The Biggest Deals in Company History

The Client

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Firstup is the global enterprise employee communications, engagement, and experience leader. It is the preeminent platform for connecting companies to their most valuable assets, their employees, through highly personalized and choreographed experiences that deliver information to the right people at the right time and on the right channel to drive peak performance.

Firstup is privately owned and based in San Francisco. More than 40% of Fortune 100 companies use Firstup to connect with their people, design and deliver personalized communications and gain engagement insights throughout the employee journey. 

The Business Challenge

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After years of rapid growth, Firstup surpassed $100MM revenue in 2023 and set its sights on its next revenue growth milestone of $250MM in ARR.  To position the business for this next stage of growth, Firstup CEO and co-founder Nicole Alvino brought in multiple new C-suite executives, including Chief Revenue Officer Joe Marcin, to help lead a GTM transformation that would drive accelerated growth at Firstup.

Marcin explains, “When I joined the team at Firstup, there were several challenges and growth inhibitors centered around performance, consistency, forecasting, deal control, and long onboarding cycles for new hires.”

A top priority was aligning how the organization thinks and talks about itself internally and externally. “If you were to ask a hundred sellers what we do, you would get at least a hundred different answers,” Marcin states. “We didn’t have a consistent view of what we did, how we did it, and why it mattered in the market. We had no common language across the business. If you were talking to someone in sales, account management, customer success, professional services, or support, you’d hear different language describing our work with customers. Most of what we said focused on the product and what it did rather than the business outcomes it enabled and the value it created for our customers.”

Some of the positive business outcomes Firstup identified for its GTM transformation include shorter deal cycles, more strategic commercial relationships, and faster time to productivity for new hires. Marcin explains, “We were looking to drive velocity into the business and ensure that we had a scalable growth model so that we could add more people to the organization and get those people productive and able to sell very quickly.” 

The Solution

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Firstup partnered with Force Management for a Command of the Message^® engagement, which helps organizations articulate the value of their solution and its differentiation in the context of the business problems it solves for its customers. The Firstup Command of the Message engagement was tailored towards increasing company ARR, decreasing ramp times for new hires, and aligning the organization around its value proposition.

The initiative began with an executive alignment workshop that served to create the Value Framework. Next came an early manager training session that ensured managers were prepared to inspect, coach, and develop teams during and immediately after the main training event. The following day kicked off Command of the Message training across several GTM teams, with deliverables for sales, sales management, marketing, customer success, professional services, product teams, and executive leadership.

Each stage included prework on Force Management’s digital engagement and eLearning hub. Marcin states: “It’s a highly immersive training experience.”
Firstup included a Continuous Learning bundle to drive reinforcement and ensure the initiative maintains long-term momentum. Each session addressed current gaps or needs, with pre-work on the Ascender® eLearning platform followed by facilitator-led sessions. Continuous Learning modules for Firstup have included “Using Storytelling in Sales” and “Nail Your Proposal.”

Two enablement leaders joined Marcin in obtaining Train the Trainer certification, enabling Firstup to train new cohorts on Command of the Message internally and independently of Force. 

The Results

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Eight months after launching Command of the Message, Firstup reported the following indicators of program success:

•  Won several of the largest deals in the history of the company
•  Increased pipeline of large scale, strategic deals by 4x
•  Multiple new sales athletes closed their first deals in their second quarter with the company

Marcin explains that sellers closing deals in their second quarter signals initial improvement in onboarding and reduced time to productivity. “We haven’t broken all of the records yet,” Marcin adds, “but we have plenty of opportunities in the pipeline that will take us to our goals and beyond. With Command of the Message and our partnership with Force Management, we have seen clear progress toward growing our business in a scalable way.”  

Other measurable results include:

•  Improved deal velocity
•  Larger deal sizes
•  Decreased time to productivity

“It's exciting to see some of the salespeople that have been a part of this organization for so long, winning bigger deals, elevating the strategic importance of what we do with the customers they serve,” says Marcin. “They're writing long-term agreements that historically were difficult to write, and they're getting rewarded for that with more wins and more incentives.”

“Command of the Message helped our organization align cross-functionally with how we speak to customers and articulate our differentiation in the market. It helped ensure that our sellers could be audible-ready as well as those working with customers every day in customer success, professional services, marketing, product, support, and beyond. They can have conversations with various stakeholders at different levels in the organizations we serve and flex their messaging up and down based on where a given customer is in their journey. Instead of talking about products, we have shifted our focus to business outcomes. And that's really what Command of the Message and the Value Framework enabled us to do.”

“Today, we're selling on value and business outcomes,” Marcin says. “It's a systemic transformation. It's holistic across the entirety of our business and ensures that we're transforming on the individual level, the team level, and the organizational level. It’s really across the entire company.”

 

Read more stories of transformation in Force Management's Case Study Library