Categories: Company Alignment | Sales Productivity
We spend a lot of time on our blog talking about challenges our customers face and possible solutions. We try to practice what we preach, making our blog content focused on our customer, and less about us. However, today we are breaking with the norm and sharing a little more about Force Management to help you align on your biggest opportunity to drive sales impact.
We're continually sharpening our methodologies, making them more robust and valuable for our buyers. Given the current state, we’ve pivoted our solutions and made strategic changes to ensure our offerings continue to support sales organizations in solving their complex execution challenges and driving lasting results. Whether the current state has left you on a path to recover revenue, stay competitive, or continue on an accelerated journey to growth—our goal is to ensure you make it happen.
Below are six solutions that our customers are using to boost the impact of their sales initiatives right now. See how they may help you ensure your change initiative sticks and enables your sales team to overcome the challenges of selling in today’s murky sales environment.
1. Virtual Sales Training Delivery
When you need productivity from your sales teams, you can't slow down. Every day that goes by is one less day that you have to meet your numbers. We are working with our customers right now to help them keep their initiatives running responsibly in the remote environment and in a way that aligns to their organizational goals. Given the current state, we’ve cut off our in-person training sessions and gone completely virtual with our global trainings and offerings. Through our virtual sales training engagements, our customers have been able to move forward with their strategic initiatives regardless of current state, to drive immediate and lasting results. See how you can move forward with a virtual sales engagement to drive similar outcomes.
For more information: Here’s what you can expect from a virtual sales training engagement:
2. MEDDICC (or it's variants, MEDDPIC and MEDDIC)
It’s almost impossible to grow or even hit revenue numbers repeatedly without a voracious sales qualification process. At PTC, the sales organization executed on MEDDICC so well that they went 43 straight quarters of never missing their number to Wall Street. Ever since their rapid growth, the MEDDICC sales qualification methodology has become a top choice for sales leaders looking to improve business predictability and forecasting.
Elite companies are moving quickly to adapt their qualification methods and ensure their sales teams can consistently focus on the right opportunities and move them forward efficiently. We believe in the strength of MEDDICC to help sales teams ensure alignment with the buyer’s decision criteria and improve forecast accuracy. Through virtual training engagements, we’re helping customers make MEDDICC work for their sales organization by equipping them to drive lasting results, even during a pandemic.
For more information: Get familiar with our MEDDICC offering. If you’re strongly considering MEDDICC, view all of our resources on implementing and executing MEDDICC successfully. See how we could partner to help you achieve predictable business growth, quarter after quarter.
Something to consider: Processes like MEDDICC grow more powerful when they are backed by a value-based sales messaging framework. Buyer-focused value messaging can help reps create opportunities and instill value in them throughout the entire qualification process. See how value messaging and MEDDICC work together to drive predictable revenue growth.
3. Ascender Plus - Force Management On-Demand
Many of our customers are already using Ascender Plus to accelerate adoption and improve outcomes related to their initiatives. It's an on-demand digital content hub that gives your reps, managers and executives 24-7 access to content, tools and resources that support your engagement. One of biggest roadblocks to sales success is the ability for leaders to reinforce concepts, while trying to hit their revenue numbers. That's why we built this platform to provide short, practical learning opportunities that drive results.
Ascender Plus doesn't replace your Learning Management System. It's a knowledge center where all of the Force Management courses, content and coaching is accessed in one place, 24/7 — on your phone or on the computer.
For more information: Check out the Ascender Plus Technology Page
4. Value Negotiation
As John Kaplan would say, our Value Negotiation offering is LEGIT. Created by Tim Caito, it was developed particularly for salespeople and any other customer-facing role. It focuses on making negotiation an organizational competency, not a tactic that you use at the end of the sales process. We pull together sales, pre-sales, services, finance, product, legal, and other stakeholders to ensure each person understands what the must-haves are in every opportunity. Then, we teach your entire customer-facing team to build and protect value at every state of the customer engagement process.
For more information: Get familiar with our value negotiation offering. You can also watch this video of our Value Negotiation Training in Action and check out this on-demand webinar on Powering Through Procurement.
5. Inside Sales and Sales Development Reps
How can you execute the Value Framework in a 10-second phone conversation? Well, we have customers that are doing just that right now. We've found that many of the fundamental challenges sales leaders faced when managing field teams followed them into building inside organizations. Things like articulating and aligning value, objection handling and decision-maker access.
So what does this mean for you? If you’ve already experienced the impact of Command of the Message® with your field sales team and would like to be able to drive the same outcomes with your Lead Gen and Inside teams, we now have a solution that does just that. We call it our “Bootcamp powered by Command of the Message”.
The curriculum has been updated to resonate with a faster-moving, tech-enabled workforce and it easily drafts into how your teams operate on a daily basis. The bootcamp also leverages our on-demand digital content hub to deliver short learning modules (3-5 minutes) and help accelerate adoption.
More Information: Read more about the curriculum offering on our product page and read how we helped Vertafore improve productivity in their inside sales organization.
6. Opportunity Coaching
Sometimes helping your salespeople apply new concepts to specific opportunities can be the one thing that turns on the light bulb. Our facilitators and subject matter experts frequently coach salespeople on specific deals through our Opportunity Coaching offering. This program helps sellers think strategically about a specific opportunity and gives them the tools they need to advance their position within the deal. In the sessions our team:
- Provides feedback and coaching on strategy execution, rather than creating a list of action items
- Demonstrates the intentional use of training concepts by providing tactical, hands-on advice
- Establishes a coaching rhythm for inspecting opportunities across the sales team
- Observes and gains insight on bright spots, challenges, and opportunities for improvement
- Identifies common themes across the sales team to define reinforcement efforts
For more information: Watch Brian Walsh Talk Through Opportunity Coaching Best Practices
Don’t Wait. Drive Sales Impact by Moving Forward with Your Strategic Initiative
Your next SKO is your biggest opportunity as a sales leader to get your entire sales organization aligned on how they will execute against 2021 goals. If you have challenges that any of these offerings can help you solve, don't wait. Remember, these problems don't fix themselves. We can help you align on your biggest opportunity to course-correct sales execution challenges and set yourself up for success next year.
