Avoid Commoditization, Accelerate Client Decisions, Drive Sustainable Performance

Deep down, clients don’t really care about your products and services, they only care about how they can lift their condition and fix their problems. The best salespeople think less about their product, and more about their clients’ businesses, pressure points and opportunities.

Negotiation is important, even critical, but most of the value in a sale is created before the formal negotiation stage, based on which stakeholders are engaged and how the client defines and values the problem or the opportunity. The best salespeople gain effective access to most senior stakeholders early, understand and monetize their pain points and influence buying criteria.

Front-line managers are generally promoted to the role after performing well as individual contributors. But few are giving the training and tools to transition from coaching deals to coaching people. Many remain “super-reps”, unable to unlock the true potential of their mid-performing salespeople. Fixing this is often the single most important driver of productivity growth. (Here are 4 signs you’ve got a field coaching problem)

We’ve trained tens of thousands of professionals, from young graduates up to CEOs. Training by itself can be highly effective, but there are massive opportunities to increase ROI by implementing simple tools and workflows after the training to create an ongoing planning and coaching methodology. We can help. Why most sales training is a waste of money?

Most sales leaders have solid pipeline analytics, but have little to no visibility to the competency gaps that ultimately set the limit on pipeline velocity. Unlocking these gaps reveals problem areas early, and delivers dramatically better performance management outcomes. That’s why we developed the SWIFT™ productivity app for Salesforce.

The Swagger approach is based on three principles – LEVERAGE, HONESTY and SIMPLICITY. It was developed by a small team of professional negotiators who had spent 15+ years advising commercial leaders on their largest enterprise deals, and training tens of thousands of sales professionals in sales, negotiation and coaching. They observed common and predictable gaps in the skills and approaches of the sales teams managing complex B2B sales, including the commoditization of value through the sales process (leading to price-only discussions at the end of the sales process), a lack of front-line manager coaching skills (with many managers being “super-reps” more than leaders), and a lack of visibility for sales leaders to the competency gaps in their team that were ultimately limiting productivity and revenue growth.

We have four main modules in the Swagger curriculum – selling skills, advanced negotiation, account planning and navigation, and manager coaching. We create custom curricula for each job role based on a combination of these modules for each client’s specific needs.

Yes. Our highly trained consultants train up to (literally) CEO level, and our training methodology (making extensive use of simulations and filming/debrief) can highlight capability gaps in even your most senior and experienced enterprise sales professionals. For more junior sales members, we can also deploy training via a Train-The-Trainer process.

We build a custom training plan for each client’s needs, so it varies. But our core selling skills curriculum is typically delivered over 2 full days, in-person where possible, with day one focused on the core methodology and skills coaching, and day two focused on live deal war-gaming and rehearsal for immediate application in the field. Managers will generally attend with their teams, and then attend a follow-up one or two day session focused on coaching the methodology.

Our consultants are highly experienced commercial professionals and former executives, and typically have over 20 years experience in sales, procurement and leadership. They bring a compelling experience to all of our training sessions, and can confidently coach and advise even your most senior leaders. We can also equip your team to deliver the training in-house through a comprehensive train-the-trainer and accreditation process.

Apart from a step-change in skills and confidence, we have a full set of simple, effective and value-add tools for your team to deploy in the field, including a highly effective pre-call planning tool, negotiation planner and manager field coaching tools. For sales teams using salesforce, we also have a fully native Salesforce SWIFT^TM app that plugs right into Salesforce and creates the workflows for successful planning and coaching and leadership visibility.

Yes. We customize training for every single client, including building custom sales simulations set in your business (your products, your challenges), a varying curriculum for different roles (e.g. sales rep vs enterprise account manager), and with war-gaming and rehearsal for live deals and meetings forming part of every training session.

Yes. We generally prefer in-person training, but have an exceptionally engaging and effective remote training (delivered over Zoom) that creates genuine behavior change and skills development.

We regularly deliver a 15-25% lift in sales productivity within 12 months of deployment, and the training investment routinely pays for itself within 6 weeks. You can see some great client testimonials throughout the website, or Book a consult with us to find out more.

Yes. We have a highly effective Train-the-Trainer (for training) and Train-The-SEAL (for commercial leaders) processes to equip our clients to deploy and support the methodology long after the training is complete.

The Swagger curriculum is currently deployed in over 15 languages across the Americas, Africa, Europe, Asia-Pac and the Middle East. We support local language training through our highly effective Train-The-Trainer process where we equip your local trainers to deploy the Swagger curriculum to their teams in local language.

We are intensely focused on return on investment, which obviously happens after the training not during it. We built the SWIFT^TM Salesforce app to provide a simple but powerful drop-in coaching solution  to create the workflows that reinforce the Swagger Sales techniques. The app provides pre-call planning, negotiation preparation, complex account planning and front-line manager feedback and coaching workflows. It also provides sales leaders with drill-down visibility to their sales teams and competencies so they can literally see the methodology working in real time in the field.