Six Solutions Our Buyers Are Finding Additional Value in Right Now

At Force Management, our focus is helping our customers achieve revenue results, even long past their initial engagement with us. That's why we're continually sharpening our methodologies and tools to make them more robust and valuable for our clients. As many organizations continue to face uncertain market conditions, causing higher scrutiny and hesitancy from buyers, we know you still have your sights set on big revenue goals — and we're determined to help you make them happen.

In this blog, we're sharing six solutions that our customers are using to boost the impact of their Command of the Message investment right now. See how they may help you to get more value out of your methodology and supercharge your key growth objectives, even when external market factors might be in flux.

1. On-Demand Training and Reinforcement with Ascender Plus

Many of our customers are already using Ascender Plus to accelerate adoption and improve outcomes related to their methodologies. Ascender Plus is our on-demand digital content hub that gives your team 24/7 access to content, tools and resources that support your engagement. One of the biggest roadblocks to continued sales success is the challenge of reinforcing desired behaviors at the individual seller level as time goes on and new sales objectives, quotas and challenges are introduced. That's why we built this platform to provide short, practical learning opportunities that improve execution.

Ascender Plus helps minimize skill gaps across your sales team with highly relevant skill-specific courses like  Actionable Account Planning, Validating Champions, and Maximizing the Effectiveness of Proof Points. Front-line managers can hone their ability to lead and guide deal activity with curriculum on Executing Opportunity Coaching, Mapping Team Communication Styles, and Skill/Will Model Essentials.

If your teams are already using Ascender Plus, there may be ways that you can extract more value from the content, curriculum and community available on the platform. To ensure you're maximizing your investment, check out our blog on eight ways to get more out of Ascender Plus.

Our Continuous Learning Program combines the resources of Ascender Plus with virtual, instructor-led sessions and new sales collateral. It helps leaders sustain the impact of their training engagement by providing further adoption support for sales, management, and enablement teams. Continuous learning builds on the foundation of your initial engagement, helping teams retain and consistently apply the methodology, expanding their understanding and up-leveling their skills in a structured long-term training regimen. Learn more about how the Continuous Learning Program helps our customers drive long-term success.

2. Integrate Methodologies Into Your Tech Stack

Your tech stack is key to enabling sales execution, and strategic alignment with your core methodologies within your team's day-to-day tools is key to staying productive as markets change.

One way our customers embed their methodology for greater results is through our Salesforce-integrated tool Opportunity Manager. For teams that use Salesforce, this plugin offers the ability to apply the methodologies directly in the CRM to achieve more consistent application and adoption of your sales initiatives. Guided assessments within the tool help sellers and managers understand where a given opportunity stands at any moment, providing better line of sight for leadership into the forecast and where challenges arise. Watch the Opportunity Manager demo to see this game-changing tool in action.

If you're looking to artificial intelligence to enhance productivity during this time, you'll also be able to harness the power of your Force Management investment with AI. As part of our partnership with Gong, Force Management customers can now embed their customized methodologies into the Gong Revenue AI Platform, which provides insights and predictions and powers workflows to help sales teams maximize revenue. We've also partnered with WINN.AI to allow joint customers to automate administrative sales tasks, like CRM updates, with a real-time sales assistant that is informed by their custom methodology. Force Management customers can also add personalized, on-demand coaching for reps with Replicate Labs' AI Sales Coach trained on their Force Management methodologies.

With these AI partnerships, we're pushing Force Management methodologies forward and innovating new ways to help our customers execute their strategy at the seller level to achieve greater revenue outcomes. Learn more about our AI offerings.

3. Improve Business Reliability with MEDDICC

Suppose you're struggling with consistency in productivity and quota attainment across your revenue teams, even after aligning on a message of value. Maybe your forecasts are unpredictable and deal timelines often shift, or your team is unable to secure the buy-in from executive decision-makers needed to close deals at a high value. If those apply, it's likely your team would benefit from a qualification initiative.

MEDDICC (also referred to as MEDDPICC) is a game-changer for creating reliable revenue execution, which is the foundation for achieving growth and higher valuation. It’s almost impossible to grow or even hit revenue numbers consistently 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. 

When external markets shift, qualification becomes even more critical. Elite revenue organizations remain resilient in the face of buyer uncertainty by reinforcing MEDDICC to ensure their teams are focusing on the right opportunities and moving them forward with urgency. MEDDICC also helps sales teams win with decision-makers by creating process rigor in how the decision process is identified and helping managers and sellers work together to chart the most efficient path to close. Check out our list of free resources on improving MEDDICC execution with your team and why it's valuable.

Our facilitator team is comprised of seasoned sales leaders who have been developing qualification disciplines for decades, some dating back to the legendary team at PTC. We approach qualification as a process, not an event, and help our clients develop qualification criteria, tools and processes that are customized to their solution and how their customers buy. Learn more about our MEDDICC offering and how it can help your team drive consistent execution on your topline revenue strategy.

4. Secure Bigger, More Favorable Deals with Value Negotiation

When you're facing hesitant or budget-conscious buyers, a company-wide value negotiation process is key to positioning and protecting the value of your solution to win high-value deals. Excellent negotiation is key to successfully closing any deal - but our Value Negotiation offering addresses more than just securing favorable deal terms. We approach negotiation as a process that begins from the first customer interaction, and training your go-to-market teams on this skill is critical to developing an elite customer engagement process that maximizes the revenue you can extract from your pipeline. For our client Zendesk, Value Negotiation training multiplied their Command of the Message investment, resulting in larger deals, higher conversion rates, less discounting and improved cross-selling of multiple solutions.

Created by our resident expert Tim Caito, the Value Negotiation program focuses on making negotiation an organizational competency, not just 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 a great deal looks like for your organization and your growth objectives. Then, we teach your entire customer-facing organization to build and protect value at every state of the customer engagement process. Check out our Value Negotiation training in action.

5. Leadership Training for Managers

How are you training your front-line managers? Too often, organizations promote their top reps and make them managers without teaching them the skills you need to coach. Managing a team of salespeople successfully is a very different skill than selling your own opportunities. Our leadership training is customized to your needs and can include programs that help leaders establish a Management Operating Rhtyhm, manage to change, effective sales coaching and tips for retaining and attracting top sales talent. 

More Resources: Check out our "Coaching the Coaches" resources. 

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.

Ready to drive greater impact from your Force Management partnership?