Three workshops, reported as they happened.
The cases are anonymised. Industry and sales situation are given here, the customers’ names are not.
What we show is the work: where the team stood, what we did, and where it landed.
Three sales situations, three different kinds of deal.
“We have a steam engine. We have never translated it into horsepower.”
A Nordic telecoms company, the business area for connected solutions. Sells complex technical platforms to large industrial and infrastructure companies. Sales cycles of six to eighteen months, several decision-makers, and deals almost always initiated by a finished request from the customer.
The team placed itself between Midstream and Downstream. Asked where the customer would place them, the answer was the same.
Their own description of the pattern: the customers send a procurement request, we reply with a quotation, the customer already knows what it wants. They often worked with the customer early, but at the wrong height in the organisation.
The steam-engine sentence came later that morning, and it refers to horsepower. The unit was invented by James Watt to sell steam engines to buyers who had no steam engine to compare with. They had horses. Watt expressed the machine in the unit the buyer already measured in. 1
The team had the machine. They described it in components, pressure and performance, that is, in the machine’s parts. They had never expressed it in the customer’s unit.
All five steps, on a single live deal the team chose themselves: a large Nordic grid owner in an industry under regulatory transition.
We built a sourced picture of that customer and sent the analysis report a week before the workshop, so the team had time to read it and get answers to its questions.
The workshop was one morning, two consultants, six exercises. One facilitated, one logged. Everything said and decided went on record.
The workshop’s strongest moment was not what got filled in. It was the box for what the team did not know about its customer.
No one in the room could say how a technical shortfall in the customer’s operations translated into money in the customer’s own profit and loss. They knew what the platform did. They did not know what its absence cost.
The team also worded a sentence about what the customer is trying to achieve. They wrote it twice. The first version was about digitalisation in general. The second pointed to a specific capability the customer must master to succeed. The difference between the two versions is the whole point of the exercise, and it came from the room.
A week later we delivered the pitch, with a speaker script, eleven prepared objections and a source list where every figure can be traced. It does not open with the platform. It opens with the capability the customer must master, and its weightiest section is the one no one in the room could answer: what the absence costs.
That is the translation into horsepower.
“The customer sees no difference between us and the cheaper option.”
A Nordic logistics and communications company with nationwide physical infrastructure. The business area sells business communication to large corporate customers.
The sales cycles are procurement-driven and the price competition is hard. The competitive field holds three kinds of players: price-driven physical distributors, digital platforms that make the channel redundant, and specialised optimisers selling advice on top of the customer’s communication flow.
The team stood in Downstream. Four patterns described the situation, and they recognised all four:
The sales process starts in a request, not in an insight.
The customer sets the criteria, you quote.
The strategic conversations about the customer’s communication happen at other suppliers.
The offer is perceived as interchangeable with the cheaper option.
The diagnosis and the decision, not the full programme: a positioning analysis of the company against the whole competitive field, and a decision workshop with the sales leadership and the management team.
The analysis set two questions against each other: how standardised the offer is, and how much of the customer’s actual business problem it addresses. The company landed in the same box as the players who compete on price alone, despite an infrastructure none of them has.
It was that picture that made the conversation possible.
The room arrived at three conclusions, and all three came from them.
That the unique reach was valued as a hygiene factor, not as a strategic asset. The customers assumed it and did not pay for it.
That the company held a position no competitor could take, but that the position had never been worded in the sales conversation.
And that the hardest shift was not commercial but internal: to stop chasing volume in a business area where volume is the only thing measured.
The work then went on to a finished pitch.
“Nine times out of ten, it is a direct request.”
A Nordic company in device management and mobile workplace solutions. Sells to both the public and the private sector, with sales cycles ranging from pure procurement to longer solution deals.
The team stood in Downstream, and they said so themselves before we could.
The most common ways into a deal were the web shop, device management, equipment take-back and consultants. The public sector was described as a given in that price logic. The private sector was seen as less price-sensitive, but there the company more often served as a source of knowledge than as a partner.
The underlying diagnosis the group worded themselves: the customer sees no difference between us and the competitors, and then price decides.
All five steps, on a live deal the team chose themselves: an acquisition-driven Nordic group in the middle of an ownership change.
The analysis report on that customer went out a week before the workshop. The workshop ran in five blocks that built on one another, with two consultants in the room. The pitch was delivered afterwards, with a speaker script and a source list.
The strongest thing in the room was an unusually honest self-image. The group mapped which decision roles own the value at the customer, noted that they know who they are, and admitted that they rarely meet any of them.
That made the task easier, not harder. The problem was never convincing the group that they needed to move. The problem was giving them a mechanism for doing it.
The group also identified its own largest knowledge gap, and it was not about technology. It was about who makes the decisions at the customer after the ownership change. The whole deal was exposed to a question no one in the room could answer.
At the same time, the pattern they had described showed itself. As soon as an exercise required the group to act rather than analyse, they returned to the product. The frictions they found at the customer pointed to an integration problem, but the hypothesis they landed in was about device configurations. That is still a downstream question.
The work after the workshop therefore became a translation in reverse. For every solution the group had written down, we restored the customer friction that solution presupposes, tied to a consequence the owner of the customer’s business cares about. The difference is the one between selling an answer and selling a diagnosis.
The pitch is built on that translation. It opens in the customer’s ownership change and in the question of who makes the decisions afterwards, not in device management.