Bespoke sales training built from your own best practice
Most providers arrive with a system and ask your team to adopt it. We arrive with questions and ask your team what already works.
Before we design a bespoke programme we speak to your best salespeople individually. Not an email survey. One-to-one calls, long enough to find out how they actually run a deal, what they say when a buyer stalls, and which of their habits the rest of the team has never been taught.
That becomes the programme. Where a genuine gap remains, we fill it with our own frameworks. Where your people are already strong, we leave it alone and spend the day on something that will change a number.
The problem every training budget runs into
Sales training is not usually bad. It is usually forgotten.
Those numbers are not an argument for better content. They are an argument for a different design. A day that ends with notes produces the first figure. A day that ends with a written plan, a manager who knows what to reinforce, and a measure agreed in advance produces the third.
How the programme is designed
Nothing is pre-written. Every programme starts from nothing and is built in four stages.
- Nothing pre-writtenNo template and no reused material. We do not begin with our content, we begin with your situation.
- We interview your peopleOne-to-one discovery calls with your top performers and your sales leadership. On a recent programme for a European manufacturer we ran nine structured interviews across the sales team and its leaders before designing anything. We are looking for what already works in your environment, and where the same problem keeps recurring.
- We build around your realityYour deals, your deal sizes, your industry and the people who will be in the room shape the content. Not the examples. The content.
- We add our expertise where it fitsOur frameworks fill the gaps the interviews found. Where your team is already strong, we leave it alone.
Why we start with your top performers. Every sales team already contains the answer to most of its own problems. Somebody is handling the objection the others struggle with. Somebody has worked out who to call when the usual contact goes quiet. That knowledge is rarely written down and almost never taught, because the person doing it does not think of it as a technique.
It also removes the resistance. Experienced salespeople push back on training because it usually asks them to replace something that works with something a stranger prefers. When the programme is built from their own colleagues’ behaviour, that objection does not arise.
How the day is delivered
There is no presentation. Our trainers do not present, and there are no slides. A detailed workbook holds the teaching material, so the time in the room is spent on your deals rather than on watching.
Every concept follows the same three steps, and the loop repeats across the whole day.
The model or framework, kept short.
To one of the participant’s own real, open deals.
Into their own 90 Day Action Plan, written by them, in the room.
The plan is not issued afterwards and it is not written by the trainer. A plan someone wrote themselves is a plan they will defend. A plan handed to them is a document.
Group size is capped
Workshops are designed for 15 to 25 participants. Above that, the pair and small-group work that carries most of the learning stops functioning, and the day becomes a presentation with a larger audience. We will not run it that way.
What happens in the 90 days afterwards
A single day changes behaviour for about two weeks unless something holds it in place. Your sales managers are the thing that holds it in place, and they are given a structure rather than an instruction.
The Manager Embed Plan
Every participating salesperson’s line manager receives their own document setting out what to reinforce and how, with formal reviews at Day 30, Day 60 and Day 90.
| What the manager does | How long it takes |
|---|---|
| Commitment conversation on the first day back | One conversation |
| Weekly review of the salesperson’s own dashboard, inside the existing one-to-one | 15 minutes a week |
| Formal reviews at Day 30, Day 60 and Day 90 | 60 minutes each |
| Total across 90 days | About 6 hours per participant |
That distinction matters, because “coach your team more” is the instruction most reinforcement programmes give and most managers cannot act on. A dated agenda, a set of questions and three scheduled reviews is something a busy manager can actually do.
What is measured
Your leadership selects the execution topics the programme covers, and each one carries a measure agreed before the day and tracked afterwards.
We do not run a satisfaction survey at the end. A satisfaction score measures how the day felt, which is a measure of the trainer rather than of the change. Rating a day highly and changing nothing the following week is the normal outcome of training, and it is what we are trying to avoid.
Attending does not demonstrate anything. Executing the 90 days does.
Each topic carries its own measure, agreed with your leadership in advance, so that at 90 days there is something specific to look at.
What your team leaves with
- A 90 Day Action Plan per person, written by them, against their own accounts
- Measurable progress on live opportunities, made during the session
- A measure per topic, agreed with your leadership before the day
- A workbook holding the full teaching material
- A Manager Embed Plan and three structured reviews at 30, 60 and 90 days
When bespoke is not the right answer
Bespoke is the right answer when your salespeople are experienced and have stopped learning from generic content, when your sales cycle or buying group is unusual enough that generic examples do not transfer, when you have already run training that did not change behaviour, or when different people on the team need different things.
It is not the right answer when you are training people who have never sold before. New starters need the fundamentals in a known order, and a standard programme does that well and costs less. We will say so.
Proof
CAEM
CAEM ran a bespoke programme against a defined target list. In 90 days the team opened three new customers worth £167,000 from 102 target accounts, with 19 further accounts in active conversation and 62 still being worked.
The number that matters is not the £167,000. It is that the activity was traceable to a named list, so the result could be attributed rather than assumed.
Marangoni
Marangoni, a global business in retreading systems and tyre services, was moving its partner network from transactional selling to a consultative approach built around sustainability and the circular economy.
The challenge was not the strategy. It was cascading it to a diverse network of independent partners across several countries and languages. We interviewed stakeholders, identified the gaps, and built multilingual training around Marangoni’s own value proposition. The first workshops ran in Hamburg with the Swedish partner Dacknor.
Every provider says they tailor. Tailoring usually means changing the examples. We build the day from what your top performers are already doing, because that is the behaviour the rest of the team will actually adopt.
Investment
Bespoke programmes are priced in two parts. A one-off design and delivery fee covers the discovery interviews, the programme design and the materials. Each workshop is then priced per delivered day for a group of up to 25 people.
| What | From |
|---|---|
|
Design and delivery One-off. Discovery interviews, programme design, workbook and Manager Embed Plan. |
£3,000 €3,500 · US $3,800 · AUS $5,800 |
|
Each workshop Per delivered day, up to 25 participants. |
£6,000 €7,000 · US $7,600 · AUS $11,600 |
- The number of workshops, and whether they run in one block or across a quarter
- How much discovery the programme needs. A single team is different from a partner network across several countries
- Languages, where materials and delivery are not in English
- Locations and travel
Frequently asked questions
What level of experience do participants need?
We have worked with people at every level, from graduates with no sales experience to salespeople with forty years behind them. Not every topic suits every audience, and we agree in the design phase which sessions are matched to which group.
How many people can attend?
Between 15 and 25. Above that the small-group work that carries most of the learning stops working. If you have more people than that, we run more than one workshop.
Does this work alongside a system we already use?
Yes. We do not ask your team to abandon a process that is working. We start from what your best people already do, and where your existing approach is part of that, it stays.
How much time does this take from our sales managers?
About six hours per participant across the 90 days. That is one commitment conversation, 15 minutes a week inside an existing one-to-one, and three formal reviews of an hour each.
Which industries do you work in?
The training is specific to business-to-business selling rather than to one vertical. We have significant experience in technology, SaaS, pharmaceuticals, professional services, digital media, construction, engineering, oil and gas, banking, software and financial services.
Can you deliver on site and internationally?
Yes to both. Most bespoke programmes are delivered at your premises or a venue you choose, and we have delivered across North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia in several languages. Availability should be checked early.
What "bespoke" should mean, and usually does not
Almost every sales training provider offers a bespoke option. In most cases it means one of three things.
The examples change. The content is the same standard programme and the case studies are rewritten to mention your industry. This is the most common version and the least useful, because the behaviour being taught has not changed.
The modules are reordered. You choose from a fixed catalogue and the provider assembles them in the order you want. Better, and still a standard curriculum in a different sequence.
A questionnaire is sent before the day. The provider asks your learning and development contact what the team needs, and designs against the answer. The problem is that the person completing the form is rarely the person who will be in the room, and the answer describes what leadership believes the gap to be.
None of these is dishonest. They are all cheaper than the alternative, which is to find out what your team actually does before deciding what to teach them.
Where our own frameworks come in
We do have proprietary material, and we use it where the interviews show a genuine gap rather than by default.
The most common gap is the buying group. Salespeople usually know who signs the contract. They much less often know whose targets suffer if the problem is not solved, and those are normally two different people. A deal can be approved by someone who never felt the pain, and a purchase nobody owns is often abandoned within the year.
The second most common gap is value. Most teams can describe what their product does. Fewer can state, in the buyer’s own words, what solving the problem is worth to that buyer. Without that figure there is nothing for the buyer to weigh a price against, and the conversation becomes a negotiation about cost.
Those are the gaps we fill. If your team is already strong on them, we spend the day somewhere else.
How to compare providers
If you are evaluating more than one, these five questions separate them quickly.
- Who do you speak to before designing the programme, and how? A form sent to learning and development is a different answer from one-to-one calls with the people who will be in the room.
- What happens in the room? A slide count is a useful proxy. So is asking whether participants work on their own live deals or on a prepared case study.
- Who writes the action plan? If the provider writes it, ownership sits with the provider.
- What is measured, and who agrees it? Satisfaction scores measure the day. A measure per topic, agreed before delivery, measures the outcome.
- What happens to the managers? If the answer is nothing, the programme ends when the day does.
If you are considering bespoke sales training, the first conversation is about whether it is the right answer for your team. Sometimes it is not, and we will tell you.