Context Overview
Established ways of working can make it difficult for Sales, Marketing and product specialists to see where coordination breaks down across a customer opportunity.
Applied in different organisational settings, the Complex Selling Workshop brings the team together around a real customer or account group to examine its sales process, clarify each function’s contribution and agree what each colleague needs to know before taking the next step.
Facilitated analysis of strengths, bottlenecks and customer needs becomes a shared action plan with owners, milestones and hand-off outputs. A collaborative tool records visits, decisions and progress; the validated workflow is then developed with the CRM team for use beyond the initial team.
Stakeholders
Sales, Marketing and Product Leadership; account and territory teams; product specialists and, according to the solution, clinical, medical, scientific or technology experts; CRM team for workflow integration; HR consulted on the people-development dimension.
Deployment
- Diagnose the way the team works. Facilitate a workshop on an account or customer group, using previous experience and a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats review to surface effective practices, bottlenecks and improvement opportunities.
- Map the end-to-end opportunity. Work back from customer and business outcomes through targeting, territory and portfolio analysis, needs discovery, value proposition, proposal, follow-up and retention. At each sales or customer buying stage, identify the roles involved, the decision to make and the output required for the next step.
- Define capabilities and hand-offs. Specify what each contributor must do, when, with whom and to what standard. Define the stage outcome, applied skills and information to pass on, so the next colleague can see what was attempted, what was learned and how far the opportunity progressed.
- Build and practise the team action plan. Address identified skill and process gaps through focused learning and coaching; facilitate agreement on a shared workflow, owners, milestones and expected outputs within the company’s established methodology and value proposition.
- Pilot collaborative execution. Translate the agreed approach into an internal tool with meeting and customer-visit logs, shared updates and team reviews. Use it to track ownership, decisions, hand-offs and opportunity progress as part of the work rather than reconstructing them afterwards.
- Validate and embed the model. Review the pilot with the teams, refine the process and partner with the CRM team to incorporate the validated workflow into the system used by the organisation, creating a model that can be adopted at country, regional or global level.
Metrics & Results
- Positive participant assessment of how structured the work was and how clearly each role fitted the sales process increased by 37% across the before-and-after indicators reported.
- Opportunity updates increased by 22%, improving the visibility of opportunities in the CRM; updates were brought closer to the team’s normal workflow rather than left until afterwards.
- The share of no-bid decisions fell by approximately 17%; the team reported broader opportunity coverage with the same staffing.
- The workshop produced a shared stage-by-stage action plan and collaborative pilot workflow for recording customer interactions, decisions and hand-offs. The process was refined with the teams and incorporated into the CRM workflow.
Competencies, Frameworks and Tools
Cross-functional workshop facilitation; sales methodology application; territory, customer and opportunity analysis; process and hand-off design; role and capability mapping; team coaching and performance enablement; action planning with stage-level milestones; collaborative tool piloting; CRM adoption and stakeholder alignment.
Sales and customer buying-stage mapping; SWOT review; outcome-to-execution-to-skills framework; stage-level action plans and hand-off milestones; agile process design in the pilot; meeting and customer-visit logs; collaborative pilot tool and CRM workflow.
The applied sales methodology varied by organisation: Value-Based Selling in the Siemens context, alongside MEDDIC, Challenger principles or an internally developed methodology where relevant to the specific implementation.