Sales reviews: does critical information reach the table?
In high-value-added selling, information relevant to a decision is often spread across salespeople, technical specialists and operational managers. The management question is specific: how should a sales review be organised so that facts held by just one person are examined before the proposal is approved?
What the literature establishes
Garold Stasser and William Titus (1985, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) demonstrated experimentally that group discussion can favour information already known to everyone over information held by only some members. Bringing together people with complementary information therefore does not guarantee that they will pool it. For a sales review, this suggests a risk: repeating an opportunity's familiar strengths without surfacing a technical constraint known to only one person.
The interpersonal risk of speaking up
Amy Edmondson (1999, Administrative Science Quarterly) observed an association between team psychological safety and learning behaviours. Psychological safety here means a shared belief that the team allows interpersonal risk-taking, including reporting an error or asking for help. Applied cautiously to selling, this mechanism invites us to distinguish two difficulties: having information and being able to voice it when it contradicts collective enthusiasm.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that simply asking everyone for their opinion before closing the review is enough. Yet a round-table discussion can still produce convergent opinions without revealing the facts behind them. A practice worth testing is instead to collect, before the discussion, a relevant piece of information that each participant believes only they hold, then examine its source and implications. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence does not establish
The information-sharing experiment did not concern complex sales, and the psychological safety study was not a controlled trial of a sales review method. These studies therefore do not demonstrate that such a process increases win rates or margins. Moreover, new information is not necessarily accurate or decisive: its novelty warrants examination, not automatic priority.
A practical check in Bâle
As part of SHR's « Vente à forte valeur ajoutée » programme, an exercise in Basel could focus on proposals for pharmaceutical and life sciences clients involving Rhine logistics or international R&D teams. For one month, before each review, every participant would record a fact that could change the proposal, its source and whether they believe that information has already been shared. The measure would be the proportion of facts flagged as unshared that receive documented treatment before proposal approval: incorporation into the proposal, verification assigned to a named person or exclusion with a recorded reason. The forms and meeting records would allow this treatment to be checked; they would not, on their own, prove an improvement in sales. To go further: explore the High-Value Selling training in Basel in the canton of Basel-Stadt, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: High-Value Selling in Basel
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