We do one thing.
Pitch Perfect Sales moves sales organisations’ position in the customer’s thinking. Everything we deliver is a different way of doing that.
Our clients are sales organisations. We build the thinking, the material and the capability their sellers use in their own customer meetings. Everything produced here has two customers: our client, and our client’s customer.
Ford solved its problem. Toyota defined the industry's.
When the crisis of the seventies arrived, with high costs, uneven quality and hardening competition, the dominant Western reflex was to ask how to build cars more efficiently. Ford is the example: optimise the production you already had.
Toyota had by then already spent two decades on a different question. What actually is efficient car production? The foundations of their production system grew from the forties and fifties, with just-in-time and jidoka as bearing principles.
Through the eighties, the competitors tried to copy Toyota. They copied the tools. Steven Spear and Kent Bowen later explained why that rarely sufficed: what made the system hard to imitate was not the methods but the thinking behind them, and that did not show from the outside. 1
Toyota did not own a method. They owned the way of thinking about the problem. That is the difference Upstream Selling is about, carried over to the sales table.
That the method was worded now, and not ten years ago, has a reason. As long as the seller’s main contribution was information and good questions, it was enough to get better at both. When the customer gets those free and instantly from a machine, two things remain that are still hard: shaping the picture of the problem before it locks, and making the decision safe for the person who has to carry it internally. That is what we work on.
A machine summarises what is already written. Whoever sets out to shape a picture of a problem needs to show where every claim comes from, and that is why everything we hand over is marked evidenced, derived or assumed.
Five beliefs we work from.
Position beats technique. A skilled seller in the wrong place in the customer’s thinking loses to an average seller in the right place.
An insight that requires your product is not an insight. If the claim collapses when the product is removed, it was a sales argument.
What is not measured gets dropped. That is why measurement is always the first step, and why every engagement starts in a number.
An unevidenced claim is worse than a gap. Every bearing claim we deliver is marked evidenced, derived or assumed.
Change that does not survive the consultant is no change. That is why the work ends in something the team owns, not in a course that was good.
We are not for everyone.
We work with sales organisations that have complex deals, several decision-makers and decisions that have to be defensible afterwards. That is, where the customer’s picture of the problem is still forming, and where what the deal is judged on can be influenced even after the request has arrived.
We are a poor fit when the sales cycle is short and transactional, when the deal is decided by a procurement function without internal debate, or when no one in the sales leadership is prepared to change what gets measured. The last one is the most common reason this kind of work fails to stick, and it is worth knowing in advance.
Working upstream also demands more. More work before the quotation, more senior judgement, more patience with deals that do not yet have a date. The stake comes before the payoff. That is why most people leave it alone, and it is also why it works. What is easy to do, everyone does, and what everyone does never shows in the customer’s decision.
Your transactional volume business should keep being run efficiently downstream, exactly as today. This is about the deals where the margin is decided. You do not trade volume for margin everywhere. You choose where to play which game.
The question about industry almost always comes. Over the years the work has spanned telecoms, IT, logistics, retail and financial services, among others. But the industry is not the selection criterion, the shape of the deal is. Two procurements that look entirely different on the surface can have the same decision process, and it is the decision process we work in.
Fredrik Häggblom
I have worked in sales and sales development for thirty years, with a background in strategic sales and marketing, in both B2B and B2C.
Upstream Selling grew out of an observation I kept making. Sales teams that did everything right still lost deals, and the explanation was rarely in the execution. They stood in the wrong place in the customer’s thinking, and then being skilled in the room was not enough.
I worded the concept to be able to say that briefly. Then it turned out the position could be measured, and at that point it became a method instead of an observation.
Per Thorell
I come from thirty years in sales, with strategic marketing and sales management as my base. At Pitch Perfect I am a senior consultant.
The combination is the point. Marketing is about how a value is worded, sales management about what can actually be steered in a sales team. Upstream Selling sits at the intersection of the two: shaping the customer’s picture of the problem before the requirements are written, and building a way of working that lets the team do it again without us.
It is also my yardstick in engagements: the work is not done when the workshop was good, but when the team owns what came out of it.
