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FAQ​ - FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Sixteen questions, answered straight.

The questions below are the ones we get most often. The answers are short on purpose.

A way to determine where in the customer’s thinking you are, and to move to where the deal is actually decided. The model has three modes: Downstream, Midstream and Upstream. They describe where in the customer’s thinking you stand, not where in time.

No. We do not train, we work. The team does the job on a live deal, and the capability is built in that work.

That does not make training wrong. Training raises execution in the room you already stand in. The position decision determines which room that is. Position first, then capability.

The difference shows in the format too. A programme built on practice examples requires the team to transfer the conclusions to its own deals afterwards, and that step often never happens. Here the work is done on the deal directly.

If you are looking for classic sales training that sharpens conversational technique without touching position, there are providers who do that better than we do.

No, they sit at different levels. A questioning framework such as SPIN is about how you ask the questions. A conversation strategy is about how you lead the conversation. Upstream Selling is about which conversation to have. It picks the battle, your existing methodology wins it.

Twelve questions about a live deal, four to five minutes. You get your position in the model, a position score and a credibility score, your position gap, four values showing where you are losing position, and an action plan for seven, thirty and ninety days.

No registration is required. The answers are not stored. They live in the browser tab and disappear when it closes. We cannot recreate them, and we do not know who answered.

From start to finished pitch, an Upstream Sprint takes three to four weeks. Most of that time is our work and your reading time, not meetings.

What costs you time is the interviews in step one, about an hour per person, reading the customer analysis before the workshop, and the workshop itself at three to four hours.

The analysis report is with you a week before the workshop, precisely so it has time to be read. That week sits inside the three to four, not on top: the measurement, the choice of deal and our analysis work run over the same period.

We publish no prices. The scope varies with the number of teams, the number of accounts and the choice of add-ons.
What we promise is concrete: a shared and evidenced picture of where you stand, a finished presentation that can be run in a customer meeting, and the strategy behind it, written for the person who will deliver it. If you want to measure the effect, we set the baseline together in step one, and the measurement is yours.

The industry matters less than the type of deal. It works in complex deals with several decision-makers, internal trade-offs and decisions that have to be defensible afterwards.

It works poorly 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.

With what shows already within the quarter. The analysis gives an action plan with steps within seven, thirty and ninety days, and Position Reading gives a baseline. After three to four weeks there is also a finished pitch in a live deal, built to be run in the next customer meeting. The road from analysis to use is weeks, not a year. From there it can be followed up whether the work is moving: at what level the meetings get booked, and whether you were there before the requirements were written. The deals come later. The movement shows first.

A live case. We never work on invented examples. You choose a real customer you want to win, and all the work is done on that deal.
Two consultants in the workshop: one facilitates, one logs. The customer analysis and the pitch are produced by us between the steps.
Yes, and the whole engagement can be run in English: the customer analysis, the workshop, the pitch and the documents. The method names and the model’s three modes are English from the start, so the material works in an international group whichever language the work is done in.

No. Respond to the brief exactly as asked, point by point, and at the same time offer a working session on what the brief does not ask about: what you believe is missing from the customer’s picture of the problem, what that gap is costing them, and what you can do about it.

That is where you become the supplier who saw something the customer had missed, instead of one of several answering the same questions. You also find out whether anyone can change the question, which is itself a measurement of where the deal sits.

Then take the analysis and show us we are wrong. It takes four to five minutes, costs nothing and stores nothing. It is the fastest way to dismiss us.

No, and there is a test that settles it. An insight that only works because it favours us is not an insight.

The test is simple: can the claim be made without naming your product, and does it remain true if the customer chooses someone else? If it does not hold on both counts, it is not used.

No. Consultative selling starts from a need that is already defined and adapts to it skilfully. It is reactive, however well it is done.

What once made it a difference, the seller arriving with questions and perspectives the customer did not have, is a commodity today. The customer gets the same perspective in four minutes without you.

Upstream Selling operates before the need is defined. The difference is not one of degree. It is one of direction.

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