Offerings · Coaching · Rep and Deal Coaching
Coaching your sellers on the opportunities they are actually working, so the method reaches the deals that decide your quarter.
I coach your biggest opportunities, especially the ones you should win but that need reframing to win.
The longer version of thatClose
One real, open deal per session, a prep sheet before it, your manager on the call, and a written summary of what was decided.
What it is
A methodology rarely dies because people disliked it. It dies because it never reached a live opportunity while that opportunity could still be changed. This is the offer that reaches it. Every session takes one real, open deal, chosen by the seller, and works it in front of the seller and his manager.
The conversation structure gets applied to a live opportunity, again and again, until it is simply how a deal gets worked. Each review leaves a written record of what was decided, owned by your seller and his manager rather than by an outsider.
The rest of what it isClose
Two days before the call
The seller completes a prep sheet built on the qualification framework and the conversation structure, or sends a link to the same fields in your CRM, and shares it with everyone who will be on the call. I read it before we start. Filling it in is the first coaching event of the session, because it is where a seller finds out which questions he cannot answer about his own deal.
Who opens it
I set the call up quickly: the purpose, the structure, what we expect to walk out with. When the manager is on the call, the manager does that instead. The front of the room belongs to your leader rather than to the outside coach, from the first session onward.
The first ten minutes
The seller gives the opportunity uninterrupted. His summary of the buyer's story, then the qualification: how, who and what. Uninterrupted is a design decision, not a courtesy. A seller who gets interrupted starts performing for the room instead of thinking about his deal, and the gaps stop surfacing.
The middle of the call
Strengths worth continuing. Information gaps to fill. Positioning gaps and the actions that close them, in priority order, including how to take the action rather than only the instruction to take it. Gaps are a good thing. I want to know the gap when I can action it, not when it is too late.
When talking about it is not enough
Some sessions become a role play instead, run the way it is run in the training: ten minutes of practice, ten of feedback, and the seller assesses himself first. That is the move when a seller knows what he should say and cannot yet say it to a customer. The deal itself goes back on the table at the next session.
The day after
A written coaching summary with recommendations, from me. The seller, or the manager, captures the actions and drives accountability for finishing them. I do not take that on. The actions are theirs, and so is the credit for closing them out.
- The subject here is the deal, and the skill gets coached through it. That is the reverse of a classroom, and it is why the two are worth buying in that order. This is one half of sustaining a selling transformation. The other half is coaching your managers to run these reviews themselves: Leadership and Manager Coaching →
- A common language to coach against, where the team does not have one yet: Sales Training and GTM Transformation →
- Stage exits the buyer has confirmed, so a review stops being an argument about status: Cross-Functionally Aligned GTM Process
Why it matters
Impact it creates
The structure your team was trained in starts showing up where it decides revenue: in the opportunities your sellers are working right now.
Two sessions a month per seller, each one on a real open deal with the manager watching, is repetition against live consequence, and that is the difference between a team that was taught a method and a team that uses it.
Preparation becomes the first place the standard bites.
The prep sheet is built on your qualification framework and the conversation structure, so it is yours, and it stays the format your opportunity reviews run on after the program ends rather than lapsing when the sessions do.
Reviews stop ending in agreement and start ending in action.
Each session leaves prioritized recommendations in writing, and your seller and your manager own finishing them, so what was decided is checkable, and the person accountable for it works for you.
Gaps show up while they are still worth something.
Deal by deal and seller by seller, the question nobody had put to the buyer surfaces weeks before the forecast call instead of inside it, which is the difference between an action and an explanation.
You can judge the program while you are still paying for it.
Every session is logged in a sheet you hold, so whether this is working is a question your own record answers rather than one you take on faith until the end.
The distance between knowing and saying closes.
Where a seller knows what he should say and cannot yet say it to a customer, the session becomes practice in the structure your team already learned, and the skill gets built at the point it was failing.
Who it is for
What I usually hear before this starts
- We trained on it. Everyone liked it. I do not hear it on customer calls.
- My reps run a good first meeting and then the deal stalls somewhere after the demo.
- Our deal reviews are status updates. Nobody leaves with an action.
- The forecast slips late, and the gaps were sitting there for a month before anyone said them out loud.
This is the problem this offer is bought against. The full page →
How it runs
- Cadence
- Two sessions per seller per month, over a program with a start and a finish. One dedicated day a week, held as a standing block. Sessions are booked for sixty minutes with the expectation that they run forty. The forty is on purpose: it keeps the call on what matters, versus extraneous filibuster detail.
- Format
- Video, one seller and one opportunity at a time, scheduled at least a week ahead through a shared booking link. A seller who cannot make his slot swaps it with a peer rather than losing it.
- Who is on the call
- The seller whose deal it is. Me. The manager, and I want the manager there. On a large or complicated opportunity, the manager should bring whoever else that deal needs. Where the person carrying the conversation is a customer success manager working a renewal or an expansion, it is the same session and your Chief Customer Officer names who comes to it. The opportunity on the table is an existing customer rather than a new logo. Nothing else about the hour changes.
- What you supply
- Participants named at the start, a prep sheet your team has agreed to, someone who keeps the schedule honest, and CRM access so I can see a deal in context rather than in isolation. And the one written into every scope I sign: execute the recommendations. A deal coached on Friday and untouched by Wednesday was a conversation, not coaching.
- What you can see while it runs
- Every session is logged in a shared tracking sheet that you hold, for transparency and auditability. You should be able to audit what you are buying while you are still buying it.
- What it is not
- Not one-off deal help. A pipeline too big to fix an opportunity at a time needs a program rather than a run of rescues, and I will tell you which one you are actually buying. Not a deal desk and not a pricing or approval body. And not a substitute for a common language: where nobody has agreed what good looks like, these sessions become expensive tutoring.
Two reasons this works
Your Methodology, Not Mine
The coaching does not require my methodology. If yours is sound and unexecuted, we coach yours into behavior: your vocabulary, your stages, your inspection points, carried in the buyer's language.
Why that mattersClose
Revenue: a methodology you have already paid for starts working, which is the cheapest revenue available to you this year. Cost: no second rollout, and no new vocabulary for the field to learn. Risk: nothing your managers already inspect has to be thrown away.
What that means in a session is that I am asking your questions back to your seller. If your framework calls it a champion test, I use those words. If your stage four gate says the economic buyer has confirmed the business case in writing, that is the line we look for in the deal, and the coaching is about how he gets it rather than about what to call it.
Coached on the Deal, Not in the Room
The work happens inside an opportunity that is open right now, with the manager on the call, rather than in a classroom against a case study written by someone who has never met your buyer.
Why that mattersClose
Revenue: the coaching lands on deals already sitting in this quarter's forecast, so the first return is not a behavior, it is a next step taken in a live opportunity. Cost: forty minutes on a seller's own deal, rather than field days spent away from the pipeline. Risk: you can see it working deal by deal within weeks, and you can see it not working just as fast.
A seller practicing in a workshop performs. A seller reviewing a deal he has to close behaves differently, because there is a consequence sitting in the room with him: he has to go and do the thing on Monday, with a real buyer who may say no. It is also why the manager is there: he watches the standard applied to his own pipeline rather than hearing about it afterward.
Proof
Energage. A three month coaching cycle after the training, two sessions a month per seller, a prep sheet ahead of each one and managers on the calls. The change was observable while it was happening, and it was collected during delivery rather than reconstructed afterward, by name and by date, across nine named sellers. Sellers reframed calls around the customer's problem rather than around the product, asked directly about budgets they had been assuming, and pushed for the champion conversation they had been working around.
“I reframed the call around their employee engagement instead of our survey - and they immediately started talking about attrition challenges that we can solve!”
Behavior change documented by name and by date across a single coaching cycle
What it is like to work with me
“I had the privilege to work with Russell 3 times. After many years of selling and sales leadership where I have been trained at Solution Selling twice, Customer Centric Selling 3 times, Sandler once, Force Management 3 times, I can easily say that Russell is one of the best facilitators of sales training I have met. His ability to lead a room with 2, 3 or 400 people is absolutely incredible. Russell has this gift of feeling the energy of the people he interacts with and can instantly adapt his speech to them; Russell has an extremely strong psychology and can really lead and inspire others through a shared objective. Last point that really inspired me when I was working with him is that Russell enjoyed so much what he does that it is contagious with everyone and make them enjoying learning.”
“Russell, I can’t begin to tell you how much I appreciate your efforts this week! I’ve been through many sales trainings and this was the best I’ve ever attended, much due to you. My team is pumped!”
“Russell, I teared up at the end of your session b/c you reminded me of why I loved sales strategy so much. Thank you for your warmth, the kindness you exuded, and the passion you shared.”
“I was not exaggerating when I told you, and several others, that I have been in many training classes over the years, and this will absolutely stand out as the best one, bar none.”
“Russell’s ability to break down complex concepts into simple, actionable strategies made an immediate impact. Since then, I’ve brought him back multiple times. Russell has a unique talent for making sophisticated sales principles easy to understand and, more importantly, easy to apply in day-to-day selling. Russell immediately elevates any GTM teams efforts.”
Questions people ask
You are one person. How many sellers can you actually coach?
Do the arithmetic rather than take a claim. Sessions run forty to sixty minutes. Each seller gets two a month. One dedicated day a week is about four days a month, and that is the ceiling on direct coaching. Past that number the answer is not more of my hours. It is coaching your managers to run the same session, which is a different offer and a better one at scale:
Which deals should we bring?
Not the layups. The ones with hair. Reviewing a deal that was always going to close teaches nobody anything and it uses a slot a real opportunity needed. If a seller brings a safe deal twice in a row, that is itself the coaching conversation.
Does the manager have to be on the call?
Not contractually. In practice I want him there, and when he is there he runs the open. A seller coached by an outsider while his manager is elsewhere learns to take his hard deals to the outsider. That is the dependency this program is designed not to create.
Our team has never been trained in your methodology. Can you still coach them?
Yes, against whatever framework they use today. But be clear about what you are buying. Where there is no common language, coaching one deal at a time is expensive scaffolding for a problem a room fixes faster, and I would rather point you there first:
This is the Energize part of the work: the standard arriving in real opportunities, carried by your sellers, with your managers watching how it is done. Your goal, not my service line.
What the first session looks like.
Your seller sends the prep sheet on Wednesday for a Friday call and finds three fields he cannot fill in about a deal he has been calling committed. His manager opens the call and says what it is for. The seller talks for ten minutes without being interrupted and hears his own version of the buyer's story out loud for the first time. We spend half an hour on the two gaps that decide the deal. He leaves with three actions in priority order that he wrote down himself, and on Monday you get the summary. That is the hour. There are two of them a month, per seller.
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