Upstream Selling
Shape the question, and you stop competing on the answer.
#shifthappens
Who put the customer's problem into words in your last major deal?
In most major deals, the problem is already worded and the criteria already set by the time the request lands on your desk. You answer, as well as you can, a question you were never part of asking.
Not because anything is done badly. Most sales teams do a great deal right: good people, a strong offer, structured ways of working. Yet the pattern is familiar: price decides more than it should, the work grows while the results don’t, and deals you ought to win quietly come to nothing.
This is not an execution problem. It is a positioning problem.
Ninety-four per cent of business buyers use AI in their buying process.1 The need is often worded before any supplier is in the picture.
The customer has done their homework. With help from a machine.
You can only win the deals you hear about.
The customer draws up the shortlist alone, and more often every year. In 2024, eighty-five per cent chose among suppliers they already had in mind before they started searching. In 2025 it was ninety-five.2 If you were not in that picture, the deal becomes a silent loss.
Whoever is there when the problem is put into words stands a better chance of still being there when the criteria are written, and of being among those invited to bid. That is what an upstream position is worth.
Sales training makes the seller better at selling: finding the right customers, getting in, asking sharper questions, handling objections. All of that helps.
But by the time the request arrives, the requirements are usually already written, and how well you answer does not change which criteria you are judged on. Those are two different problems, and training solves only one of them.
Sales training improves execution. It does not move your position.
Position is not a feeling. It can be measured.
Four things decide where you stand in a deal: when in the buying journey you enter, whose words describe the problem, who set the criteria, and whether the customer can state your value when you are not in the room. Most sales teams have never measured any of them.
The distance between the position you think you hold and the one you can evidence is called the position gap. Twelve questions are enough to measure it.
We always work on your real deals. It starts with a measurement of where you stand. Then a deal you want to win, a sourced analysis of the customer behind it, a workshop with the team, and a finished pitch.
The pitch arrives one week after the workshop: a PowerPoint presentation with a speaker script, objection handling prepared in advance, and a source list where every figure can be traced. It is built to be run in your next meeting with the customer.
Five steps. One real deal. One finished pitch.
We move your position in the customer's thinking.
We do not do everything. We work where the purchase is a project inside your customer’s organisation: several people need to agree, the decision has to be justified upwards, and it has to be defensible afterwards.
Even when the request has already arrived, it is possible to influence what the deal is judged on. But if the deal is simple and price is the only thing that sets you apart, downstream is the right answer, and we are the wrong supplier.