ClientA global industrial automation supplier
SprintA 10 week sprint
Fieldwork2 sales workshops and 1 training week
Strategy and Commercial Excellence
Built to sell products, asked to sell transformation
The division wanted to stop selling drives and control systems and start selling enterprise-wide transformation. That means the meeting is no longer with the plant engineer, it is with the chief executive. Nobody had a method for preparing for that meeting.
6
Stages in the pre-RFQ preparation process handed over, across four phases
3
Customer archetypes defined, each with its own approach and questions
2
Workshops with the sales team and senior management, plus a training week to test it live
A note on sourcing. Every figure here comes from a SprintlyWorks client engagement. Clients are described, never named. Where a figure is identified, modelled or indicative rather than banked, the line says so.
01
The problem
The deck puts it bluntly. The division had not prepared for selling enterprise-wide transformation because of its product-oriented way of selling. Salespeople knew the products. What none of them had was a repeatable way to research a customer’s strategy, digital maturity and operating priorities before the first conversation, so every meeting started from whatever that individual happened to know.
The gap was a method, not knowledge. Building one means researching customers the team already sells to, testing the draft on live calls, and revising it with the people who have to use it. That is several weeks of somebody’s undivided attention, which a working sales organisation does not have spare.
02
What the sprint set out to do
Identify what a salesperson actually needs in front of them before a transformation conversation. Build it into a standard process. Validate it by joining real customer calls with the sales team. Then revise it and hand it over.
What came back was a six stage framework and three customer archetypes, tested on two worked customer cases and presented twice to the sales team and senior management. It is a method, not a result, and this page does not claim otherwise.
Pre-RFQ preparation
The six stages handed over
The process a salesperson runs before the request for quotation.
| Stage | Phase |
|---|---|
| Customer research, from public sources | Preparation |
| Customer focus area, and how they see the supplier | Value exploration |
| Customer value proposition | Value proposition |
| Customer value offering | Value proposition |
| Customer value opportunity, top and bottom line | Value proposition |
| Customer assurance | Value application |
How to read this → The first stage is the one that was missing. Everything downstream of it was already being done, unevenly, by whoever happened to be in the room. Fixing the preparation is what makes the rest repeatable.
SprintlyWorks analysis
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