ABB is a global leader in electrification and automation, helping industries and utilities move toward a more productive, sustainable future. Within its Motion business area, the Motion High Power division (MOHP) serves complex, long-cycle markets such as Chemicals, Oil & Gas (COG), where deals often involve engineering companies, system integrators, and multiple decision-makers before a contract is even signed.
The challenge: getting into the deal before the RFQ lands
ABB’s ambition was clear, given the predicted growth over the coming years in the Motion business area, ABB aims to grow along with the market and help industries ‘outrun’.
Stefaan Blondeel, Global Sales Competence Manager at ABB, explains the opportunity this exposed.
Many of ABB’s business developers are highly skilled technically, but spent most of their time on operational, reactive sales. According to Stefaan, the deeper work of business development – shaping demand before specifications are locked – was unfairly overlooked:
That part of the funnel gets pushed aside because people are caught up in operational sales. We wanted to pull a dedicated group of people out of that cycle, upskill them, and give them the time to focus on shaping opportunities.
ABB selected around 30 people across its COG segment for this dedicated track. Their brief: extend the buying center to new stakeholder groups such as engineering companies, system integrators, equipment manufacturers and end-users, and build the skills to influence a deal long before it becomes a price negotiation.
The solution: a customized, co-created learning track
After evaluating several training partners, ABB chose Perpetos. Stefaan Blondeel points to the flexibility of the program design and Perpetos’ commitment beyond the workshop room as the deciding factors:
It’s not a hit-and-run. Perpetos is there from beginning to end, aftercare included, and they were genuinely willing to work with metrics and adjust the program as we went.
The resulting program combined an in-person kick-off, classroom and virtual workshops, one-on-one coaching, peer intervision sessions, and implementation assignments tied directly to each participant’s live pipeline. Core topics included customer journey orientation, powerful questioning, value drivers, buying center dynamics and advanced conversational skills. Progress was reinforced through Qstream, a spaced-learning app already used within ABB, which nudges participants with short recall exercises to keep new skills top of mind.
One deliverable stood out: a messaging kit built in Excel together with the participants, mapping customer types and personas to the right questions for each stage of a conversation. ABB’s team has since turned that kit into a polished PowerPoint tool for its sales teams, and is now exploring how to make it available to other local sales units and divisions beyond COG.
Perpetos also picked up on a need that surfaced during coaching: participants wanted a faster way to prepare for meetings. Together with ABB, Perpetos helped design prompts for ABBY, ABB’s internal AI assistant, tailored to the messaging kit’s methodology, turning meeting preparation into a ten-minute exercise. As Stefaan Blondeel puts it:
Perpetos took ABB’s own context, put it into a prompt, and checked if that actually produced relevant information to prepare for a meeting. They also checked that it matched what we’d covered in the workshops. That kind of flexibility and constant fine-tuning is what I really appreciate.
Results: broader outreach, better-prepared conversations
The shift in behavior was visible. Participants grew more comfortable reaching beyond their usual contacts, mapping out the full buying center instead of always going back to the one technical contact they already knew. Salesforce data showed more visit reports and more leads being logged during the program, a positive trend Stefaan is cautious not to overstate, but one he sees as encouraging nonetheless.
Our program got an exceptional high average recommendation rating of 9,8 on 10 with an average confidence rating of 4.7/5 on applying the learnings, and a 4.5/5 overall program rating. For Stefaan, the reason is straightforward: the training was built entirely around ABB’s own cases, not a generic, one-size-fits-all curriculum.
It’s really tangible. Participants had to bring a case from their own pipeline, one they were stuck on, and apply what they’d learned directly to it. That’s completely different from an off-the-shelf program you rush through with big volumes and nothing that sticks.
Collaboration with Perpetos
Looking back on the partnership, Stefaan Blondeel credits Perpetos’ ability to read what actually drives change inside a large, complex sales organization, and to translate that into something usable for people in the field:
Perpetos is able to create a lot of value for what you pay, because they really understand the dynamics within a company and a sales organization. They can take something complex and make it simple enough for every participant to actually apply it.
With the messaging kit now evolving into a shared tool and early conversations underway about extending the approach to other divisions, ABB and Perpetos are laying the groundwork for a program built to scale, without losing the customization that made it work in the first place.
