would excite me.

Speaker A: So, uh, I'm going to start answering that at a reasonably high level. I mentioned this before. So what percentage of your pipe, if you are a CRO, that's what I would ask you. What percentage of your pipe are you coaching today? We know the average is 5%. So let's say you and I deem 50% is the correct percentage that we want those guided. Right. In context of our strategy. All right, so 50%. So let's identify what those are for the reps and then we start guiding against those. And we uh, might look at that 50%. And I would ask you, hey Chris, what of that 50% do you then want double clicked by a frontline manager? Right. What do you really want like coached after our, you know, we've guided the thing at every sales stage and let's say you say it's the top 10%, right? And then what happens is the reps are guided and they're scored. We're de risking the deal. We're giving them an action plan. It's all tied to this deal. We're helping them configure solutions, all of that. The manager can then ask the guide for a deal summary, like Chris might say. Hey, I want Brian's GE deal and you get a nice one page deal summary. And a friend of mine, Gary, who works at sitecore, I was showing him this and he said man, I could 3 to 5x the quality of my 1 on ones if I had this. He's like this deal summary is all the basic crap that I spend 50% on my one on one downloading and you've already done it for me. So he said I could quality and quantity. I could 3 to 5x my one on one. So the pull through happens again immediately. We start with live opportunities at every stage. There is no skill acquisition stage per se, it goes directly. Let's apply my strategy to these deals one deal at a time. So the pulls through starts by the AI. And then the question is again with you as a CRO, how much do you want your frontline managers? Double clicking. And one of the things we're finding out is we've even got to skill up the frontline managers. And how do you coach against a deal? That in essence is pre coached. Right. Because they're used to like zero basing everything. So there's a little onboarding with managers to say this is going to be a lot, a lot easier for you and you're going to be able to do a lot more frontline coaching.

Speaker B: Well, that's going to be exciting because that's really where in my uh, opinion, the laziness comes in.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So you've just taken that and de risked that for me. And as you said, I'm going to be able to have a more productive pipeline review, deal review, all the way down to the rep level, management level, et cetera. I have to tell you Brian, this is exciting. I've used all the old methodologies for 30 years and it's very refreshing to have somebody have thought through this in a different light using new technology like AI.

Speaker A: Uh, thank you, I appreciate it. And that's why we call it AI Native, because we built it. And by the way, we built the methodology that we were talking to this one tech company and they said, wow, you have a point of view. Your guide has a point of view, which I suppose is our methodology about what gets deals closed. And that comes from 20 years of deal coaching all over the world and in our other practice. So about the only thing we pulled over is what do we know at each stage of the deal cycle? What do we have to do to de risk the deal? What do we have to know? What data from our company do our reps need to know and in order to, in order to be able to get deal closed and we built that ground up right so that, that was, there was no band aids. Uh, it was a complete zero base blank slate after interviewing 65 execs and saying what, what do you need? And so yeah we're pretty excited too. I think it's you and I chatted about this the other day. I don't think there's been a new sales methodology in 20 years. Probably some of the existing ones have tweaked theirs a little bit but there certainly hasn't been an entirely new system from customization to delivery to pull through. It's all built on variations of the old school. So yeah, I appreciate the prep you did for this and your time. You've been super generous and I love being on the receiving end of uh, being interviewed by you. So thank you so much.

Speaker B: It was a pleasure. Thank you Brian.