We always work on live cases.
One programme, two add-ons.
Pricing is per engagement. The scope varies with the number of teams, the number of accounts and the choice of add-ons.
Upstream Sprint, from measurement to finished pitch in three to four weeks.
Your sales team takes the Upstream Selling analysis on its own deals. We interview the sales leadership and a selection of sellers, and go through the material you actually use in customer meetings.
The outcome is a shared picture of where you stand: where you sit in the four dimensions, where self-image and evidence part ways, and which of the patterns is strongest in your team.
You choose a live deal with a real customer. It should matter enough that you care about the outcome, and be open enough that it can still be influenced.
We help you choose if you are unsure, but the decision is yours. It is your deal the work has to pay off in.
We build a sourced picture of the chosen customer: what is driving their business right now, which decisions lie ahead of them, which roles own the value, and where their own picture of the problem is still open.
The analysis report is with you one week before the workshop, so the team has time to read it and get answers to its questions before we meet.
Three to four hours with your sales team. Two consultants from us: one facilitates, one logs what the participants arrive at.
We do not come with the answers. We come with the customer picture, the structure and the questions. The content comes from the room.
The workshop is always led by two consultants. One holds the room and drives the work forward. One listens for what the group is saying without noticing that it is saying it, and that is usually where the position gives itself away. The two roles sit badly in one person. Which of us does which varies between engagements.
One week after the workshop you get a finished presentation in PowerPoint, with a speaker script for every slide, an appendix of prepared answers to the objections, and a source list where every figure can be traced.
The presentation is built to be run straight into the customer meeting by the seller who owns the deal.
Six exercises in one morning.
Framing. What we are about to do, and why this particular customer.
Place yourselves in the model. The team places itself, and says where the customer would place them. The gap between the two answers is often the workshop’s first insight.
The customer’s reality. External threats, internal conflicts, operational pains, and the box that weighs heaviest: what we actually do not know.
The stakeholder shift. Per decision role: what do we say today, and what hypothesis could we walk in with instead.
The engine. Friction, hypothesis, question. The team builds rows on the wall until the pattern shows itself.
The prioritisation. Which hypotheses hold the highest value for the customer and the highest credibility from you. Those win.
The four moves in the room have names: Reposition, Reframe, Relanguage, Reshape. Move the position, reframe the problem, change the language, reshape the criteria.
Everything said and decided is logged. It is the log, not our interpretation, that becomes the raw material for the pitch. The log becomes the workshop report, described in the next section.
A presentation the seller can run the day after delivery.
The pitch is built on your own work with the customer’s situation: what is chafing at them, what it costs to leave it be, and what can be done about it. You arrive with the proposal before the customer has worded the question.
Should the deal move forward, it can happen in one of two ways, and both beat answering a finished list of requirements. Either the deal is settled directly with you, without going out to several suppliers, and then you are not compared line by line against others’ prices. Or it goes to procurement anyway, but on a brief you helped shape, and then it was not someone else who chose which of your strengths get evaluated.
The analysis report. A sourced review of the chosen customer: the shift they are standing in, what is driving their business right now, which decisions lie ahead of them, and where their own picture of the problem is still open. It is with you one week before the workshop, so the team has time to read it and get its questions answered.
The pitch. Built in acts: the customer’s starting point, the insight that reshapes the problem, what it means for the customer’s own business, what you offer. Every slide has a speaker script. At the back of the file sit a source list where every figure can be traced, and an appendix with prepared answers to the objections that may come.
The Pitch Brief. The strategy behind the pitch, written for the person who will deliver it. Slide by slide: what the slide is meant to achieve, which move it makes, and which trap sits in it. Plus the arithmetic behind the figures, the opening question, the hardest objections and what the seller does after the meeting.
The pitch can be run without it. But it is the Pitch Brief that lets the seller answer why a given slide sits where it sits, and that question decides whether the meeting becomes a conversation instead of a recital.
The workshop report. What the team arrived at, exercise by exercise, and our overall analysis of the session.
No figure stands unmarked, in any of the documents. Evidenced means the source or the measurement can be shown. Derived means the conclusion can be computed from evidenced facts. Assumed means a hypothesis is in use, and that it says so. Three words, throughout the delivery.
Two ways to let the work live on.
It starts with a measurement.
