Frequently Asked Questions

We work side-by-side with our customers as allies and advocates to increase sales effectiveness and drive sustained results. Our five-stage process is more than just sales consulting. It builds alignment and ensures a return on your investment.

Stage I – Discovery: In discovery, we quickly gather the foundational information and insights required for the remaining stages. This stage includes reviewing existing processes, tools and systems. The goal is to supplement the work done to date with a first-hand understanding of the current leadership best practices and coaching/reinforcement challenges within the organization.

Stage II – Workshop: Our workshop drives the design and development of the training curriculum and associated tools. This stage includes a workshop with a selected team to collect, organize, develop and cleanse the necessary processes, tools and knowledge requirements for the upcoming training.

Stage III – Design and Integrate: During this stage, Force Management’s baseline training curriculum is integrated with any existing or to-be-created materials and processes.

Stage IV – Delivery: The purpose of this stage is to deliver the training curriculum to the sales organization based on the content that was created during the previous stages. Our approach for training delivery is based on state-of-the-art adult learning models. At least 60% of the instruction will consist of role plays and practical exercises that leverage real-world coaching and selling scenarios.

Stage V – Embed: The purpose of this stage is to support the reinforcement of the major training concepts and to ensure the desired learning behaviors are adopted in the short term and sustained in the long term.

This engagement process can be executed, virtually, in person, or a combination of both. Check out our infographic for more on our process.

Throughout our customer engagements, we use several strategic technology applications that allow us to accelerate and extend the learning, adoption, and implementation processes. Ascender^® is Force Management’s Sales Enablement application, providing organizations with a way to consistently engage with our digital content as we prepare for, deliver, and drive adoption of our training methodologies. The Opportunity Manager^® is a turnkey solution for integrating Force Management methodologies and deliverables into Salesforce. By providing sales teams with access to the FM solutions in Salesforce (where reps spend most of their time), sales leadership can ensure consistent application of the methodology across the entire organization and gain line-of-sight into the adoption and application of the methodologies, making it simpler to prove ROI.

We also leverage several other technology and mobile applications to support different aspects of our engagements. These tools are typically influenced by the outcomes our customers are trying to achieve, along with what existing technologies we need to ‘draft into’ in order to make the experience as seamless as possible for learners. We’ve advised hundreds of clients on how best to do this and can share examples of customers who have drafted our specific methodologies into their systems.

The rollout or the initial training of our methodologies is a small piece of the entire engagement process. At the start of our engagement, we make a plan for adoption and reinforcement. This outline ensures that your sales leaders, enablement team and managers have a plan to reinforce the content that is rolled out in training. Our Ascender platform accelerates adoption by giving your reps, managers and executives 24-7 access to content, tools and resources that support your engagement. The Opportunity Manager, a tech solution that integrates our methodologies into Salesforce, was built to help drive ongoing adoption, reduce time-to-productivity and scale the success of the sales transformation. Some of our clients also invest in Train-the-Trainer programs that ensure they have people on-site certified to teach our curriculums to new hires down the line. Sales leaders who fully commit to their initiatives find our other additional programs valuable throughout their sales transformation journey. To learn what those are, how they align with our Command Series offerings, and how successful sales leaders leverage them, please reach out to our team.

Our customized sales consulting solutions are built by you, for you. We help our customers build on current best practices and target areas of needed improvement. We customize the content alongside our customers, to ensure it is relevant to what your account teams are doing every day and the conversations they're having with customers. Our clients take ownership during the development and the rollout of their sales transformation process, ensuring that the content developed for training is consumable and adaptable to their entire organization. Dig deeper on how we help our client customize their training and deliverables. We also have several customer testimonials that speak to the importance of this customization and how it positively impacted results.

From the start, we bring cross-functional leaders together, creating buy-in and alignment across your organization. They’re included in the workshop where the content around your value and differentiation is defined, created and vetted. Our methodology is sales-focused, but we know it will not be successful if we don’t have buy-in from pivotal departments (e.g., marketing, product, technical services and customer success). We engage leaders early on in developing the content so when it is rolled out to reps, there’s buy-in throughout the company.

Listen to Force Management President and Managing Partner John Kaplan talk about building alignment around the essential questions.

We deliver the training curriculum based on the content created in the discovery, workshop and integration stages. Your reps will be primed for the training through a series of pre-work activities which include online learning modules and executive communication. The instructor-led training is an interactive customized program that is focused on practical application. At least 60% of instruction consists of exercises that leverage real-world scenarios. We believe it’s important that our reps use the methodology with real opportunities in training. This activity ensures immediacy of application. We have several proof points of reps who were able to quickly close deals by leveraging the methodology the day after training.

Consistency in the sales force is also driven by a stringent focus on adoption from the beginning stages of the initiative. After training, our spaced-learning tools, surveys and additional reinforcement mechanisms put a process behind continual measurements. This structure ensures associates are readily using the methodology and have a clear, consistent answer to why customers should choose your
solution.

Hear from PrimeRevenue’s CEO on the consistency they were able to drive in their engagements.

Sales Leaders: If you're a Head of Sales, you’re busy. You have a day job. At the same time, changing behavior and implementing new processes is hard work. It's a full-time job. Your sales initiative can't replace all the activities that need to be done regularly to drive revenue. Company leaders can't take their foot off the gas to devote time to develop content, processes and tools that change behaviors for the long term, we provide the fuel that lets you drive the car and achieve your desired outcomes. [More here]

Company Investors/Partners: Our Command Series equips portfolio companies with the foundation and discipline that fuels predictable revenue growth. Our programs help companies align the growth strategy with the point of sale, ensuring measurable results that drive growth faster and increase valuations. [Learn more about our investor program]

Sales Managers: Force Management has developed and refined our training and adoption programs to focus on how first- and second-line managers drive sales effectiveness that results in bottom-line impact. We believe they’re a pivotal component to your success. Our offerings have specific learning tracks for managers. Here are resources that cover ways sales leaders can enable their managers to be great coaches. We leverage these practices in our engagements to support managers in building elite sales managers.

Our success starts with hiring the right client-facing staff. Without the right people, it is impossible to drive repeatable success for our customers. Our sales performance facilitators are carefully selected and go through a stringent training and alignment process that is set up to drive operational excellence in all aspects of client engagement. We have several client testimonials that speak to our success in drafting in the right people at the right time with our company.

We demand that our facilitators are uniquely able to command a room and have the unique knowledge base to effectively train on the intricacies of your industry. In addition, our methodologies are taught by veteran leaders who have a wealth of experience training customer-facing professionals. Our facilitators have extensive experience in the industries in which our customers operate. They have the practical experience that drives legitimacy in our overall project execution.

Our methodologies have proven their success repeatedly, but our biggest strength is the way we engage with our customers. We differentiate on our process. That success comes from our ability to:

• We draft into current processes and tools, and customize solutions based on what’s most important to the client and what will move the needle the fastest. We drive organizational adoption post-training, developing an integrated sales motion and process that’s consumable, practical and repeatable.
• We build cross-functional buy-in. Our methodologies are sales-focused, but we know they will not be successful if we don’t have buy-in from pivotal departments (e.g., delivery, marketing etc.). We engage leaders early on in developing the content so when it is rolled out to the sales teams, the result is a highly aligned organization.
• We enable our clients to adopt and reinforce our methodology throughout the organization. Our engagement process is built in a way that demands the buy-in upfront, but drives reinforcement on the back-end. The purposeful approach to adoption, with a plan that starts from the very beginning of the engagement provides a clear path and execution approach for successful change management.

As a result, our clients are able to drive bottom-line impact for their organizations. Check out our testimonial videos to hear about their experience with our company.

Our clients are high-growth B2B companies who are looking to accelerate growth and improve sales productivity. The majority of our clients are international with a combination of offices and distribution channels in NA, EMEA and APAC. Our work spans the high-tech industry, fintech, medical devices and technology, manufacturing and staffing. Hear from our customers by visiting our results page.

Our Command of the Message® Train-The-Trainer Program certifies your designated facilitators to independently train during refresher events, new hire programs, and cross-functional sessions. Learn more about this program.

• "There are thousands of sales methodologies out there. The main reason I went with Force Management and Command of the Message is because Force treats it like a process, not an event. We had this initial intense training at our SKO, where we were fully immersed in the customized programs, but that wasn't the end of the journey. It was the beginning of the journey." Keegan Riley, CRO at Sysdig. Read their story here.
• “We needed a way to help our sales teams evaluate and qualify deals consistently and build solid pipeline. Those two major components came together when we leveraged both Command of the Message and MEDDPICC together.” Rich Wing, Global Director of Sales Enablement at Intercom, read their story here.

We help leaders enable sales teams with a common, buyer-focused mindset and methodology that improves their ability to articulate relevant value, negotiate on that value, drive increased sales revenue and forecast accurately.

Our solutions are customized to each company’s buyers, industry and organizational structure. We aren’t off-the-shelf training. Everything is built “by you, for you” with a focus on adoption and reinforcement to ensure immediate and consistent execution on the front line. We’ve helped numerous companies increase revenue per rep, average deal size, speed up time-to-productivity, etc.

We assess benchmarks throughout the initiative in order to set our clients up for the greatest ROI. We've outlined the major measures below:

Pre-Implementation

• Executive support and participation
• Timely completion of workplan activities
• Timely deliverable reviews & approvals
• Completion of pre-work assignments

Leading Indicators

• Course evaluations | Adoption surveys
• Completion of “commitments to action”
• Success stories
• Management reinforcement

Operational Metrics (1 - 2x average sales cycle)

• Average deal size
• Annual Contract Value
• MRR/ARR
• Average sales cycle
• Win rates
• Pipeline health
• Revenue forecasting accuracy
• Time to productivity

Financial Metrics (2 - 4x average sales cycle)

• Revenue per sales rep
• Margin
• Cost of sales
• Quota attainment
• Customer renewal rates

Engagement ROI

• Cost vs. incremental sales revenue

We use an approach called MEDDIC(C) as a Sales Qualification Tool to help drive consistent discovery and efficient qualification of opportunities. It's an acronym that outlines a proven qualification approach for your sellers. Each letter stands for a key qualification element. It’s a litmus test for gauging the strength of a sales opportunity and a GPS for navigating the sales cycle.

MEDDICC enables your sales team to quickly qualify deals in or out, so sellers can focus their attention on accounts with the highest potential opportunities. Using this approach for qualification helps both the buyer and the seller move successfully through the decision-making process. It ensures that the way you sell is aligned with the way your customers want to buy.

In our experience, there are three major factors that distinguish the elite sales organizations from those whose initiatives don’t gain traction.

1. They have the commitment, active involvement and participation of leadership to truly drive the initiative.
2. They have a company-wide commitment to aligning behind the company’s integrated go-to-market sales model.
3. There is buy-in on the need to enable the front-line managers to coach and reinforce.

Watch our Facebook Live video with Brian Walsh on how leaders drive success with a sales initiative.

There are also factors relating to your elected project manager that can improve your chance of success during the process. Here are some of our ideal tactical daily or weekly activities to consider while working with us:

1. Able to devote 20-25% of time to the sales initiative
2. Type-A personality
3. Responsive and task-oriented with the ability to get things done quickly and correctly
4. Over-communicates and isn’t afraid to ask questions
5. Has power and influence… or works closely with someone who has both
6. Functions well in a team environment
7. Cares about the success of the project and has “skin in the game”
8. Respects and trusts the process with an attentiveness to the end-game

The fact that you’re reading this answer means you are in the right mindset to drive a successful sales initiative. What good is a sales initiative if it isn’t adopted and reinforced?

Adoption is the cornerstone of our learning philosophy and consists of five integrated disciplines: Priority, Relevance, Integration, Measurement and Reinforcement.

Priority is achieved through leadership involvement, commitment to participating and “leading from the front” throughout the development, delivery and sustainment processes. Priority also includes leadership commitment to the enforcement, inspection and reinforcement of the training concepts and best practices.

Relevance is achieved by tailoring the curriculum to reflect the real-world selling situations that the sales organization encounters on a day-to-day basis. The sales tools and processes must be specific and “sales consumable” if they are to be perceived by sales reps and/or sales management as a mechanism for enhancing productivity. Our adoption methodology achieves relevancy through the insights and content gathered during the Discovery and Workshop stages.

Integration is achieved through the inclusion of the training concepts and best practices of the existing tools and technology used to support the sales organization. Integration also includes expanding the footprint of the transformational initiative, along with the language and tools, to include other organizations within the company (e.g., Marketing, Product Development).

Measurement is achieved by tying the results of the training program to the key performance indicators of the sales organization. As an integral part of our Adoption Methodology, we co-develop and periodically co-measure key performance indicators through a scorecard system.

Reinforcement is achieved primarily through the behavior of front-line managers. Our Adoption Methodology promotes reinforcement by:

• Gaining widespread management involvement throughout the project
• Providing sales managers with “coaching playbooks” that define desired behaviors to be inspected and red flags to remediate
• Ensuring that sales managers “lead from the front” by speaking a common sales language and managing via common processes

Download our ebook on ensuring successful sales adoption.

We’ve helped numerous companies increase revenue per rep, average deal size, speed up time-to-productivity, etc. You can see them on our results page.

Our typical initial engagement lasts one quarter, with adoption and reinforcement initiatives ongoing and available as necessary. The people needed varies by offering and scope. Typical attendees at the kickoff and workshop stage include C-level executives, sales leaders, marketing leaders, product leaders. The program is championed by upper management and typically managed by sales enablement. The person who is managing the program internally can expect to devote 25% of his/her time to the initiative.

Our typical customers buy based on their biggest business challenge. We find that the majority of them start with Command of the Message because sales productivity is almost impossible to improve if you don’t have alignment on your value and differentiation. At the same time, an inability to sell on value manifests itself into a slew of challenges that often spark the need for an initiative.

While many customers buy an engagement that encompasses the four areas of sales effectiveness, we would never roll them out all at one time. Rather, we would systemically launch them based on your own internal initiatives and what makes the most sense for your specific organization. Too many initiatives at once hurts adoption and hinders success.

It depends on your company culture and how you want to drive execution. A big event is great for high-energy dynamics and getting a highly consistent message out to everyone quickly. Regional roll-outs take more time, but the group sizes are more intimate and localized. In big events, you can also structure break-outs so smaller teams are working together as part of the larger event. The majority of the time, we recommend a big event over regional roll-outs because it is easier to ensure consistency in the message. In international deliveries, we’d recommend you roll-out by larger geographies (e.g., North America, EMEA, APAC).

Our engagements are highly customized and therefore, it’s difficult for us to provide an accurate range through our website alone. However, we don’t shy away from talking price with our customers. Feel free to schedule a call with us and we can talk more about the specific outcomes you’re looking to achieve. You can also read this article on Force Management and pricing for more information.

Both virtual and in-person engagements are live and interactive. Virtual sessions are aimed at maximizing rep engagement remotely. This diagram breaks down how the sessions may change in a virtual setting and what you can expect. This article covers how we approach virtual training sessions to ensure lasting outcomes.

A Value Framework isn’t a script. It’s a repeatable framework that guides the customer conversation
face-to-face, over the phone and digitally, throughout the customer engagement process. The Framework’s foundation is cross-functional company alignment on the value drivers and differentiators that are top-of-mind for your most influential buying audiences. Clearly defining these buyer topics and the sales message provides on-ramps into multiple levels of the customer organization and allow your team’s message to transform and resonate with the appropriate audience. Think of the Value Framework as a navigational aid that helps sales teams engage in a consultative sales conversation focused on value and differentiation in a way that has meaning to the buyer. Individual reps can tailor it to their own selling style. It also can be used as a tool to integrate any previous sales training investments.

Force Management’s customers build their own frameworks with our facilitators who guide them towards clearly defining that value and differentiation for the sales team. Our methodology is sales-focused, but we know our sales leader clients will not be successful if we don’t have buy-in from pivotal departments (e.g., marketing, product, technical services and customer success). We engage leaders early on in developing the content so that when it is rolled out to reps, there’s buy-in around the company.

Command of the Message enables sales reps to effectively articulate your value and differentiation at the point-of-sale, then deliver on the promise of that value. This enablement is integral to the function of sales and other customer-facing roles and unfortunately, doesn’t happen without a clear process to get you there.

When marketing invests time, resources and frankly, a lot of hard work creating messages to the industry that attract buyers, reps need the ability to explicitly incorporate that value into their sales conversations.

A sales team’s ability to consistently articulate the value message relies on their ability to draw through the messaging and value that marketing and product teams have established with the buyer.

Effectively engaging your prospects on the value you provide as part of your sales message, leverages the corporate and product marketing messages into impactful, “three-foot” sales conversations that connect the customer’s requirements with your solutions. The sales conversation is where the business strategy turns into revenue generation. Therefore, making a company’s messages highly “sales-consumable,” enables sellers to use them in real-world customer conversations.

That’s why alignment behind a sales messaging platform is so important. Your sales team is responsible for engaging your customers on the value of your solutions. It is critical that marketing, product and sales organizations are aligned on what that value is, because the role they play effectively enables the sales team to articulate that value to a customer.

It’s easy to articulate your product’s features and functions, but that’s not going to help your sales team sell a million-dollar deal. Complex, enterprise sales requires company alignment and high velocity around a focused value-message. Driving that alignment and as a result, enabling your sales team to have these value-based conversations generated with Command of the Message, you will you improve margins, generate more revenue and make your overall company more successful.

Your front-line managers play a pivotal role in driving sales performance. If you just train your sales team, without giving your managers the same training, two things will happen:

1. They won’t be able to reinforce the content because they haven’t been given the tools, training, and processes to do so.
2. They won’t buy-in to the initiative because they weren’t included in it and will quickly revert to the old way of doing things.

Similarly, if you just train your managers, your reps won’t have the context they need to adopt the methodology. Remember, change is difficult. Your reps need to see the value in changing how they approach customers. If you don’t make it easy for your reps to change behavior, they will quickly revert to old bad habits.

Our approach has proven successful because of our focus on alignment. This emphasis means our approach is easily adapted to all components of the customer engagement process. We’ve trained customer services, marketing ADRs, and SDRs around the globe because our engagement approach aligns the entire company on the process, mindset, tools and content we roll out in our trainings. At the same time, the content is developed specifically with your buyers in mind. This outside-in concentration ensures the process is easily adaptable to other parts of the sales and customer service organization. It also increases adoption, providing the ability for anyone engaging with buyers to execute on the methodology.

Here is an example of the company-wide benefits companies can achieve by generating alignment and putting their entire customer-facing organization through Command of the Message.

We add short-form content (blogs, podcast, videos) to Ascender five days a week. Courses are added each quarter. Participants can ask questions at any time in our community. Our event team hosts live virtual events three times a month. Those replays are also added to our community after the events. 

Content is developed by our sales experts and professional content creators. In the Explore feed, we may feature guest authors and guest experts, but the point-of-view is always validated by Force Management methodologies. 

Ascender is responsive to mobile devices. Courses are best taken on a computer because of the variety of learning modalities presented.

Ascender provides a place for reps to learn and ask questions about best practices. Opportunity Manager can help them apply those concepts to live deals in the company's CRM. By connecting these two platforms, you can ensure that sellers have access to relevant learning content while they’re applying key concepts to live deals.

We don't replace your LMS. Ascender is not an LMS. It provides your sales organization with 24/7 access to the best digital courses, content, and coaching to support your Force Management engagement. We built this platform to provide short, practical learning opportunities that drive results. 

Ascender is customized for your engagement. Its content, tools, and courses are built by our team (so you don’t have to spend the time creating them), but they are customized based on your Force Management engagement.

Managers have a dashboard for tracking participation and completion of activities and courses to ensure adoption is taking place. They can also assign specific courses and content as part of a tailored Individual Development Plan.

Each manager will have two additional items available in the drop-down menu when clicking on the far right icon in the top navigation bar. These additional menu items include "Team Management" where managers can assign courses to their team members and "Reports" where they will be able to review all progress for any course assigned to their teams.  If you're a current Plus subscriber, you can read this post in the Ascender Plus Support Forum for additional context. 

We do tailor courses and learning paths so that they reference the specific deliverables created during the customer’s engagement. For example, when we reference the ‘Value Framework’ or ‘Discovery Guide’ as part of a course or learning path, we embed the client-specific version rather than a generic example.

Ascender supports continuous learning and is purpose-built to reinforce training concepts in the short term and drive adoption by deepening understanding and application in the longer term. The content is designed to meet individuals “where they are” in their adoption journey based on the adoption challenges they may be facing. This includes courses and learning paths tailored for particular roles, activities, or topics.

The user experience and design is ideal for customers leveraging SFDC Lightning, however the Opportunity Manager, along with all of its components, will still function within a SFDC Classic setup.

Because we deploy the Opportunity Manager as a Managed Package, you won’t have any issues with redundant field names, even if you’ve already done so level of integration to support a Force Management engagement. If necessary, as part of the implementation, we'll help you map your current data over to the Opportunity Manager. This is a relatively straightforward process and will ensure that your sellers maintain access to information and data they’ve already entered into Salesforce.

Unfortunately, not yet. The Opportunity Manager is currently targeted to current and past Force Management customers.

As mentioned above, yes, current and long-standing Force Management customers can implement the Opportunity Manager to support their engagements.

If a technical issue arises, the quickest resolution is to use the support button located on the bottom right of each page on the Command Center. Through this window, you can send a message or search a library of support topics. You can also email Support@lyearn.com.

If you have an inquiry re Command Center content, subscription terms, or licenses, contact your Customer Success Manager or other primary engagement contact.

Your primary Salesforce.com Administrator will be able to assist with Opportunity Manager user support questions.

Please contact accountspayable@forcemanagement.com for any of your billings questions.