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Categories: Podcasts

Latest Podcasts: Upleveling Sales Organizations

Hear tangible leadership takeaways from pioneers across industries and professions. In each June episode, John McMahon and John Kaplan brought dynamic guests to share insights on how successful sales leaders elevate their approach to culture, metrics, technology and leadership. Tune in to listen to stories of iteration and evolution, failure and success from seasoned sales leaders at some of the most innovative companies of our time. We publish two episodes per week, sharing lessons for sales leaders at all stages of their careers. Make sure to subscribe to the Revenue Builders Podcast on your favorite podcast player, so you never miss an episode.

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Categories: Sales Leadership  |  Sales Productivity  |  Sales Training Initiative

How a Draft-In Approach Helped Aptean Accelerate GTM Growth

The B2B tech marketplace operates at a lightning-fast pace. The companies that stay ahead of the competition do so by maintaining momentum even through internal changes their leaders make to keep up with the times. The question becomes: how can revenue teams adapt and evolve without disrupting the bottom line?

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Categories: Artificial Intelligence  |  Sales Leadership

The Blueprint for Great Sales Leadership: Aligning AI with Customer Success and Strategy

Great sales leaders know how to make the number, but the ability to do that consistently requires more than just great sales skills. The best revenue leaders understand the critical need to equip individuals with the proper tools for revenue success and drive organizational outcomes. A great sales leader understands the importance of a structured sales discipline while reinforcing methodologies that drive measurable results. Veteran Sales Leader and Current Shopify Chief Revenue Officer Bobby Morrison recently joined the Revenue Builders podcast with John Kaplan and John McMahon to talk through his lessons learned and his blueprint for great sales leadership. Morrison knows how to grow and scale companies; from his sales leadership roles at Verizon, where his leadership helped drive $8.3B in revenue, and at Microsoft, where his segment increased revenue from $15B to $25B. Now, at Shopify, he’s led their shift upmarket to an aggressive 30% revenue growth rate in Q1 of this year.

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Categories: Artificial Intelligence  |  Sales Leadership

3 Mistakes Revenue Leaders are Currently Making with AI

The AI revolution is coming fast – it’s reshaping industries, redefining workflows, and promising unprecedented growth to sales organizations. Yet, many leaders are hesitant to make a big bet on AI. The wrong move could cost you time, revenue, and credibility. With the right foundational strategy and the right tool, AI should be a sales force multiplier enabling your teams to sell faster and more proficiently, bringing more value to customers and more impact to revenue. Our recent webinar on AI in Leadership brought together a team of experts to discuss AI, sales productivity, and what top companies are doing right now. Joining the conversation were Eldad Postan-Koren, CEO and co-founder of Winn.AI; Rob Moyer, Director of Partnerships at Gong; and Sriharsha Guduguntla, CEO and co-founder of Hyperbound. Their discussion with Force Management’s Head of Community Joe Huber revealed the common mistakes leaders are making today with AI and how they can take proactive steps to ensure successful implementation of these new technologies.

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Categories: Podcasts

Latest Podcasts: Growth and Leadership in Sales

This month on the Revenue Builders Podcast, we shared discussions with experienced and forward-thinking leaders. These conversations ranged from stories of powerful leadership, to advice on growing organizations to the latest in financial technology. These episodes offer valuable insight for any CRO, CHRO, CFO, or CEO — or those aspiring to the role. Stay on top of the latest and greatest in leadership, revenue strategy, and emerging tech. Dig in! We publish two episodes per week, sharing lessons for sales leaders at all stages of their careers. Make sure to subscribe to the Revenue Builders Podcast on your favorite podcast player, so you never miss an episode.

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Categories: Economic Change  |  Sales Negotiation

Preserve Margin with Budget-Conscious Buyers through Value Negotiation

We’ve talked a lot in blogs and other content about the importance of negotiating early and often. Negotiation isn’t an event that happens with procurement at the end of a deal, but a process of establishing and validating the value of your solution throughout the life of a deal. How does that process change in today’s environment, where buyers are hyper-focused on cost and sales teams are struggling with reduced pipeline?

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Categories: Sales Leadership  |  Sales Productivity  |  Unicorn Companies

GTM Strategies Used by the Top 1% of Tech Startups

Leaders of B2B software and tech organizations looking to ignite revenue with a consulting or training partner have no shortage of options. When evaluating potential partners, two must-haves for most companies are: 1. Not starting from scratch 2. Evidence of where the training partner has been successful At Force Management, we take pride in how we differ from other vendors in the sales training and enablement space. If your team is weighing the decision to bring in an expert, consider how a revenue partner that meets these criteria will help you meet your revenue targets faster.

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Categories: Economic Change  |  Government Buyers

Strategies for Selling Software to Government Agencies In Times of Change

Several government mandates make it clear that agencies are focusing on fiscal impact and efficiency. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) continues to push on its directive to reduce costs, cut duplication and consolidate unnecessary spend within organizations. A recent OMB memo (M-23-15) calls for digital solutions that are scalable, efficient and cost-effective. This one from Executive Order 14094 called for prioritizing regulatory outcomes that minimize waste and deliver measurable results. How are you aligning your software solutions to these mandates and priorities? Organizations that are able to position products as delivering on these important value drivers of decreasing costs and improving efficiencies will thrive in this new DOGE-directed environment. Below, we've outlined a few key areas of focus.

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Categories: Artificial Intelligence  |  Sales Enablement Technology

Three Questions to Answer When Building an Internal AI Operations Team

As AI becomes even more prevalent in society and business, leaders are looking for ways to embed the new technology into their go-to-market motion. Gartner predicted in 2023 that 35% of CROs would establish an internal AI Operations team by 2025. These teams help to manage change, compliance and adoption to ensure new technology is used in a way that promotes the company’s goals.

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Categories: Podcasts

Latest Podcasts: Secrets to Career and Revenue Growth

Last month on the Revenue Builders Podcast, our guests had some wisdom to impart on being successful in roles from sales rep all the way to CRO and CEO. We heard stories and lessons learned from experienced leaders, divulging how to build relationships, work strategically, and position yourself for the next step in your career — wherever you might be now. Learn from those who have been there, done that and seen the results by tuning in below. We publish two episodes per week, sharing lessons for sales leaders at all stages of their careers. Make sure to subscribe to the Revenue Builders Podcast on your favorite podcast player, so you never miss an episode.

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Categories: Competitors  |  Differentiation  |  Sales Leadership

The Top 3 Reasons Why Successful Revenue Leaders Partner with Us Repeatedly

As a leader responsible for ambitious company revenue targets, you have several options to improve execution. You can organize an internal initiative, or work with one of the many sales training providers claiming to impact your bottom line. We've helped over 130 sales organizations grow their valuation to $1B+. In 20 years of partnering with revenue leaders, more than 350 of them have returned with their next company. What brings them back is clear: ROI. We asked some of our repeat partners what drove their decision to partner with us time after time. Here are the top three things they say set us apart.

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Categories: Economic Change  |  Sales Kickoff

3 Skills Your Sales Team Needs to Drive Revenue in an Uncertain Market

Recent global economic shifts and widespread uncertainty are likely changing the selling landscape for your go-to-market organization. As revenue pressures mount and buyer hesitancy increases, it's mission-critical that you keep your team focused on the skills that will help them cut through the noise. The best companies don't wait for outside factors to correct themselves. They align their strategy to their buyers' current state. We've worked with hundreds of revenue leaders who have multiplied revenue and increased the valuation of their sales organizations, even during some of the most drastic economic downturns of the past few years. They did so by identifying opportunities to strengthen core selling competencies that enabled their teams to deliver increased customer value and maintain pipeline through seasons of uncertainty and downturn. These are the three must-have skills your sellers can use to win consistently and drive your core revenue objectives in a challenging economic climate.

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Categories: Differentiation  |  Sales Conversation  |  Sales Leadership  |  Sales Transformation

Elevating the GTM Approach with Patra: 3 Keys to Success

For today's B2B tech firms, the path to rapid growth and repeatable revenue means advancing through stages and change. Each transformation story is different, but most boil down to three keys for success: choosing the right strategy or partner, applying the new methodology within daily rhythms, and ensuring long-term adoption. When Patra, an insurance-tech provider, crossed the $100M in ARR benchmark, their leadership launched a partnership with Force Management to elevate their go-to-market approach with the goal of doubling their revenue. One year into the partnership, Patra realized outcomes including a 143% increase in win rate, a 48% increase in Average Deal Size, more bookings, and faster times-to-close. Read the full Patra-Force Management Case Study here. Let’s look at how Patra found success and their approach to these three key areas:

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Categories: Company Alignment  |  Sales Productivity

Buyers Plus: 6 High-Value Solutions for Revenue Growth

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.

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Categories: Sales Leadership  |  Sales Productivity

How Leaders Leverage Data to Boost Sales Performance and Revenue

In today's competitive market, leveraging data effectively can be the key to unlocking higher sales performance and increased revenue. Most leaders understand they must harness the power of data to drive success. But in order to effectively use data, you must first ensure you have the right structures in place to collect data about your sales activities and apply findings in a way that's relevant and actionable. Parm Uppal, Chief Revenue Officer of Benchling who has previously led and helped to scale companies like Data Robot and Luminary Cloud, recently joined the Revenue Builders Podcast for a discussion with John Kaplan and John McMahon. He shared his approach to implementing data to drive results as a sales leader. Today, we'll break down his insights as well as some best practices we've learned from working with leaders who successfully scaled their companies to $1B+ valuation. Continue reading to learn how these revenue leaders leverage data to enhance sales performance and drive stronger, more reliable revenue.

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Categories: Sales Transformation

Identify Revenue Team Challenges: Optimize Sales Performance

The economic landscape is unpredictable. When you have revenue goals to hit, you don't have time to wait around for executional challenges to reveal themselves. As a leader, you need to diagnose and address sales problems before they show up on the revenue report, and you need solutions that can impact your revenue this quarter. Uncertainty in the market and shifting priorities for your customers doesn't mean you can't meet your ambitious revenue goals for the year. Start now identifying how you can help your revenue team focus on the core revenue-driving activities that will help them build and close qualified pipeline.

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Categories: Podcasts

Latest Podcasts: Leading Complex Revenue Processes

This month, the Revenue Builders podcast shared some detailed breakdowns of complex sales processes, growth stages and leadership challenges. Seasoned Chief Revenue Officers shared insights on how they create process rigor to ensure their organization handles high-stakes deals with tact to maximize returns. From complicated deal negotiations, to identifying influential champions, to handling your board of advisors, these episodes deal with some of the biggest execution challenges facing revenue leaders today. Dig into these interviews to learn from leaders who have helped grow companies like Qumulo, Sumo Logic, Modern Health, Crux and more. We publish two episodes per week, sharing lessons for sales leaders at all stages of their careers. Make sure to subscribe to the Revenue Builders podcast on your favorite podcast player, so you never miss an episode.

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Categories: Sales Leadership  |  Scaling Sales

How to Use First Principles Thinking for B2B Sales Leadership

First principles thinking is a reasoning process used by some of today’s top innovators to look at complex problems through a new lens. The concept is based on Aristotle’s writings about first principles, which he called the “first basis from which a thing is known.”

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Categories: Differentiation  |  Sales Messaging  |  Scaling Sales  |  Unicorn Companies

Becoming a Unicorn: What Top Tech Companies do Differently

If you’re a leader in a high-growth tech sector, you’ve probably heard the phrase “unicorn company.” It’s the dream of any private company – to reach a valuation of $1 billion without an IPO. As a revenue leader, your success is tied to securing growth, increased returns, and higher valuation. So what do unicorns and their leaders do differently that sets them so far apart from the competition?

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Categories: Mission Critical Success Series  |  Sales Leadership  |  Sales Qualification

3 Sales Behaviors That Can Impact Your Revenue This Quarter

As a revenue leader, your timeline to results is critical. Stakeholders and board members want to see outcomes, and you need constant progress from your teams to reach ambitious revenue targets. No strategic pivot is immediate – many initiatives can take at least a full sales cycle to reach full adoption and have visible impact on revenue numbers. If you’re looking to supplement your strategy with something that can affect revenue as soon as this quarter, consider launching a qualification update or reinforcement initiative.

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Categories: Buyer Alignment  |  Sales Discovery Process  |  Sales Enablement Technology  |  Sales Qualification

3 Ways to Help Sellers Chart the Buyer Landscape

One way the most successful organizations outperform their competitors is by equipping customer-facing teams with the tools to navigate modern buying committees. In recent years, the stakeholders in B2B tech and enterprise software purchases have grown, which means increased buyer scrutiny. Customers are hyper-focused on ROI, and multiple parties approve deals through different criteria. What does this mean for revenue team leaders? In order to maintain timely sales cycles and hit revenue targets, it’s critical that leaders enable their sales teams to navigate these complex deals. Here are three strategies to enable your sales force to consistently communicate ROI in multilevel deals.

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Categories: CRO Best Practices  |  Sales Kickoff  |  Sales Leadership

Driving Revenue Outcomes After Your SKO: 3 Expert Perspectives

The sales kickoff is often one of the biggest investments of the year. The event not only requires budget, it also takes a large share of resources in terms of time and commitment from your go-to-market and enablement teams. That also means our focus is largely on planning and executing the event - but what happens after the SKO? As your teams wrap up the event and start focusing on revenue-driving activities, do you have a plan to ensure that you can drive clear return for this investment in a way that is relevant to your company's top priorities and revenue goals for the year? Force Management has worked with hundreds of organizations to help them execute sales kickoffs that advance their strategic revenue goals. Today, we're calling on insights from three of our veteran facilitators who design, plan and lead kickoff training events that get results. Here are the leadership actions after the sales kickoff that they've seen drive positive business outcomes.

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Categories: Company Alignment  |  Sales Kickoff  |  Sales Productivity

Unlock Top Sales Performers: SKO Strategies for Retention and Growth

As we start the new year, many of us are also launched into SKO season. As a revenue leader, you've invested budget, time and resources into this event - with the assumption that you will see ROI in terms of your strategic revenue goals. Your goal may be to improve upon last year's performance by training up new or underperforming members of the sales team and communicating expectations. The sales kickoff is a prime opportunity to build momentum, right the course and chart the path towards increased sales productivity and revenue. In order to achieve desired levels of growth and productivity, leaders must ensure that their presentation addresses the needs of every member of their sales team.

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Categories: Economic Change  |  Sales Kickoff  |  Sales Messaging

Top B2B Revenue Leaders: Which Differentiator Determines Company Success?

The start of the year is an opportunity to capitalize on the mindset of a fresh start. Your revenue teams are setting their goals and habits for the new year, and SKOs and strategy sessions are shifting their approach. The first month or two will be crucial in setting the foundation that will determine your organization’s success this year. Now is the time to lay out a bold strategy and empower your teams to take control of closing bigger deals, stacking pipeline, and driving toward organizational goals. Here are three strategies that leaders are using to start the year strong with a message that delivers ROI and aligns with your broader vision for growth and profitability.

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Categories: Company Alignment  |  Sales Coaching Tools  |  Sales Productivity  |  Scaling Sales

A Revenue Leader's Strategy for Achieving the Next Growth Milestone

The journey from start-up to maturity involves multiple rounds of iteration. Achieving product-market fit and getting your customers to pay and stay are the results of how your product and message adapted to your buyers' needs along the way. Now, reaching that next benchmark means continuing to refine and shift the way your company thinks about and talks about itself in the market. In our work with rapidly growing B2B SaaS and tech organizations, we’ve identified three common components that are crucial for satisfying the growth imperative. Here are three keys for leaders targeting the next revenue milestone:

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Categories: Company Alignment  |  Sales Productivity

Sales Productivity: How to Get Your Organization Aligned

In today's ever-changing sales landscape, stagnating is not an option. If it seems that you've reached a growth plateau, or you're struggling to increase recurring revenue to meet your goals, you may be facing an alignment challenge. Too often, companies function in silos, with sales, marketing, product and operations working separately rather than together toward common goals. As each department works to meet company goals on their own, inefficiencies become rampant, with sales performance likely becoming one of the largest frustrations. Removing those silos can create and capture customer value, as well as streamline internal processes and administrative burdens to increase overall productivity of your go-to-market teams.

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Categories: Podcasts

Latest Podcasts: Delivering Value

This month's Revenue Builders Podcast episodes shared a central theme of delivering value. In sales we often think about value as something we deliver to our customers, which is true - but value is also something delivered to teams by their leaders, to reps by their organization and to sales organizations by their customers. In the below episodes, we were joined by some highly accomplished guests who shared new ways of thinking about value and how we can become the most valuable leaders, service providers and individual contributors that we can be. Dig in. We publish two episodes per week, sharing lessons for sales leaders at all stages of their careers. Make sure to subscribe to the Revenue Builders podcast on your favorite podcast player, so you never miss an episode.

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Categories: Sales Negotiation  |  Sales Process

3 Things Your Sales Negotiation Strategy Might Be Missing

A well-defined negotiation strategy is a critical component of an organization’s success. A great negotiation strategy goes beyond individual seller skills - leaders should create a repeatable framework to ensure negotiation is being executed consistently across all deals to ensure maximum revenue. If your team repeatedly loses margin on deals, loses to competitors based on price or struggles to expand deal sizes, it may be time to assess your negotiation strategy.

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Categories: Sales Coaching Tools  |  Talent Management

Why New Hires Fail: Improve Your Sales Talent Management

Sales talent is a cornerstone to a best-in-class sales organization. As a sales leader you need the right people on board if you want to hit your revenue goals every quarter. Without a process to attract, hire and retain top sales talent you will waste money on mis-hires, lose talent to the competition and have no way to build a bench strength for growth.

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Categories: Customer Success  |  Sales Messaging  |  Scaling Sales

The Top 20%: Lessons on Scaling in the B2B SaaS Market

A recent piece by McKinsey notes that 80% of startups who landed Series A funding failed within eight years (n=3164). Using interviews with B2B SaaS leaders who beat those odds by scaling from startup to over $100MM in ARR, McKinsey's recent playbook examines how these companies set up their organizations, common challenges they overcame and the actions leaders can use to emulate these pathways to success.

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Categories: Economic Change  |  Sales Messaging  |  Sales Negotiation

Four Negotiation Skills to Arm Your Sellers with Right Now

Today's sales environment is highly competitive. Recent economic hurdles mean that many buyers are adopting more complex purchasing processes, and sales organizations are looking for any way to preserve vital margins. You have ambitious revenue goals for the year - you can't afford for your sellers to resort to discounting to close deals.

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Categories: Podcasts  |  Sales Kickoff  |  Sales Leadership

Blueprints for Success: A Football Coach's Perspectives on Leadership

Scot Loeffler knows a thing or two about leadership. He knows about leading a change initiative, getting the most out of high performers, and what it takes to be elite. Scot has worked with some of the most recognizable names in college and pro football as a quarterbacks coach or coordinator. In 2018, he became Head Coach at Bowling Green State University (BGSU) and began the task of turning their football program around. Recently, Coach Loeffler sat down with John Kaplan and John McMahon on the Revenue Builders Podcast to share his experiences and insights on leadership. In a candid discussion, Scot and the hosts break down the strategies he leveraged to engineer a new era of success for BGSU football and how the same tenets apply for leaders of any high-performance team.

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Categories: Podcasts  |  Sales Kickoff  |  Sales Leadership

SKO Success: Expert Strategies from John Kaplan and John McMahon

Force Management Co-Founder John Kaplan and five-time CRO John McMahon recently had an in-depth discussion on the Revenue Builders Podcast about sales kickoffs. Combining their years of experience, they hashed out what works and what doesn't when it comes to planning and leading a kickoff event as a revenue leader. Listen to the full podcast conversation here. Today, we're sharing the top leadership tactics that Kaplan and McMahon have seen make a successful SKO that drives productivity, revenue and valuation. Keep reading for four things that all the best SKOs do.

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Categories: Sales Kickoff  |  Sales Leadership  |  Sales Training Initiative

Sales Kickoffs: Removing Roadblocks and Friction

The sales kickoff (SKO) is where you the stage for what’s coming, explain what’s changed and chart the path for success in the next year. But let’s get real. Rallying the troops and rah-rah speeches are great, but they are not what helps land high-value accounts or meet the growth imperative. Moving the needle comes by taking direct action on the day-to-day selling motion. The top performers on your revenue teams appreciate nothing more than having obstacles removed from their path. Clear the runway for them to go after and successfully land high-dollar targets by making efficiency an overt theme across your SKO. In a conversation with John Kaplan on the Revenue Builders Podcast, Tenable COO Mark Thurmond refers to this leadership function as Removing the Friction. In this clip, Mark breaks down how he approaches these conversations and digs into the nuts and bolts of removing roadblocks that impede productivity:

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Categories: Company Alignment  |  Sales Kickoff  |  Sales Training Initiative

The Execution-Driven SKO: Lessons from our Conversation with Tim Caito

This week, we hosted a webinar with Force Management Senior Partner Tim Caito. Tim is our resident expert on sales negotiation and has years of experience planning and leading sales kickoffs. He joined us to share his do's and don'ts when it comes to planning a sales kickoff that drives measurable results on company strategic goals and revenue objectives. Keep reading to learn our takeaways from Tim Caito on the top three actions that will produce SKO results. If you find these valuable, check out the full webinar recording available on-demand. It was an engaging tactical conversation with some intriguing and relevant live audience questions.

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Categories: Sales Kickoff  |  Sales Leadership  |  Sales Process

Critical SKO Advice for Leaders: Lead from the Front

The sales kickoff is a galvanizing moment for a sales organization, rallying the team around their purpose, strategy and goals for the year. As a sales leader, you've likely been a part of many of these kickoff events, and you may be familiar with the quick fizzle that sometimes happens once everyone gets back to their daily responsibilities. Driving behavior change with a SKO is no small feat, but consider the stakes - increasing competition, aggressive sales objectives, and highly guarded budgets - can you afford to invest in an event that doesn't move the needle on your business objectives for the year? Ensure your sales kickoff event makes it out of the conference room (or Zoom meeting) and into the day-to-day activities to drive meaningful impact on revenue. The key to ensuring SKO success beyond the event is to understand what it takes from the sales reps, managers and yourself as the leader to drive lasting outcomes. Then, commit to making it happen.

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Categories: Front-line Managers  |  Sales Kickoff

Boost SKO Impact: Why Early Sales Manager Training Matters

We’ve been a part of making many sales kickoffs successful over the years. One early indicator of a SKO that drives the company’s core revenue objectives all year: front-line manager preparedness. Managers are a critical instrument to driving results after your sales kickoff, helping to reinforce new concepts and best practices throughout the year. Getting them onboarded early and preparing them to lead during and after your event can transform the outcome of your SKO. Here are three ways to support your front-line sales managers before the sales kickoff that will help maximize the impact of your event:

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Categories: Sales Kickoff  |  Sales Transformation

How to Set Objectives for Your Sales Kickoff

This blog contains content from our Ultimate Sales Kickoff Resource Guide. Check out all of our sales kickoff resources, best practices, and tools here. Sales Kickoffs are meant to get the sales team motivated toward a common goal for the upcoming year. Your upcoming SKO will be an important opportunity to instill this motivation and align your team to execute mission-critical sales activities. Ensure the right outcomes and objectives are prioritized in your SKO agenda in a way that drives that company strategy. Set clear, measurable objectives for your SKO and, ultimately, your revenue team. After all, the SKO is just one or two weeks of the fiscal year. Clear objectives for the kickoff and beyond will be imperative to drive consistent sales performance in a complex selling environment. Set your objectives now so you and your enablement team know what you have to achieve to drive revenue goals. Below are a few things to factor in when you begin to set clear objectives for your next sales kickoff.

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Categories: Company Alignment  |  Front-line Managers  |  Talent Management

Sales Management Operating Rhythm: What It Is and Why You Need It

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then is not an act, but a habit.” – Aristotle The best leaders in the world are successful because they are able to align everyday company activities to their core revenue objectives. How do they do that? The answer is the Management Operating Rhythm (MOR). The MOR is a major way that organizations support their sales managers, outlining the actions necessary for repeatable success and holding them accountable to perform them consistently and at a high level. The operating rhythm helps leaders connect their role to the company’s strategy and execute the plan of action without getting bogged down in administrative burdens. Unfortunately, most companies don’t have a Management Operating Rhythm to make sure that their sales managers and their sales teams can be successful. You may have a certain cadence set for manager reviews, but is there consistency across the company with how these are executed? Do your managers have a clear idea of how to lead planning efforts and coach deals to ensure maximum revenue in every opportunity? Without a strong operating rhythm, there may be revenue falling through the cracks.

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Categories: Sales Messaging  |  Selling Technology

How to Sell Artificial Intelligence: 3 Essential Skills for Sales Teams

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a fast-growing new market sector. Recent estimates show more than 75,000 AI companies exist, with more than $107B invested in these types of companies over the last two years.

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Categories: Buyer Alignment  |  Company Alignment  |  Sales Messaging

How to Deliver Value on a Consumption-Based Pricing Model

Consumption pricing is associated with some of the fastest-growing SaaS companies of the past few years, including Snowflake, Datadog, Zscaler, and MongoDB. The consumption-based pricing model is popular because it helps these types of companies manage costs and gives the customer more control and transparency in how much they’re billed. But if the customer doesn’t directly see the value of your solution, they may stagnate or even fall in their usage. While commitment may be easier to gain on the front end without an upfront price tag, if the goal is to drive usage and growth over time, consumption model companies must constantly be proving their value. We can picture this as two sales cycles - one to close the deal, and one ongoing cycle to close the consumption. Companies that have been successful in driving sustained growth with a consumption model do so by achieving three critical levels of alignment.

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Categories: Front-line Managers  |  Sales Leadership

Enable Managers to Impact Future Deals Using Win/Loss Insights

Win/loss analysis is critical to improving win consistency and growing revenue. You may know the reason why a specific deal was won or lost, but can you and your account teams reverse engineer that process to improve results on the next deal? Is your team currently leveraging those insights to repeat successes and avoid known setbacks? Don’t scream at the scoreboard, or just tell your people what to do. Help your managers provide the how. Define exactly what’s working and what isn’t so you can focus on the best opportunities to support your salespeople in improving win rates. First, you need to equip your managers to get beyond the data of why deals are won and lost.

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Categories: Podcasts

Latest Podcasts: Transformative Leadership

Last month, the Revenue Builders Podcast welcomed leaders who have embraced risks and unique approaches that have led to true transformation for their organizations, teams and careers. From the transformative power of knowing your purpose to navigating new and untapped markets, these conversations provide insight and inspiration that could help you transform your approach to reach even greater success. Dig in! We publish two episodes per week, sharing lessons for leaders at all stages of their careers. Make sure to subscribe to the Revenue Builders podcast on your favorite podcast player, so you never miss an episode.

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Categories: MEDDICC  |  Sales Qualification  |  Sales Transformation  |  Selling Technology

How SaaS Firms Leverage MEDDICC Through Growth Stages

With funding comes responsibility. In the SaaS world, you don't have time to wait. The global SaaS market is growing more rapidly than even optimists projected (18%), and we’re right at the center of it. Over half of the SaaS firms in the world are located in the US.

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Categories: Product-Led Growth  |  Sales Leadership  |  Sales Messaging  |  Selling Technology

Driving Product-Led Growth: Maximize SaaS Success with Value Framework

The product-led growth (PLG) era marks a disruption in how SaaS companies interact with customers. A good working definition of PLG is that the product itself is the vehicle for acquiring, retaining, and expanding customer accounts. PLG companies share some characteristics. First, their solution is a significant upgrade from the previous status quo. Second, freemium or open-source versions usually feature a frictionless (meaning minimal human interaction) customer experience. Not every company has these characteristics. But the reality is that customer expectations have shifted, and the most successful companies in today’s B2B tech market are borrowing from the PLG model in order to satisfy the demand for a frictionless approach to customer engagement. Whether your company drives revenue from more traditional sales-and-marketing-led efforts or has a purely PLG-driven approach, the fundamentals of selling SaaS Solutions remain the same. Organizations get ahead of competitors by:

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Categories: CRO Best Practices  |  Sales Leadership  |  Sales Training Initiative  |  Sales Transformation

How to Sell a Sales Initiative to Your Board

For revenue team leaders, no objective looms larger or more urgent than meeting aggressive revenue goals and satisfying the growth imperative. Recent studies show that the average tenure of CROs in SaaS startups lasts between 1.5 and 1.9 years. For commercial CROs, the average tenure jumps to two years, but the point remains: if you want to make a splash, there isn't time to spare.

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Categories: Sales Enablement Technology  |  Sales Productivity

How to Write Effective AI Prompts for B2B Sales

Whether you’re a sales leader, manager, or seller, we’ve all been hearing a lot about the potential of AI for sales. You may already be incorporating some AI-powered tools in your sales stack. Like any new technology, generative AI tools require a learning curve to be most effective. Generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini or Claude in particular can give very different quality outputs depending on the input they’re given. Our Ascender team recently hosted a webinar with Matt Payne of Sales Boost Consulting where he gave some valuable tips for getting the most out of AI tools. Today, we’re sharing tips on using generative AI for sales tasks. If you’re a sales leader, make sure to also check out our playbook for improving sales team productivity with AI tools.

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Categories: Sales Transformation

Ten Reasons Why Our Sales Training Is Different

There are a lot of sales training organizations out there. It can be difficult to cut through the noise and find the solution that is right for your company. IIn case we haven't worked together yet, here's a look at how the Force Management approach is different and drives success and immediate impact for our customers.

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Categories: Customer Success  |  Differentiation  |  Sales Leadership  |  Selling Technology

Reduce Churn and Drive Renewals with Customer Success Alignment

Customer Success (CS) is a critical component of a successful customer engagement process. Growing revenue requires your organization to be cross-functionally aligned on buyer value and solution differentiation before and after the sale. Capturing that value after the initial deal is essential for driving recurring revenue and expansion opportunities within accounts. Fostering alignment between the traditional sales organizations and your CS team is one way today’s top B2B SaaS and Tech firms gain an advantage in a competitive marketplace. When CS is able to maintain continuity through handoffs and convey value through the post-sale stages of the customer relationship, organizations reap the benefits of high renewal rates, reduced churn, and increases in Net Retention Revenue. For revenue team leaders selling HiTech solutions, we’ve designed this leader playbook for improving CS execution. Dig in for more strategies and thought leadership from leaders who’ve built and leveraged elite CS teams.

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Categories: Company Alignment  |  Sales Messaging  |  Selling Technology

Mastering Sales Demos: Strategies for Impactful Product Presentations

The product demo is an important part of any sales process, but they can also be a tricky stage to navigate while maintaining a value selling approach. We often advocate for sellers to move away from the 'features and functions' conversation in favor of discussing business problems and solutions. The demo is a time to discuss both. That can be a difficult balance to strike, especially when selling complex technical solutions. When executed correctly, the demo can be a valuable step to tying the technical capabilities of your solution to the business problems of the customer and progressing deals forward at a high value. Here are some strategies to help you guide your team to execute demos that create commitment and urgency with buyers.

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Categories: Company Alignment  |  Sales Transformation  |  Scaling Sales

3 Actions to Grow Recurring B2B Sales Revenue

In our recent webinar with Force Management Managing Director and Facilitator Brian Walsh, an audience member posed a question that we hear often in our work with B2B sales organizations:

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Categories: MEDDICC  |  Sales Qualification  |  Selling to the C-Suite

How MEDDICC Helps Win with Decision-Makers

MEDDICC is an industry standard for determining the strength of a deal and charting the path to get the deal closed. Many times, deal qualification can hinge on whether your team can identify the Economic Buyer and build enough influence in the organization to both access and evangelize them. But the power of MEDDICC for influencing deal decision-makers extends far beyond the “E” in the acronym.

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Categories: Podcasts

Latest Podcasts: Connecting with Buyers to Drive Greater Influence

This April, on the Revenue Builders Podcast, we shared wisdom from hosts John Kaplan and John McMahon along with their world-class guests. The result was some of our best insights yet on leading a relationship-based sales motion that helps sellers connect with buyers and have greater influence. We dove into how new technologies are changing the sales process in The Impact of AI on Sales with James Underhill, and discussed where many B2B Sales startups go wrong in defining and connecting with their ideal customer with Monica Stewart. Our hosts also explored how leaders can equip their teams to better connect with specific roles in the sales process, with special deep-dives into Champions and the Economic Buyer. We publish two episodes every week, with both long-form discussions and bite-sized lessons to offer value to leaders at all stages of growth. Make sure to subscribe to the Revenue Builders podcast on your favorite podcast player, so you never miss an episode.

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Categories: Competitors  |  Sales Productivity  |  Sales Transformation

Understanding Sales Initiatives: Costs and Factors to Consider

Determining the budget line item for a sales initiative can be difficult until you start talking to vendors. There are a multitude of sales consultants out there with prices that vary just as much. Once you determine the key knowledge gaps you're trying to fill in your organization or the challenges you're trying to overcome, then it's time to connect with the right solution for your budget and pain points.

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Categories: Front-line Managers  |  Sales Coaching Tools  |  Sales Leadership  |  Talent Management

Set New Sales Managers Up for Success: 6 Key Strategies

Top sales teams differentiate themselves with a proven system for finding and attracting elite talent. But landing strong candidates is only the first step in the journey. The best organizations know how to retain sellers with the most potential and ensure they’re positioned to perform and excel as they advance up the ranks. Making the move from sales rep to manager is a common career pathway. Some individuals may not be ready for this transition today, but could become ready with time and development. Others may prefer to remain as individual contributors. Learn to recognize the difference so that you can make wise choices in offering promotions. Support your entire team by using the following tips to identify management potential and lay the foundation for new manager success. Here are six attributes to look for in sales manager candidates:

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Categories: Buyer Alignment  |  Company Alignment  |  Sales Leadership  |  Sales Messaging

Driving a Revenue Mindset: 5 Takeaways from Our Conversation with Brian Walsh

We recently hosted a live session on Driving a Revenue Mindset with our Managing Director and Facilitator Brian Walsh. He shared insights on what’s changing in sales, what remains critical, and what the most successful organizations are focusing on to maintain revenue momentum. Be sure to check out the full on-demand recording here.

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Categories: Sales Training Initiative  |  Sales Transformation

Launching a Sales Initiative: Should You Do it Internally?

In more than 20 years of helping companies transform their sales and go-to-market organizations, we've worked with hundreds of different sales leaders. Most have been through more than their fair share of sales trainings, and they know the methodologies and best practices that win. You don't become the leader of a sales team without being great at what you do. So, it's natural to ask: Can we just do it ourselves? Can we take on our sales challenges internally? As a sales leader, you probably have years of sales experience and a talented leadership team capable of launching and executing a project. Would a sales transformation partner be worth the investment?

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Categories: Sales Messaging  |  Selling to the C-Suite

Three Buyer Personas Your GTM Messaging Strategy Should Address

Your opportunities, especially at the enterprise level, are rarely ever sold to a single decision-maker. Top-performing organizations have go-to-market teams that successfully navigate buying committees of multiple stakeholders, as well as the parties who influence them, to sell deals at a high value. The best revenue teams have the cross-functional credibility and willingness to have multi-faceted sales conversations that drive a collective “YES” from all stakeholders. They build widespread agreement on positive business outcomes, success metrics, and the requirements needed to get there. This agreement helps to drive the urgency of solving the customer’s business challenges. The key to driving this kind of unanimous support for your solution in all purchase, subscription, or renewal processes is to coach your revenue team to identify, early and accurately, certain archetypes in the sales process. We call this charting the buyer landscape.

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Categories: Adoption and Reinforcement  |  Sales Transformation

How to Sustain New Sales Behaviors

With any strategic change initiative, there’s always the question of whether or not it will stick. If you’re tasked with ensuring your sales organization can execute against aggressive growth goals, you’ll want to ensure that the investment you're making in a new approach pays off. Whether you are wrapping up a sales kickoff or delivering a new training initiative to your team, the ROI of the new strategy depends on your post-implementation plan. Building sales capabilities and driving ongoing reinforcement is not easy. Even veteran leaders aren’t immune to the risks that come with investing coveted time and resources in a sales transformation initiative. However, experience does provide insight on what not to do and how to lead from the front in a way that drives ongoing results.

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Categories: Company Alignment  |  MEDDICC  |  Sales Messaging  |  Sales Transformation

How to Prevent Slipped Deals at the End of the Quarter

When one deal slips, that’s a deal problem. Nobody likes a missed opportunity, though sales professionals accept that some slippage comes with the territory. But when slipped deals are a consistent end-of-quarter occurrence, that’s an organizational problem with serious negative consequences. Companies that can’t rely on forecasts feel ripple effects across the organization, impacting manufacturing, delivery, operations, and finance. For publicly traded companies, the snowball effect can be devastating. Frequent deal slippage indicates a broader issue with your qualification and sales execution process. It signals that reps aren’t qualifying deals appropriately and managers aren’t coaching effectively. Leaders of revenue teams with a high slip rate need a systematic fix for an organizational challenge. In a recent Revenue Builders Podcast, hosts John Kaplan and John McMahon met with featured guest John Donnelly III, CRO with DTiQ and Co-Founder of e2log, to break down the reasons why deals slip, and the strategies leaders can use to solve the problem.

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Categories: Company Alignment  |  Sales Conversation  |  Sales Messaging

Stop Selling: How Business Conversations Improve Value Across the Buyer Journey

If you’re leading an organization that’s selling a solution, whether in an established market or a new vertical, you’re competing for your buyers’ attention. The competition is high – we are all faced with hundreds of sales messages each day. Successful sales organizations know how to consistently rise above the noise and command greater market share. These organizations ensure that the entire customer-facing team understands how to communicate the value of their solution in a way that’s meaningful to the buyer’s needs and outcomes. The customer journey no longer begins and ends with the salesperson; to stay competitive, it's critical to ensure that value is being created and captured at every stage of the buyer experience. Start by equipping every member of your go-to-market team with the customer-first mindset associated with the business conversation.

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Categories: Sales Coaching Tools  |  Sales Planning  |  Sales Transformation  |  Talent Management

When Are Sellers Most Effective? 5 Elite Traits Revealed

Leading your organization to sustained revenue growth begins by honing your greatest asset: your talent. Every organization has its top performers, and usually others within the ranks hold the potential to become elite. When organizations invest in the learning, coaching, and development needed to level-up each team and player, they give themselves a competitive advantage at every touch-point in the customer journey. A great talent development strategy begins when you identify and codify the behaviors that drive your core business objectives. These behaviors apply to more than just sales reps; BDRs, SEs, and even Marketing and Customer Success roles are more successful when they leverage a common mindset. Raise up your entire customer-facing organization with a plan for identifying and developing the characteristics within individuals and teams that help elevate your organization to greater heights.

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Categories: Front-line Managers  |  Sales Planning  |  Sales Process

Building Sales Pipelines: Coaching Tools

Healthy sales pipelines and accurate forecasts are grounded in structured territory, account and opportunity planning processes. These processes provide sales managers with an unrestricted line of sight into their sales organizations. Without this line of sight, sales organizations often miss quota goals, forecast revenue inaccurately, and close the majority of deals late in the quarter – or year.

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Categories: Company Alignment  |  Sales Transformation  |  Sales and Marketing

Cross-Functional Sales Teams: Improving Execution and Growth

In today's highly competitive market, it's no longer enough for a sales organization to differentiate itself solely based on its offering. The most successful companies today are those that create differentiation in their initial sales process and the customer’s journey. That level of execution requires that leaders enable every customer-facing team and role to be fluent in a unified sales message, strategy, and execution.

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Categories: Adoption and Reinforcement  |  Sales Enablement Technology

Eight Ways to Get More Out of Ascender Plus

If you want to lead a top-performing organization, you need a way to equip the daily grind of sales. Training programs are effective, but what happens after the training stops? You need an enablement engine with content, curriculum and community. That's the power of our platform Ascender®. Right now, we’re working with sales leaders who have seen measurable improvements in quota attainment and forecast accuracy leveraging Ascender. Here are eight ways they’re maximizing their value from the platform.

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Categories: Podcasts

Latest Podcasts: Building Culture As a Leader

Whether you're leading an early-stage startup or an established organization, one of the most important things a leader can do is to cultivate a culture of accountability, curiosity and excellence. This month, our guests on the Revenue Builders podcast offered some insightful perspectives on building a successful sales culture. These leaders have spearheaded culture transformations and spurred massive growth at some of the most influential sales organizations of our time. Tune in to the episodes below to hear their stories and advice on building, scaling, and enabling a winning culture as a sales leader. We recently started publishing two episodes per week, so there's even more great lessons in leadership to dig in to! Make sure to subscribe to the Revenue Builders podcast on your favorite podcast player, so you never miss an episode.

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Categories: Adoption and Reinforcement  |  Company Alignment  |  Sales Training Initiative

The Key to Accelerating Your Sales Initiative

A sales training initiative is a big investment - one you want to ensure provides a long-term return. The key to ensuring a return on the investment is increasing the breadth and depth of your engagement, ensuring long-term adoption and extending training to all customer-facing professionals, not just the direct sales team. Today’s top enablement teams are expanding their efforts to a wider set of roles to ensure new strategies permeate into the daily sales motion. This includes Lead Gen, Pre-Sales, Sales, Post-Sales, Channel, Marketing, and Product roles.

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Categories: Company Alignment  |  Sales Negotiation

How to Align Multiple Functions Around Your Sales Negotiation Strategy

Many companies mistake sales negotiation as a function conducted exclusively by sellers. We consider negotiation a team effort. In a complex B2B sales environment, it is rare for an individual seller to negotiate an entire deal on his/her own without the support, guidance and active participation from the rest of the organization. There are multiple functions and teams involved in negotiation alongside the sales team. You would be doing a disservice to your company to only involve your sales team in the creation and execution of your negotiation strategy. Each function must have a clear understanding as to how negotiation is executed and agree upon what a great deal looks like.

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Categories: Sales Planning

Effective Ways to Improve Sales Planning and Add Value for Your Team

Many sales organizations struggle with building consistent, qualified pipeline because their sales teams are spending too much time “working around the opportunities.” The key to driving qualified pipeline is focusing your team on the territory, not the opportunities. When your sales team views their territory as their own business unit, they’re more accountable for the forecast and able to execute on next-level pipeline building. Let's examine three ways you can switch up your team's approach to pipeline and give them the tools and agency to deliver more qualified opportunities.

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Categories: Podcasts

Our Top Podcast Episodes of 2023

2023 was a great year for the Revenue Builders Podcast. We enjoyed hosting conversations with some truly transformative leaders, from sales executives at "Unicorn" tech companies to founders of inspiring charitable organizations. Our hosts John Kaplan and John McMahon welcomed over 50 guests whose conversations covered topics like product-led growth, selling to champions and C-level decision-makers, growing your personal sales career and making great sales hires. Today, we're sharing our top 10 most-listened podcasts of the year. Listen, save and share these greatest hits to guide you as you aim even higher in 2024. Thanks for tuning in to the Revenue Builders Podcast this year. We're so grateful you're here, and we love to hear your comments, suggestions and discussions about the show. Make sure to follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram so you can keep up with all the latest wisdom from our guests and tag us when you share your favorite episodes. If you haven't already, subscribe to the Revenue Builders Podcast on your favorite podcast player.

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Categories: Partners  |  Sales Leadership  |  Sales Productivity  |  Scaling Sales

How to Increase Revenue with Channel Partners

A channel program is an effective way to increase your capacity and expand market share, helping you reach your growth goals faster. When executed well, your channel program will decrease the cost of a sale, improve reach into new markets, and grow overall seller capacity without increasing internal headcount. However, backing your program with the right resources will be critical to its success. To expand market share, you'll need Productivity x Capacity to drive growth. A robust channel partner program will take focus and attention to develop both sides of this equation. For today, we'll set aside the capacity piece of the formula and dig into the actions leaders can take to boost productivity from channel partners. Increasing Channel Partner Productivity When it comes to channel sales, your ability to control the sales process is limited. You have to accept that your partner controls the time frame, message to the customer, and, ultimately, your forecast. What you can control is the tools you provide to help that partner sell your solution. It's important to put time and resources into helping your channel sellers understand your company's value and differentiation as well as your internal revenue teams do. Successful channel execution starts with clearly defined practices that drive bottom-line impact. Five steps to secure channel partner success: 1. Ensure that your company's message and your partner’s message are consistent Driving consistency between your organization's message and your partner's message is critical to align with your customer's buying process. The amount of digital content available today means customers are educating themselves about your offerings prior to any conversation with an actual salesperson. If your partner's message is misaligned with your content, you could miss opportunities to move good deals forward. The best channel enablement programs equip their partners with the ability to communicate their value proposition and give them the ability to answer essential questions on their behalf: • What problems do we solve for our customers? • How do we specifically solve these problems with your solution? • How do we do it differently from the competition? • What is our proof? These questions are simple, but the answers typically are not. Most companies don’t have internal alignment on these questions. If you asked executive leaders in your company these four questions, how much would their answers differ? Align internally on the answers, and then make sure your partners are aligned in the same way. Does your message support the channel buyer’s journey? Can your partners execute that message? Do their marketing materials, sales tools, and presentation decks all have that same unified message? 2. Educate the partner community on the critical skills to be successful in today’s markets Your partners won’t be successful in selling your solutions if they can’t effectively execute in front of the customer. Secure a plan to make sure that every person selling your solution can execute these three critical sales skills: 1. Uncover customer needs by executing an effective discovery session 2. Articulate value and differentiation in a way that has meaning to the buyer 3. Position and negotiate value, preserving margin and avoiding price cuts 3. Implement and inspect what channel leadership adopts in the field Ensuring that your channel leaders are driving enablement and adoption in the field will help produce greater success rates. Just as you do with your internal managers, make sure you provide the how, not just the what. Give partners the tools and processes that help drive the right behaviors and coach them on the desired sales motion. Actions like pre-call planning, asking deep discovery questions and role playing all help increase transaction sizes across the board. 4. Arm partners with competitive intelligence to accelerate the sales process How does your solution differ from the competition? How is that differentiation tied to what drives value for your buyer? Provide partners with competitive information that outlines how your solution is: • UNIQUE — your competition doesn’t have the same features or capabilities • COMPARATIVELY DIFFERENT — features or capabilities that are similar, but are delivered in ways that are more valuable to the buyer • HOLISTICALLY BETTER — qualities about your company that would mitigate risk in the buying decision (e.g., years in business) 5. Provide the channel with proof points that demonstrate your success Customer testimonials are an asset to any sales conversation. Providing tangible and consumable points of reference on the results your solution provides will strengthen your message and put evidence behind your claims. If your solution saved another customer X% of revenue, then that’s valuable information for a channel partner to have. Develop a way for channel partners to easily tap into case studies, testimonial quotes, and proof points for use in their own sales conversations.

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Categories: Sales Leadership  |  Sales Messaging  |  Sales Transformation

Aligning Revenue Teams: Execute Your Growth Strategy

Today's leaders have an uphill battle to successfully tackle revenue growth goals. Externally, marketplace dynamics have shifted and buyers have redefined why and how they buy. Internally, revenue organizations have to adapt and align their message in a way that communicates their value in today's dynamic selling environment. Strategies for growth and evolution should drive alignment across all your revenue teams. Start with a buyer-focused messaging framework that’s proven to help revenue teams align behind company goals and support front-line sales success. Everyone in your organization should have the same answers to four essential questions. Alignment around these answers will help equip your revenue teams with a consistent message around the value you bring to the market. Aligning the sales organization around new ways buyers are purchasing your solution requires a shift in the sales approach, one that equips sellers to focus on their buyers and be relevant in sales conversations. One of the most critical ways to align customer-facing teams on a new GTM approach is by ensuring the entire sales organization has a consistent understanding of the business value their solution provides and their competitive differentiation in their marketplace. This alignment starts with the executive team. When leaders generate cross-functional agreement on the value drivers and differentiators that are top-of-mind for their most influential buying audiences, they lay the groundwork for creating a consistent, buyer-focused sales message.

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Categories: Company Alignment  |  Customer Success  |  Opportunity Reviews  |  Sales Coaching Tools

Driving Behavior Change: Skillsoft's Global Sales Initiative

When a growing EdTech firm set assertive revenue targets, it partnered with Force Management to help create the transformation necessary for reaching those goals. Skillsoft is a global leader in corporate training and enterprise learning experiences. Together, we implemented a multi-phase engagement to redefine their selling motion and align teams worldwide around the new, customized approach for driving consistent revenue.

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Categories: Sales Messaging  |  Sales Process

Cross-Selling Training: Essential Sales Skills for Upselling Success

In today's economic climate, cross-selling and upselling have become more challenging due to the budget constraints of customers. While gaining new customers is always a positive outcome for any organization, the ability of your sales representatives to sell additional products or services to existing customers is often the key to meeting your revenue targets consistently. Unfortunately, many sales leaders may instruct their teams to pull resources from existing accounts in an effort to meet quarterly goals, without equipping them with the necessary tools and strategies to succeed in upselling. This can lead to disorganized sales behavior and increased discounts, creating unnecessary stress for managers and sales representatives alike as they try to close deals that are not yet fully developed.

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Sales Training Tips to Help You Reinforce MEDDICC

It’s easy to find a sales training company to help you enable your teams. Google it and you’ll find plenty of options that run the gamut of experience and cost. The challenge lies in finding the right sales transformation solution to help you solve the challenges you’re currently facing and drive the outcomes you need.

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Categories: Company Alignment  |  Sales Planning  |  Scaling Sales

Defining Your Differentiation: Key to Sales Success in a Changing Economy

Competitive differentiation is at the core of every organization’s sales strategy. It’s why customers choose your solution and why sellers get excited about bringing your product to market. As markets change, though, customer needs change too. It’s possible that your differentiation may need to adapt to fit these changing customer behaviors.

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Categories: Podcasts

Latest Podcasts: Tactical Leadership

This month, the Revenue Builders Podcast featured some great deep dives into tactical sales strategies. Each episode covered a different element of a great sales motion, breaking it down step-by-step in conversation with seasoned leaders and experts with years in the industry. The result is a collection of hard-earned lessons, blueprints for success, and golden nuggets of advice that can only come from leaders who have been in the barrel. Don't miss out - listen, save, and share these episodes to start applying the knowledge that gets your team on the top of their game for a strong showing in Q4. We recently started publishing two episodes per week, so there's even more great lessons in leadership to dig in to! Make sure to subscribe to the Revenue Builders podcast on your favorite podcast player, so you never miss an episode.

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Categories: Economic Change  |  Sales Kickoff

How to Define a High-Impact Priority for Your Sales Kickoff

As a new fiscal year approaches, sales leaders face a critical task: setting the right priorities for your Sales Kickoff event. The past year may have presented new challenges for your sales team, whether due to external market factors or internal changes as your organization scales to pursue greater revenue. Those challenges can be opportunities for your team to learn and strengthen your approach in the coming year.

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Categories: Sales Leadership  |  Sales Planning  |  Sales Transformation

QBR Sales Performance: Assess, Pivot, and Boost Revenue

A new quarter is upon us, and it’s time to strategize on how you can make this one even better than the last. Often, sales leaders know where their sales team falls short – but it can be a challenge to identify the root of these problems and determine what action will have the greatest impact in solving them.

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Categories: Economic Change  |  Partners  |  Sales Leadership  |  Scaling Sales

3 Steps to Develop Your Channel Partner Program

Channel organizations are an often overlooked, but critical component to increasing market share for complex B2B sales organizations. During my time as VP of PTC’s Worldwide Channel Program, I leaned on a core formula: Productivity x Capacity = Growth. In this article, we will focus on capacity, but stay tuned for part two in this series for the other side of the equation: How to Increase Channel Partner Productivity.

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Categories: Sales Negotiation  |  Selling to the C-Suite

Top 3 Habits of Sales Teams that Consistently Win High-Value Deals

The sales landscape has changed more rapidly in the past few years than ever before. From a worldwide pandemic to emerging technologies and fluctuating economic factors, the way that buyers make a purchase decision has evolved. In some ways, these changes require new sales approaches. More likely, these changes have created a stark disparity in the skills of teams who succeed and those who fall behind.

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Categories: Sales Process

Six Questions to Test Your Prospect's Decision Process

The buying committee is changing. The average buying committee is now between 8 and 10 decision-makers. This means the sales process is more complex than ever, and ongoing budget concerns add another layer of challenges for your sales team. When you're putting time and resources into sales cycles that last an entire quarter or much longer, the last thing you want is for an unexpected requirement, budget allocation or a last-minute stakeholder interjection to throw a wrench in your plan and stall or kill your deal.

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Categories: Podcasts

Latest Podcasts: Habits of Great Leaders

There's no one recipe for success. Every leader has their own unique strategies and practices that they swear by. And yet, there are some great habits that are undeniably shared between many great leaders, including the ones who join us on Revenue Builders. Some of the most common themes in our discussions with the sales greats are a learning mindset, a focus on people, and a willingness to push on through hardship and failures. Our guests last month on Revenue Builders all live by those themes, but they each have their own personal approaches and anecdotes. Wherever you are in your career, dig into the four episodes below to get inspired. Make sure to tune in to the Revenue Builders podcast on your favorite podcast player, so you can easily download, listen, and share.

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Categories: Economic Change  |  Sales Leadership

Top Questions for Industry Leadership Panel: Navigating Market Challenges

We recently hosted an Industry Leadership Panel where we talked to three growth-oriented business leaders about what top organizations are doing to drive success in the current market. There were a few questions we saw over and over again from the audience, so we wanted to take the time to provide some relevant resources around those topics. Keep reading for podcasts, blogs and videos from our library that address the four most commonly asked questions from our webinar about economic change. Top Questions for Industry Leadership Panel: Navigating Market Challenges We got even more nuanced and unique perspectives on these topics from our panel guests during the event. If you missed the panel discussion, you can watch it on demand here. The conversation dove into specific lessons and action items for leaders in every industry on how to support teams, shift priorities, and drive growth outcomes in our current economy.

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Categories: Cloud Computing  |  Cybersecurity  |  Economic Change

Mastering Cloud Selling: 3 Essential Skills for Today's Tech Sales

Every industry is impacted by the ongoing economic uncertainty in recent months, including cloud data and cybersecurity sales. Whether your team sells SaaS, IaaS or PaaS solutions, you’ve likely been faced with customers changing purchasing protocols and placing higher scrutiny on budget approvals. These obstacles may present a huge threat to your company’s growth goals unless you’re able to adapt your sales approach to address these new challenges. Now is the time to support new behaviors on your sales team to help reps have greater impact and meet your revenue objectives. We’ve outlined three of the most critical skills for cloud data and security sales reps in today’s market and how sales leaders can enable them.

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Categories: Economic Change  |  Podcasts  |  Sales Messaging  |  Sales Process

Develop Proof Points That Make an Impact

Few tools in your sales team’s arsenal can move the needle like effective proof points. They verify that you do what you say you can do. The more proof points are aligned with your buyer’s industry, problem, or positive business outcome (PBO), the more effective they’ll be. Sales organizations with a process for developing and maximizing the effectiveness of their proof points can leverage these important tools in ways that create and preserve value in the sales process.

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Categories: Podcasts

Latest Podcasts: Leading for Growth

This month, the Revenue Builders Podcast featured six guests who are experienced in driving efficiency and creating repeatable success that fuels growth. Their conversations ranged from strategies for increasing deal size within the sales process, to creating a culture of accountability and improvement within your team. We even shared a special episode featuring three guests who offered unique perspectives from outside investors on what drives growth across their portfolios. There's no doubt that the key to unlocking growth is a combination of great interpersonal leadership and collaboration, as well as solid execution and data-driven business decisions. Dig in to our June episodes to get insights on every element of a great revenue growth strategy. Make sure to tune in to the Revenue Builders podcast on your favorite podcast player, so you can easily download, listen, and share.

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Categories: Front-line Managers  |  Sales Leadership  |  Unicorn Companies

Why Unicorn Companies Maintain Growth: Key Strategies Revealed

In 2013, a venture capitalist coined the term “Unicorn” to refer to privately owned firms valued at over $1B. Back then, only 39 companies fit the criteria. Legislation had cleared the path for private companies to pursue funding and Unicorns became less mythical. By 2020, there were over 600. The real Unicorn stampede occurred in the wake of pandemic-era restrictions, fueled by rapid tech adoption and an exuberant funding environment. During 2021 alone, 537 new Unicorns were minted. Today, there are over 1250. There is no roadmap for becoming a Unicorn, but there are common threads. Most have great timing with a disruptive idea, scalable technology and a relationship with investors marked by two-way trust. But once they've reached the coveted Unicorn status, how do companies maintain performance and continue their steep growth trajectory? For leaders at these companies who have reached great heights and want to keep the pedal to the floor, there are three critical areas they'll need to maintain and support continued success. First, fast-growing teams need a unified sales message to leverage clarity on the value they’re bringing to the market. Second, streamline your selling processes: qualification methods, deep discovery, capturing and sharing proof points – fine-tune each component into a repeatable process embedded in your operating rhythm. Third, maintain strong talent while emphasizing retention and development. Let’s examine these three focus areas:

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Categories: Podcasts

Latest Podcasts: Elite Leadership

This past month of the Revenue Builders Podcast has featured some all-star leaders. These inspiring conversations have explored everything from game-changing sales strategies to leadership actions that transform teams and people. At a time when many of us are being confronted with new and complex challenges, these stories from experienced leaders offer perspective and advice that will keep you on the path toward growth. Dig into the episodes below to get into the elite leader's mindset. Make sure to tune in to the Revenue Builders podcast on your favorite podcast player, so you can easily download, listen and share.

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Categories: Economic Change  |  Sales Discovery Process  |  Sales Leadership

Why Your Sales Team Needs Deep Discovery and Multiple Champions to Win Right Now

Recently, we’ve all been living in a constant state of economic uncertainty. Market trends show a leveling off of growth and consumer confidence is steadily declining across global markets.

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Categories: Economic Change  |  Sales Conversation  |  Selling to the C-Suite

Selling to the CFO: 5 Key Questions for Sales Success

The Chief Financial Officer is an influential voice in any sales conversation. If you’re looking to drive growth for your organization, your reps must be able to influence the CFO to close higher-value deals. Recently, due to economic pressure and budget constraints, many sales teams are seeing CFOs get involved in every deal, regardless of size. The ability to sell to the CFO is now a crucial skill every seller needs in order to hit revenue targets in today’s market.

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Categories: Company Alignment  |  Sales Messaging  |  Sales and Marketing

Convert More High-Value Leads with Sales and Marketing Alignment

Recent economic uncertainty has forced many sales teams to dig deeper into their territories for potential pipeline and put a critical focus on effectively maximizing every lead. As buyers become more budget-conscious and develop more stringent criteria, it’s never been more important to communicate value from the very first interaction.

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Categories: Podcasts

Latest Podcasts: The Power of Influence

Last month, the Revenue Builders Podcast explored the concept of influence: how to identify it, access it, and wield it in the sales process. Our esteemed guests shared expert insights on core sales fundamentals as well as emerging strategies in the market. From nailing negotiations and upselling to converting champions and CFOs, this month's episodes are a masterclass on how to maximize your impact in a challenging sales environment. Dig into our April episodes below and share them with your team to stay prepared for whatever the market throws at you. Make sure to tune in to the Revenue Builders podcast on your favorite podcast player, so you can easily download, listen and share.

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Categories: Economic Change  |  Sales Leadership  |  Talent Management

3 Ways to Motivate Your Sellers During Economic Challenges

Economic challenges can take a huge toll on workforce morale. Your sales force is likely encountering obstacles they haven’t faced before, and it’s possible that’s affecting their ability to win.

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Categories: Economic Change  |  Scaling Sales  |  Selling to the C-Suite

How to Enable Sellers to Win at the C-Suite Level

Selling to C-level leaders is a crucial skill for your sales force if you want to grow your average deal size. Especially in today’s environment of economic uncertainty, big price tags are not getting approved without skillful execution of these conversations.

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Categories: MEDDICC  |  Sales Messaging  |  Sales Qualification

How Sales Messaging & Qualification Work Together to Drive Scalable Growth

Most sales organizations have been affected by the economic downturn, which has resulted in rapid changes in buyer behavior, business priorities and decision criteria. You may be experiencing stagnation of growth, declining win rates or struggles with inconsistency in sales performance. Depending on your organization's current challenges, a sales qualification and/or messaging transformation can improve your sales teams’ ability to increase average deal size and win rates consistently. One initiative complements the other, and the true power of each is maximized when they’re executed together.

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Categories: Podcasts

Latest Podcasts: Leading Through Challenges

As leaders, we serve as guides for our teams through challenging times. In the current economic landscape, when the challenges are unpredictable, it helps to have guides of our own. Last month on the Revenue Builders Podcast, we talked to multiple leaders who have guided teams successfully through crises. They spoke to the power of gratitude, communication, culture, and humility. Dig in to these five episodes for sales strategies, wisdom, and inspiration to help you stay at the top of your game through any challenge. Listen to the Revenue Builders podcast on your favorite podcast player, so you can easily download, listen and share.

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Categories: Company Alignment  |  Economic Change  |  Scaling Sales  |  Unicorn Companies

How to Drive Cost Optimization of Your Sales Organization

As the external economic environment continues to shift, many organizations are looking for ways to optimize costs and make their sales force more efficient. One focus area has emerged as a key differentiator for those organizations who have been able to do more with less, accelerate revenue, and exceed their objectives during this economic time: alignment. Succeeding during economic change requires all hands on deck and a united motion toward your goals. Perhaps the recent market shifts have exposed misalignment in your teams that wasn’t as critical before. Or maybe your organization has struggled to pivot to match the speed of the market, resulting in misalignment on how you’re addressing changing customer needs.

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Categories: Economic Change  |  Sales Enablement Technology  |  Sales Leadership

The Crucial Aspects of Leading Sales Teams Today

Sometimes change comes in the form of a tidal wave: immediate, dramatic, and undeniable. More often, change happens slowly and steadily: hard to perceive until we’ve drifted so far from the shore that we can’t see where we started. Whether you’re trying to minimize “drift” that’s occurred within your sales organization over time or respond to the immediate impact of the turbulent economic environment, ensure you’re focusing on crucial aspects that enable your team to succeed. Remain focused on the fundamental aspects of good selling while using every advantage to stay competitive in the modern selling landscape.

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Categories: Front-line Managers  |  Opportunity Reviews  |  Sales Coaching Tools

Coaching 2.0: How to Enable Sales Managers Through Technology

For the modern sales organization, certain technologies are universal in the age of Sales 2.0. We rely on CRMs and continuous learning platforms to increase the efficiency of our sales force and drive organizational outcomes. The recent economic downturn has most sales organizations looking for ways to achieve even greater cost efficiency and support revenue-driving activities. One high-impact area where leaders are choosing to invest is manager enablement. Emerging sales technologies can optimize opportunity reviews and coaching to increase front-line manager effectiveness. These managers have a unique potential to impact your organization’s success; an investment in their efficacy is an investment in overall sales velocity.

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Categories: Podcasts

Latest Podcasts: The Leadership Mindset

This month on Revenue Builders, our guests reminded us of the power of the mind. In leadership and life, the power of your mindset is clear - it affects your outlook, motivation and most importantly those around you. We look for a great mindset in those we partner with and who we hire. These are four stories that convey the transformative power of the mindset, from entrepreneurship to service. Dig in to the episodes below for inspiration and personal growth tactics for leaders in every stage of their career. Listen to the Revenue Builders podcast on your favorite podcast player, so you can easily download, listen and share.

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Categories: Economic Change  |  Sales Leadership  |  Sales Messaging

How to Lead a Revenue-Driving Sales Force in Today’s Market

What do today’s most successful revenue-driving sales forces have in common? The top teams all feature the same traits: (1) a customer-focused qualification and discovery process, (2) the ability to attach to desired business outcomes (3) and clear, tangible differentiation. How can leaders help their organization achieve these things? By operationalizing a powerful messaging framework.

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Categories: Talent Management

The Team: Building and Managing Successful Business Teams

I have been very fortunate to be a part of some great teams in my life. My freshman year in college I played football for the Defending National Champions of I-AA (now D-I), Boise State University. I transferred my sophomore year to Bowling Green State University in Ohio and played for one of the greatest teams in BGSU history. During the 1985 season we were ranked 20th in the nation ahead of some of the powerhouse schools like Texas and Georgia!

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Categories: Podcasts

Latest Podcasts: Building From Within

The roadmap for building effective teams begins with the leader. As sales leaders, we can only command the best possible team when we're operating at our own maximum potential. This month’s guests on the Revenue Builders podcast give insight on the essential building blocks for creating company cultures where teams thrive and exceed collective goals. Tune in as four guests discuss the life experiences which led to their own evolution and personal growth, and how the lessons learned have helped them develop teams that get results, again and again. Listen to the Revenue Builders podcast on your favorite podcast player, so you can easily download, listen and share.

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Categories: Sales Planning  |  Sales Qualification  |  Scaling Sales

3 Forecasting Habits of High-Performing Sales Organizations

Achieving 100% forecast accuracy is a goal for any sales organization, but at times it can feel out of our hands. So many factors affect a successful forecast: external economic factors, problems within the buyer organization and the ability of sales teams to predict and execute their number. How do you improve forecast accuracy as a sales leader?

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Categories: Podcasts

Latest Podcasts: Leading Together

Leadership is a tough job. Luckily, we don't have to go it alone. This month on Revenue Builders, our guests remind us of the power of the team. Through the story of four very different journeys, these podcast episodes show that humility, mentorship and continuous learning make for more than just great leaders. They create great teams who produce great results. Dig into the episodes below for inspiration on how you can be, and create, better leaders. Listen to the Revenue Builders podcast on your favorite podcast player, so you can easily download, listen and share.

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Categories: Economic Change  |  Mission Critical Success Series  |  Sales Process

Manage Deals to a Successful Close in a Shifting Economy

This blog is part of our Mission Critical Success Series, where we dive into the strategies leaders are using to execute on mission critical sales objectives during times of economic change. Each week, we will cover a different essential area of sales effectiveness. Check our blog next week for the newest installment, or subscribe for updates straight to your inbox. Buyers are more cautious when the economy is uncertain. If these heightened concerns aren’t identified and addressed early in the sales cycle, deal times may get longer and stalling is more likely as more stakeholders get involved. Sellers need to be able to tie your solution directly to the business outcomes that will capture buy-in from each decision maker.

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Categories: Company Alignment  |  Economic Change  |  Mission Critical Success Series

How to Become a Must-Have Solution for Customers in Any Economy

This blog is part of our Mission Critical Success Series, where we dive into the strategies leaders are using to execute on mission critical sales objectives during times of economic change. Each week, we will cover a different essential area of sales effectiveness. Check our blog next week for the newest installment, or subscribe for updates straight to your inbox. With recent uncertainty and shifts in the economy, price-based decisions are becoming more common. More sales organizations are competing for less budget, creating a challenging market for sellers. Leaders can support their sales teams by providing them with a repeatable value-based framework for sales messaging and elite customer care that will intrinsically link their solution to the customer’s success.

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Categories: Economic Change  |  Mission Critical Success Series

3 Key Strategies to Cultivate a Customer-Focused Mindset in Sales

This blog is part of our Mission Critical Success Series, where we dive into the strategies leaders are using to execute on mission critical sales objectives during times of economic change. Each week, we will cover a different essential area of sales effectiveness. Check our blog next week for the newest installment, or subscribe for updates straight to your inbox. Getting customer-focused is an organization-wide initiative that requires alignment of strategy, messaging, content and seller skills. The ability to center your customer in the sales process is a major growth driver, and especially important when customers are dealing with challenges like economic change. Budgets are tightening, and decision makers are under increased scrutiny. When effectively executed, a customer-focused sales process will lead the buyer to view your solution as vital to their success.

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Categories: Podcasts

Latest Podcasts: Leading Through Change

At some point, every leader will have to guide their team through some level of change. Our guests this month on the Revenue Builders Podcast are familiar with that task. Tune in to these eye-opening episodes for lessons on leading with confidence, building connections and building the leaders of tomorrow. Whether it's building a company from the ground up, tracking our ever-shifting economy or even building a grassroots movement, the insights shared this month are highly relevant and actionable for the leaders of today. Listen to the Revenue Builders podcast on your favorite podcast player, so you can easily download, listen and share.

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Categories: Adoption and Reinforcement  |  Economic Change  |  Sales Kickoff

Your SKO: How to Drive Long-Term Adoption & ROI

With the season for sales kickoffs approaching, the current economy is likely a driving influence on your plan. Given the shifting market dynamics, ensure you use your SKO resources where it matters most, and equip your team to drive lasting results long after the SKO ends. Affecting real change on sales behaviors requires more than a two-day SKO event or one-off virtual training session. Teams that compete next year, will be the ones who were equipped from the get go, at the SKO, and then supported along the way as they adjusted their sales actions. In times of economic pressure, elite leaders use their SKO as a critical event to build proficiency around key components of sales effectiveness, whether it be sales messaging, planning, execution or qualification. While the work may start at the SKO event, it’s critical that there’s also a plan to maintain momentum beyond the event, measure ongoing performance and drive the adoption of new sales behaviors.

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Categories: Podcasts

Latest Podcasts: Leadership 'It' Factors

The best leadership requires a combination of skill and character. Last month's guests on the Revenue Builders podcast shared the qualities that they've found to separate the good leaders from the great. Dig into these leadership stories and hear key takeaways from individuals who come from diverse backgrounds, industries and cultures. From military-level discipline to the ability to be vulnerable, there's a quality in each episode that each of us can aspire to as leaders. Listen to the Revenue Builders podcast on your favorite podcast player, so you can easily download, listen and share.

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Categories: Economic Change  |  MEDDICC

Changing economy? Help Your Salespeople Prioritize the Right Opportunities Faster

Given the current economic downturn, your salespeople may be more inclined to invest time in an unqualified deal or skip important steps in the sales process to keep pipelines moving. If the current economic landscape is amplifying the pressure your sales team is feeling to hit revenue targets, address this challenge head on and have a direct conversation with your team now. Early action will help to minimize forecast inaccuracy and ensure your salespeople aren’t getting stuck in deals that are more likely to stall out or lose.

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Categories: Front-line Managers  |  Sales Leadership  |  Sales Transformation

5 Characteristics of Successful Sales Leaders: Driving B2B Success

Front-line managers play an impactful role in driving your sales organization’s success. As a sales leader, it's critical that you show your managers support by helping them build their leadership skills.

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Categories: Adoption and Reinforcement  |  Customer Success

Build the Roadmap to Reinforce Your Sales Initiative

We build strategic partnerships with our clients with a focus on helping customer-facing organizations achieve both quick wins and long-term outcomes. To ensure we help our clients achieve that success, we partner with them throughout the journey. We help our customers build out a forward-looking success plan to maximize adoption, drive consistent bottom-line impact and significantly increase the ROI from their engagement.

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Categories: Adoption and Reinforcement  |  Customer Success

Maximize Adoption & ROI: The Continuous Learning Journey

Through hard work and a successful delivery, you’ve created momentum for your customer-facing team, equipping them with the knowledge and skills to improve front-line numbers. Now is the time to refine and amplify your team's skill set — taking them from good to elite.

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Categories: Product-Led Growth  |  Sales Messaging

Navigating Product-Led Growth Complexities

Product-led growth (PLG) is driving some of the fastest growing B2B companies. While these solutions can propel organizations forward, this approach requires business leaders to make strategic decisions around what’s needed to scale that success.

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Categories: Sales Messaging

What’s Important to Your Buyer?

Companies that drive significant growth in their markets all have one thing in common — cross-functional alignment around buyer value and solution differentiation. Through a conversation on the Revenue Builders podcast, Chief Marketing Officer at TripActions, Meagen Eisenberg shares why generating this company-wide alignment is critical, “To fight for larger players and enterprise deals, the entire company needs to know the value your solutions drive for your customers and understand how to develop and sustain that value for customers.” As you work closely with company leaders to define opportunities to improve sales performance, you may find there is a lack of agreement cross-functionally on what's important to your buyer. These gaps and misunderstandings are not uncommon, especially as companies mature into their B,C, or even D-level rounds and new executives join the business. However, misalignment can significantly impact your sales organization's ability to land high-value accounts. When you correct this misalignment, it can lead to increased margins and market share.

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Categories: Company Alignment  |  Sales Messaging

Partner With Your CMO on the Path to Revenue Growth

While the delineation between marketing and sales can vary from one organization to the next, establishing a close working relationship between both areas remains critical. The most successful companies are the ones with leaders who can mitigate any silos and ensure the entire customer-facing organization is aligned with what’s most important to their buyer. Find ways to establish clear alignment with your marketing counterparts to build a revenue engine that powers aggressive growth in your market.

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Categories: Podcasts

Latest Podcasts: Lessons for Leaders

What do the most successful business leaders do to take themselves and their people to the next level? Tune into these episodes for insight on how to build and lead elite sales teams. Hear from dynamic revenue leaders on how they got to where they are now, and the trials and tribulations of their journeys. Take actionable advice, enjoy John McMahon and John Kaplan's banter (we hear it's a hit), and dig in. Listen to the Revenue Builders podcast on your favorite podcast player, so you can easily download, listen and share.

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Categories: Sales Planning  |  Sales Process

A CFO Perspective on Achieving Healthy Revenue Growth

Each player on the executive team has a different perspective. The CFO is the ears of an organization. They combine everything they hear from leadership to create a balanced plan. They want to yield healthy growth. They go for accuracy.

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Categories: Talent Management

How to Hire the Right Sales Talent for Growth

In this wave of mass resignations and global hiring, reduce hiring challenges and cost by narrowing your sales manager's focus. Define what the ideal sales talent candidate looks like for your organization so you can help your managers hire the right people for growth. The topic of sales talent has come up often on the Revenue Builders Podcast. John McMahon and John Kaplan dig deep with their guests, pulling out top-level advice you can use to make your sales talent a competitive advantage for your company.

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Categories: Sales Coaching Tools

5 Essential Elements of an Effective Sales Process

Efficiency and alignment are critical elements of sales productivity. An effective sales process provides a vehicle to enforce discipline, repeatability, predictability and validation of progress throughout a sale. Most importantly, it allows for inspection and planning – in advance. Part of the beauty of a revenue-driving sales process is its simplicity. Ensure your sales process provides the rigor and support that sales teams need to accurately predict their numbers. Here are five must-haves for every great sales process.

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Categories: Press Release

Force Management and DecisionLink Partner to Help Organizations Achieve Better Sales Results

CHARLOTTE, N.C. & ATLANTA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--DecisionLink, a leader in secure, SaaS-based Customer Value Management solutions that simplify and automate customer value conversations at all stages of the customer journey, today announced a partnership with Force Management, a leading provider of sales force transformation solutions.

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Categories: Podcasts

Latest Podcasts: Catch up on Revenue Builders

The Revenue Builders Podcast, hosted by John McMahon and John Kaplan, has quickly become part of the weekly routine for business leaders in all stages of their careers. McMahon, Kaplan and their guests get real, digging into timely topics with some of the most successful business leaders in all company disciplines (i.e., Sales, Finance, Product, Engineering, Customer Success, Executive Leadership, etc.). McMahon and Kaplan highlight the characteristics of great leadership no matter the environment, interviewing leaders with impressive backgrounds. Take a look at the recent episodes below. Listen to the Revenue Builders Podcast on your favorite podcast player, so you can easily download, listen and share.

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Categories: Front-line Managers

Accelerate Growth: Key Strategies for Sales Success

There’s not a sales leader out there who isn’t trying to accelerate growth. Even if you are working at a company that is driving record numbers, you're likely focused on ensuring you can scale that growth and avoid stalls. How do successful leaders ensure that they are able to maintain their company's growth rate over time?

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Categories: Podcasts

Our Latest Podcasts: Tips to Level Up Your Team

With this month's podcasts, there's no shortage of educational insights and quick tips for sales reps, managers and leaders. Review the episodes below for actions you can take to drive accountability around your priority sales initiatives. Share the episodes with your front-line managers to help them improve their coaching skill set. Listen to the Audible-Ready Sales Podcast on your favorite podcast player, so you can easily download, listen and share.

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Categories: Sales Coaching Tools  |  Talent Management

Sales Coaching Tips: Structure Manager Feedback

Sales managers are charged with training, motivating and coaching sales professionals on a daily basis. Your salespeople look to your front-line managers for professional development and expect to be provided the necessary resources, guidance and knowledge to be successful in their role. Remember, people quit managers before they quit companies. Drive talent engagement and improve retention by enabling your managers to give reps the critical feedback they need to improve current and future outcomes.

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Categories: Front-line Managers  |  Sales Planning  |  Sales Process

End of Quarter Sales Results: Three Areas to Assess

The greatest leaders are the ones who never let their team rest on their success, or wallow in defeat. At the end of the quarter, avoid screaming at the scoreboard. The final score only gives you the end result. It doesn’t tell you the whole story. It’s your responsibility as a sales leader to help your team uncover and address execution challenges.

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Categories: Adoption and Reinforcement

5 Proven Strategies to Increase Sales Revenue: Insights from Top Organizations

Creating true change within your sales team, and the revenue results that follow, takes more than a set of spreadsheets and a simple day of training. If you implement a hasty training session, you’ll short-change yourself and your salespeople. Creating organizational change requires time, commitment and a plan for reinforcement that drives lasting results. When done right, a well-thought-out strategic initiative creates transformation in a way that accelerates growth and powers valuable exits for growing companies. Here are five ways sales leaders can create top-performing sales organizations that drive significant bottom-line impacts.

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Categories: Buyer Alignment  |  Sales Negotiation

Boost Sales Win Rates: Simple Strategies for Success

Whether you've recently launched a sales initiative or are simply looking for ways to support your sales team as the quarter progresses, one thing is certain — you've got numbers to hit. While driving a lasting change to front-line numbers takes consistent effort and leadership, find simple strategies to help your sales reps improve on core areas of sales effectiveness. After all, great selling is great selling. Encouraging reps to hone their sales skills will only further the success of your current initiatives and help your salespeople focus on closing more deals, faster.

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Categories: Front-line Managers  |  Sales Leadership

How to Create a Strong Blueprint for Your Sales Management Team

Sales managers deserve support from your organization. After the launch of a strategic initiative or sales kickoff, managers can have a significant impact on rep adoption and growth, but their success will relate back to how well they were supported. Start with a clear definition of what good looks like for your front-line managers as they reinforce current initiatives and build top performers. Great companies start with a strong blueprint that includes the processes and tools that enable sales managers to drive success at the team level.

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Categories: Product-Led Growth  |  Sales Leadership

Product-led Growth: What CROs Prioritize to Drive Critical Outcomes

Product-led growth (PLG) can propel emerging portfolio companies forward. Some of these companies scale that success and significantly reduce time-to-realization, while others face complex sales execution challenges that they aren’t able to overcome. What do successful CROs prioritize to enable their sales organization to achieve critical company outcomes?

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Categories: Podcasts

Our Latest Podcasts: Fuel Sales Success This Year

Provide the fuel your sales engine needs to have one of its best years yet. Each of these episodes share the critical actions sales leaders can take to ignite momentum around new sales initiatives, help managers make an impact, and ultimately, have a great year. It all starts with this quarter's number. To get your organization headed in the right direction, listen to each episode and share them with your front-line managers and reps. Find our show on your favorite podcast player, so you can easily download, listen and share.

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Categories: Buyer Alignment  |  Company Alignment  |  Sales Transformation

Product-Led Growth: Driving Cross-Functional Support to Evolve Your Go-to-Market Strategy

Scaling the success that comes with product-led growth (PLG) brings both opportunities and challenges. If your company is aiming to drive ongoing outcomes, while reducing inefficiencies across customer-facing organizations (Product, Customer Success, etc.) you may find value in what Segment prioritized, as a company, to take their organization to the next level.

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Categories: Buyer Alignment  |  Sales Messaging  |  Sales Transformation

Product-Led Growth: Enabling Sales to Scale Your Success

Product-led growth (PLG) is leading many B2B companies to drive rapid revenue success. While PLG solutions can propel organizations forward efficiently, this approach also brings specific and complex challenges of its own. If your company is aiming to scale revenue, your cross-functional team may already be considering shifts to go-to-market (GTM) distribution efforts and strategies. What do successful sales leaders prioritize to align their sales organizations accordingly?

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Categories: Podcasts

Our Latest Podcasts: Sales Tips for a Record-breaking Quarter

If your New Year's resolution is to find small ways, every day, to provide value to your salespeople then you've come to the right place. Our December episodes focused on key sales skills and topics that lead to better numbers and faster close rates. Your front-line managers and reps can implement these actions into their daily activities to ensure consistent application of desired sales skills or methodologies. Peruse each episode and share them with your front-line managers and your reps. Find our show on your favorite podcast player, so you can easily download, listen and share.

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Categories: Podcasts

Our Latest Podcasts: Prepare for a Record-Setting Year

Each of our November episodes share ways sales leaders, managers and reps can prepare for a successful new quarter or year. Each episode digs deep into tactics your salespeople can use to plan for aggressive growth goals, reduce competitive losses, and minimize margin cuts. Peruse each episode to find those worth listening to or sharing with your sales team. You may find a few that would be a great addition to upcoming company emails, newsletters or initiatives. Find our show on your favorite podcast player, so you can easily download, listen and share.

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Categories: Podcasts

Our Latest Podcasts: Four Topics to Share with Your Sales Team

Our October episodes provide a refresher on key sales fundamentals that your reps can use to stand out from the competition and move their deals forward faster. Each episode provides tactics your salespeople can add to their approach as they prepare for their next sales conversation. Send these episodes to your sales team today. Have your managers listen as well so they can coach on those critical skills during future opportunity review sessions. Find our show on your favorite podcast player, so you can easily download, listen and share.

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Categories: Buyer Alignment  |  Company Alignment  |  Sales Leadership

Q&A: Leadership Actions That Support Revenue Growth

Every sales leader wants to get more out of their current sales team and implement a strategy that drives immediate results. In our recent webinar, Force Management President, John Kaplan, discussed three critical areas where leadership alignment supports sales resilience and growth. We’ve compiled some of the most impactful topics and resources that you may find valuable to support your sales team in hitting revenue goals.

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Categories: Sales Process  |  Sales Qualification

How to Improve Qualification in Your Sales Organization

If you want to get your sales teams working smarter, you need a well-defined sales process and qualification approach. Why do so many organizations struggle with consistently qualifying and progressing the right opportunities?

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Categories: Podcasts

Our Latest Podcasts: Build an Elite Team

If you're focused on providing tangible value to your salespeople and outlets for them to grow and become elite — this month's episodes are exactly what you need. Each episode covers specific ways you can take action right now, as well as insights you can use as you develop next year's sales kickoff. Review the episodes below and share them with your salespeople and managers as you see fit. Find our show on your favorite podcast player, so you can easily download, listen and share.

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Categories: Sales Kickoff  |  Sales Leadership

Taking on a New VP of Sales Role? Key Resources to Help You Get Started

You’ve put in the work to achieve your new position and now you’re aiming to make an immediate impact on sales success. We’ve pulled together some of our most popular resources that apply to people in a new sales leadership role. As you build your execution plan, leverage these insights to avoid setbacks and implement a strategy that gets results.

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Categories: Podcasts

Our Latest Podcasts: Skills To Drive Numbers Up

Your number one priority is always to drive numbers up, but your number one job is to help your salespeople grow, improve and become top performers. Fortunately, those two tasks go hand in hand. Use these episodes to meet your sales reps and managers where they are and help them build the skills and capabilities they need to become elite. Be sure to share last month's final episode, The Brandon Burlsworth Story, with your team. It covers motivational lessons on how to commit yourself to become the best of the best. Review each episode and share them with your salespeople and managers as you see fit. Find our show on your favorite podcast player, so you can easily download, listen and share.

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Categories: Company Alignment  |  Sales Kickoff

Sales Kickoffs: The Mistake You’re Making

Check out all our sales kickoff resources and tools in the Ultimate Sales Kickoff Resource Guide. Strategizing around this year’s sales kickoff (SKO), coming out of last year’s challenges, may require a shift in your approach. Whether you’re considering a full in-person event, a virtual meeting or a combination of the two, one thing you don’t want to do is wait too long to pull your SKO plan together. Ensure you roll out something strategic that drives the critical business impacts you need. We've helped countless sales leaders roll out transformative sales initiatives as part of their SKO. Those experiences have shown us some common mistakes that leaders often make when planning their SKOs. Here are our top four and how to avoid them.

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Categories: Sales Leadership

Top 5 Takeaways from Our Conversation with John McMahon

Five-time CRO John McMahon’s book, The Qualified Sales Leader: Proven Lessons from a Five Time CRO, has been at the top of sales leaders’ reading lists since it was published in April. McMahon recently joined John Kaplan on The Audible-Ready Sales podcast to discuss the book’s themes and key takeaways for sales leaders. Listen to their conversation here. Here are our top five takeaways from the conversation.

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Categories: Front-line Managers  |  Sales Coaching Tools

Enabling Managers to Execute the Skill/Will Coaching Approach

One of the key ways sales leaders can improve sales performance is by helping their managers coach their teams. Ensure your managers are spending the right amount of time coaching the right people all while taking into account their skills and level of motivation. A Skill/Will matrix can help your front-line sales managers account for differences on their team and coach individuals to success. We cover this matrix and how to use it in a special series on The Audible-Ready Sales Podcast.

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Categories: Sales Kickoff

Critical SKO Concepts Sales Leaders Must Communicate

This blog contains content from our Ultimate Sales Kickoff Resource Guide. Check out all our sales kickoff resources, best practices and tools here. Your sales talent is your only sustainable competitive advantage. In the flurry of preparing the business to face economic challenges, don't lose sight of your people. Find ways to communicate critical concepts that will drive motivation and engagement around mission-critical sales priorities. Given the current economic landscape, ensure your SKO provides the clarity your people are looking for. The SKO is your opportunity to articulate what’s expected of your salespeople next year and how you’re going to help them get there. What you do (or don’t) say will have a large impact on your sales team’s actions after they log off or return home from your SKO. Use the critical concepts below to provide clarity to your salespeople around what they can expect for the upcoming year. Understand what you need to communicate to them, early and often, throughout your SKO journey and afterward.

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Categories: Sales Kickoff

Your Next SKO: Steps Sales Leaders Execute Early On

This blog contains content from our Ultimate Sales Kickoff Resource Guide. Check out all of our sales kickoff resources, best practices and tools here. Defining the plan for this year's sales kickoff (SKO) has many sales leaders focused on using this year’s event to motivate and build momentum for the upcoming year. The SKO isn’t something that should just be delegated to an enablement team. It should be viewed as a strategic event that launches the sales team on a plan for success for the year. As a sales leader, it’s too important for you not to be fully involved.

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Categories: Sales Kickoff

Maximizing SKO Impact: Strategies for Year-Round Sales Success

This blog contains content from our Ultimate Sales Kickoff Resource Guide. Check out all of our sales kickoff resources, best practices and tools here. Sales kickoffs are a useful tool to enable a sales organization to execute on the organization’s top goals for the year. It is easy to delegate the SKO event or get bogged down in the details of who’s doing what, where they’re doing it and how it’s going to go. After all, it may be an event you do every year. However, the key question that needs to be at the forefront for every sales leader is how are you going to use the SKO to align your sales organization around the critical outcomes you need to achieve in the upcoming year?

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Categories: Company Alignment  |  Sales Kickoff

Align Your SKO Agenda: Driving Company Growth Strategy

This blog contains content from our Ultimate Sales Kickoff Resource Guide. Check out all our sales kickoff resources, best practices and tools here. One of the keys to a successful sales kickoff is to execute it in a way that aligns with your organization's overall business strategy. Given the current economic landscape, your company's strategy may be evolving or shifting. Sales alignment with the yearly goals of the company are critical. Because you have a limited amount of time and frankly, attention of your attendees, it’s important that you ensure what is presented and delivered during the SKO supports your team’s ability to execute next year. As the external market continues to shift, your salespeople will likely welcome the transparency on business initiatives and support for hitting critical revenue targets. Focus on the areas below to align your company’s business strategy to your SKO agenda:

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Categories: Sales Kickoff

How to Set Up an Effective Adoption Plan Around Your Sales Kickoff

This blog contains content from our Ultimate Sales Kickoff Resource Guide. Check out all of our sales kickoff resources, best practices and tools here. We are working with leaders right now who are rethinking their sales kickoffs, using the event next year to launch a broader sales transformation initiative, aligned to their company’s overall growth strategy. Whether they’re launching something new or aligning the sales team behind company shifts (i.e. acquisitions, shifted market segments, etc.) — it becomes clear pretty quickly that changing sales behaviors and mindsets requires more than a two-day SKO event or one-off virtual training session.

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Categories: Talent Management

How to Hire and Retain Top Sales Talent

Build a process you and your managers can leverage to make your B2B sales talent a competitive advantage. The remote and hybrid work environment provides companies the opportunity to hire talent with fewer geographical restraints creating the ability for leaders to expand their talent pool. Your competition may be leveraging that talent pool to build its sales team, and may be swiping your top performers. If you're considering a renewed focus on your sales talent approach, ensure you have the right foundations to make people successful in your organization and avoid your top talent jumping ship. Your most important asset is your people, and owning the talent management process is key to turning them into your sales organization’s biggest competitive advantage. With more options and more competition, you must ensure you’re maximizing your talent approach, starting by defining clear Success Profiles, recruiting proactively, and coaching consistently.

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Categories: Sales Negotiation

Why Some Sales Negotiation Training Programs Work and Others Don't

A defined negotiation strategy is a critical component to an organization’s success. If you’re seeing these challenges across your sales organization, it’s time to shift your sales team’s approach:

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Categories: Podcasts

Our Latest Podcasts: Provide Value to Your Team

How have you created value for your sales team this year? In our most recent podcasts, we discuss ways you can support your people and coach your entire team to success. As a sales leader, finding the time to fix execution gaps that you know exist, while in the flurry to hit your number is a common challenge. These episodes give you easy ways to enable your sales reps, support your managers and evaluate your own leadership skill set. Find each episode on your favorite podcast player, so you can easily download, listen and share.

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Categories: Sales Coaching Tools

5 Leadership Tactics That Get Results

Great leaders are great leaders — no matter the court they operate in. On the Audible-Ready Sales Podcast, John Kaplan, Force Management President, had a chance to chat with Coach John Mosley Jr. from Netflix's Last Chance U and East Los Angeles College. Coaching inspiration can come from anywhere. Below are our top takeaways that you can apply to your own sales teams.

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Categories: Podcasts

Our Latest Podcasts: Coaching Lessons from Netflix

This month's episodes packed an extra punch. With timely front-line sales tips and a guest appearance for ELAC Men's Basketball Coach, John Mosley Jr. (as seen on Netflix's Last Chance U: Basketball Series) — each episode has something for everyone in your organization. Here's a rundown of what each episode covers. Tune in and share with your sales reps, managers and other leaders in your organization. Find each episode on your favorite podcast player, so you can easily download, listen and share.

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Categories: Customer Success  |  Sales Messaging  |  Sales Negotiation

Maximizing QBRs: Deliver Customer Value and Drive Success

Quarterly Business Reviews are a common practice for B2B sales companies. They’re meant to provide value for the customer and also provide an opportunity for the sales team to discover ways to help customers be successful, but all too often they miss the mark. Most executives have been through countless lackluster or for lack of a better term, bad QBRs. That’s why your buyers may avoid these important discussions and opt to not come altogether. With a well-defined process on how your customer-facing teams create and capture value, you can differentiate your approach to these important meetings.

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Categories: Sales Leadership

Balancing Short-Term and Long-Term Sales Goals: 3 Strategies for Success

I often have the conversation on “balancing long- and short-term sales goals” with sales leaders. Finding the time to fix execution gaps that you know exist, while in the flurry to hit your number is a common challenge. So the question becomes, “How do you handle the pressure of the quarter while ensuring achievement of the long-term goals for your sales organization?”

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Categories: Podcasts

Our Latest Podcasts: Improve Win Rates

Our April episodes cover sales fundamentals that reps can implement right now to improve win rates and margins. From influencing decision criteria to attaching to big business problems that demand urgency — each episode shares proven best practices and actionable tactics salespeople can use to beat the competition and close at a premium price. Review each episode below, and encourage your sales reps and managers to listen in. Find each episode on your favorite podcast player, so you can easily download, listen and share.

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Categories: Sales Messaging  |  Sales Transformation

Selling New Technology: Getting Reps Beyond the Technical Sale

How can you grow sales revenue when you’re selling a product that simply isn’t a line item in most buyer budgets? Selling a product that represents a new way of doing business demands that salespeople are equipped to be relevant to their buyers’ business-level challenges. When groundbreaking high-tech companies aim to scale sales success, solidifying alignment with their buyer is a key first step and one that can drive company-wide benefits in the process.

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Categories: Buyer Alignment  |  Sales Productivity  |  Sales Transformation

5 Action Plan Steps to Increase Sales Performance

Every sales leader wants to get more out of their current sales team. How do you boost sales performance with what you have? In our recent webinar, Force Management's President, John Kaplan, and Chief Operating Officer, Dave Davies, discussed what sales leaders are doing right now. We’ve broken down our top five takeaways and action items from their conversation. If you want to watch the full discussion, get access to the on-demand webinar here.

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Categories: Sales Productivity  |  Sales Qualification

How to Combat "Not Right Now" Decisions

If "not right now" or "no decision" deals are crippling your pipeline, you likely need a concerted sales effort to minimize their impact on your forecast. Do you have clarity around what’s leading to not right now decisions? The top-tier sales leaders we’re working with are successfully driving win rates and numbers up by helping their reps align with their buyers through their sales process and message. Define where deals are breaking down in your customer engagement process. Here are two areas to assess.

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Categories: Podcasts

Our Latest Podcasts: Improve Seller Skill Sets

Our March episodes focused on key steps in the sales process. Help your salespeople improve their ability to execute on selling fundamentals like, influencing decision criteria and selling higher. Listen, and share with your managers, front-line reps and BDR/SDR organization to help them improve front-line execution over the next few sales cycles. Find each episode on your favorite podcast player, so you can easily download, listen and share.

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Categories: Sales Transformation

Sales Transformation: The Key to Organizational Success and Growth

Changing the sales behaviors of an entire organization requires time, commitment and a plan for reinforcement that drives lasting results. When done right, a well-thought-out strategic initiative creates organizational transformation in a way that accelerates growth and powers valuable exits for growing companies. Successful transformation is an outcome of a concerted effort to reinforce behavior change within the sales organization.

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Categories: Sales Coaching Tools

Our Best Content to Share With Your Sales Teams

We’re regularly updating our robust content library, focused on sales best practices. Many of the topics come from our own prospects and customers who are dealing with sales challenges as they look to accelerate growth, drive more pipeline and capture value throughout the sales process. Many sales leaders find value in sharing this content with their sales teams. Whether you’re reinforcing a recent training or trying to get your teams to up their game in certain areas, you may find some of the resources helpful. Here is a list of some of our most popular content that may be worth passing along to your front-line managers, account reps, and your BDR/SDR team.

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Categories: Podcasts

Our Latest Podcasts: Build a Team of Top Performers

Our February episodes aim to help sales leaders and managers improve seller skill sets and productivity this year. Help your salespeople stand out from competitors, avoid a dreaded "not right now" decision, and improve their ability to execute the fundamentals of great selling. From preparation, to building business acumen and being relevant to multiple decision makers — each episode this month covers key sales fundamentals your sellers should constantly be focusing on. Listen, and share with your sales teams to help them improve their ability to execute and hit quotas. Find each episode on your favorite podcast player, so you can easily download, listen and share.

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Categories: Sales Messaging

Driving Expandable Consumption: Shifting to Consumption-based Pricing

SaaS trends show companies are increasingly making the shift to usage-based pricing models. The ability to increase monetization over time and emphasize a land and expand strategy makes consumption-based models attractive to growing companies. Aligning to new ways buyers use your product likely requires a shifted sales approach, one that equips sellers to communicate value in a way that improves their ability to (1) land high-consumption accounts and (2) ensure long-term adoption within them. Easier said than done.

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Categories: Podcasts

Our Latest Podcasts: Hit Benchmarks Early This Year

Our January episodes aimed to help sales teams start the year right. Each episode shares insights sales reps, managers and leaders can use to make an immediate impact on the pipeline. Listen, and share with your sales teams to support them in driving better numbers right away this year. Find each episode on your favorite podcast player, so you can easily download, listen and share.

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Categories: Opportunity Reviews  |  Sales Coaching Tools

An Approach to Opportunity Coaching That Makes an Impact

If you’ve launched a strategic initiative to improve your sales organization’s success rate this year, ensure your managers are prepared to drive consistent execution and make it stick. Opportunity coaching sessions are an ideal place to reinforce new methodologies and sales behaviors. However, they have to be structured and executed in a way that salespeople see the value in these sessions and managers know how to provide it. When implemented with the right foundation, a coaching approach to regular deal reviews provides reps with actions to take on an account and a way to learn how to execute better in the future.

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Categories: Company Alignment  |  Sales Messaging

How to Align Your Sales Team After a New Acquisition

Acquiring a company can be an exciting time for an organization. It may bring new capabilities and solution differentiators, perks for employees, verticals to target, etc… On the flip side, an acquisition also brings the challenge of incorporating updates and changes into the sales function. Depending on what was acquired, it may bring changes to your sales process, your qualification process, your negotiation frameworks and/or your sales message. Putting a disciplined plan together that equips your teams to execute at the buyer-level is critical. That plan often starts with your sales messaging framework. Here are key areas to consider as you start aligning your sales team after an acquisition.

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Categories: Podcasts

Our Latest Podcasts: Tips to Drive Better Execution Right Now

Each December episode can help your sales reps make an impact on current pipeline opportunities, no matter what stage of the sales process they're in. Share these episodes with your managers, account reps and even SDR/BDR organization to help them improve their ability to execute on critical deals and start the new year strong. Review our rundown of episodes below. Find each episode on your favorite podcast player, so you can easily download, listen and share.

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Categories: Sales Planning

Set A Results-Driven Sales Planning Mindset

Whether you're facing end-of-year territory reviews and or planning to drive more business in the upcoming quarter, one thing is certain — you've got numbers to hit. As a leader, it's critical to support your sales managers and reps in developing a plan to drive consistent pipeline and ensure your sales team isn’t missing out on high-value accounts. Now is a great time to align your team around a consistent sales planning mindset.

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Categories: Sales Messaging  |  Sales Process

Remote Selling is Here to Stay: 3 Ways to Drive Numbers Up

Remote selling, buying, prospecting and training is here to stay. Even as lockdowns and restrictions loosen, B2B buyers continue to embrace, but also seem to prefer, remote interactions over face-to face meetings. That’s according to new research just published by McKinsey. At Force, we’ve found similar trends. Elite sales leaders are analyzing how well they’re supporting their salespeople in the remote environment, and making strategic changes to drive continued success or improve numbers.

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Categories: Podcasts

Our Latest Podcasts: Tips to Improve Execution

To help sales teams secure critical pipeline deals before year end, each of our episodes this month focused on ensuring successful execution in various areas of sales effectiveness. Review our rundown of episodes below. Share these insights with sales managers and reps to help them improve their ability to hit their numbers. Each episode is available on your favorite podcast player, so you can easily download, listen and share.

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Mastering Command of the Message: 4 Areas to Optimize Sales Effectiveness

If you’re responsible for your sales organization’s success and need to make an immediate impact — we’ve outlined a roadmap you can use to scale success. Use your sales force as a way to accelerate your company's flywheel. Assess your sales organization’s ability to execute in these four areas of sales effectiveness. Prioritize your best opportunity to scale and maximize your sales organization's current success. Equip your sales team to accelerate revenue growth by improving their ability to execute in one or more of these areas:

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Categories: Adoption and Reinforcement  |  Sales Transformation

How We Approach Virtual Sales Training to Ensure Results

This post is an extension of the Ten Reasons Why Our Sales Training Is Different. Read the original article to learn more about why our process equips our customers to achieve lasting results. Read it here. The impacts of the pandemic left many sales leaders to shift priorities and find new ways to equip their sales teams to succeed. To help ramp up sales teams and enable teams to hit aggressive growth goals, many sales organizations are choosing virtual sales training engagements as a way to move forward with internal process changes. We’re supporting customers right now in implementing their strategic initiatives virtually to ensure their sales organization can execute on new revenue goals and benchmarks.

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Categories: Podcasts

Our Latest Podcasts: Driving Results in a Murky Sales Environment

The goal of this month's episodes was to share how your sales organization can pivot in their mindset and their daily sales activities to drive results — even during challenging times. Each episode covers timely tactics sales leaders, managers and reps can use to move and close high-value deals. Review our rundown of episodes below. Share these insights with your sales team to improve execution and their ability to hit their numbers. Each episode is available on your favorite podcast player, so you can easily download, listen and share.

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Categories: Sales Kickoff  |  Sales Leadership  |  Sales Process

Don’t Let Your Sales Initiative Fail: Lead from the Front

With any strategic change initiative, there’s always the question of whether or not it will stick. Anyone who’s been involved in a sales transformation knows, going from point A to point B, the desired future state, is no simple feat. The key to ensuring your change initiative’s success is to understand what it takes from the sales reps, managers and yourself as the leader to drive lasting outcomes. Then, commit to making it happen.

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Categories: MEDDICC  |  Sales Qualification

Using MEDDICC to Drive Revenue Predictability

A great qualification approach matters in today’s changing environment. Every buyer is dealing with something they haven’t dealt with before. Because of this, their buying processes are changing. It's likely that new budget cuts, executive-level sign off requirements and solution requirements have caused customer buying processes to evolve. Elite companies are moving quickly to adapt their qualification methods and ensure their sales teams can effectively qualify the right opportunities and move them forward efficiently. These sales organizations are anchoring on methodologies, like MEDDICC, to help their salespeople maintain a healthy pipeline, close high-value opportunities and increase overall deal velocity. Now is a great time to equip your sales teams to keep pipelines moving and improve revenue predictability in these challenging times.

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Categories: Podcasts

Our Latest Podcasts: Closing High-Value Deals

The goal of this month's episodes was to share key strategies for sales teams looking to execute on critical pipeline deals. Each episode covers timely tactics sales leaders, managers and reps can use to build and maintain pipeline. Review our rundown of episodes below. Share these strategies with your sales teams to help keep them focused and motivated. Each episode is available on your favorite podcast player, so you can easily download, listen and share.

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Win-Loss Themes: What "Your Price is Too High" Really Means

This blog contains content from originally from Clozd. We're excited to announce that our very own Tim Caito, Senior Partner at Force Managment, will be taking part of Clozd's #winlossweek, the largest online event dedicated to win-loss analysis. The free conference runs from Sept. 15-17, you can register here. Mark your calendar to join Tim for a conversation on September 17th as he discusses how to build an organizational competency around winning the deals you want to win and avoiding the ones you shouldn't pursue. When a B2B deal goes south, the most common reason initially identified by both buyers and vendors is price. Of course, price runs through every decision, and no one loves shelling out cash. Unless probed further, the buyer may simply use the statement "the price is too high" to summarize his or her overall dissatisfaction with the vendor’s value offering.

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Categories: Buyer Alignment  |  Sales Messaging

The Right Methodology to Ensure Your Technology Sells

Finding new ways to meet evolving buyer needs is the cornerstone of every great sales organization. The current environment has many companies adjusting product road maps and sales campaigns, trying to align with the most pressing needs of their specific marketplace. Given the current state, you, as a sales leader, have a huge opportunity to enable your sales teams to sell new products (or your exciting offerings) in a way that drives competitive revenue growth. How you enable your sales organization to sell your technology will play the biggest role in their success, and your success. Here’s how you can make the biggest impact:

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Categories: Podcasts

Our Latest Podcasts: Tactics That Get Results

The goal of this month's episodes was to share key strategies sales teams can implement right now to close opportunities. Each episode covers timely tactics sales leaders, managers and reps can use to make an impact on the live deals in the pipeline. Review our rundown of episodes below. Share these effective strategies with your sales teams to help them hit their numbers this quarter and the next. Each episode is available on your favorite podcast player, so you can easily download, listen and share.

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Categories: MEDDICC

MEDDICC: Boost Sales Qualification and Drive Revenue Growth

Over the past few months new challenges may have forced the need for changes and shifts in your sales process. As you consider ways to help reps faster qualify opportunities, improve forecast accuracy, and increase win rates, make sure you’re looking beyond the process.

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Categories: Company Alignment

Drive Revenue by Aligning Your SDR Team With Your Broader Sales Organization

BDR/SDRs are vital to an organization's ability to gain market awareness, grow and scale. Keeping a growth engine going around this function is not easy. Its propensity for high turnover can make it difficult to enable BDR/SDR teams to make a consistent impact.

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Categories: Podcasts

Our Latest Podcasts: Navigating Today’s Sales Conversations

The goal of this month’s podcasts were to stay timely and relevant to the issues sales teams are dealing with right now. In each episode, we covered topics aimed at helping sales leaders, managers and reps navigate new buyer concerns and make positive tweaks to their process to improve the pipeline. For your convenience we’ve summed up the episodes below. Launch them on your favorite podcast player, download, listen and share with your colleagues!

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Categories: Podcasts

Our Latest Podcasts: Get Focused

Our podcasts are a great way to refresh you and your teams on selling best practices. This month’s episodes featured some short episodes on how sales leaders can maintain productivity and improve focus on the pipeline. For your convenience we’ve summed up the episodes below. Launch them on your favorite podcast player, download, listen and tell your colleagues!

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Categories: Company Alignment  |  Sales Messaging  |  Sales Transformation

Aligning Your Sales Engine with Product Development: A CTO Perspective

Cross-functional alignment on the value your solutions provide for your customer is the key to accelerating growth. This symmetry is an essential link between your product team and your sales organization. If your salespeople aren't able to articulate the business value of the products you develop, customers won't realize their full potential. How many times have you seen a deal closed where the buyer is only buying one part of your solution, and therefore missing the bigger value for his/her business by not using the platform?

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Categories: Front-line Managers  |  Sales Coaching Tools  |  Sales Leadership  |  Sales Process

8 Sales Resources to Boost Sales Rep Productivity

Maintaining rep productivity is one of the top focus areas for the sales leaders right now. The most effective sales teams are the ones who are keeping focus on their buyer and executing a plan that's setting them up for success when business opens again. We've written a lot about productivity over the years. So, we're pulling together our top content resources for maintaining productivity.

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Categories: Buyer Alignment  |  Sales Productivity

Reframing Your Buyer Message for What’s Happening Right Now

In the changing environment, your buyer’s challenges may also be constantly shifting. Elite sales organizations are assessing how this economic environment is impacting their buyers and adjusting their sales message accordingly.

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Categories: Podcasts

Our Latest Podcasts: Stay Focused

We recently launched our new Audible-Ready podcast with four new episodes focused on how you can impact your numbers right now. Our focus is to provide short episodes that give you tangible tips you can use in your sales environments. Below is a rundown of our most recent episodes. Listen to a clip and launch your favorite podcast player to subscribe, listen or download and save for later.

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Navigating a Crazy Week: Leadership Strategies for Turbulent Times

It's Saturday morning and I am reflecting on this past week. It started off with my sluggish reaction to the time change; moved through a free-fall of personal wealth and ended with overwhelming public health concerns for my company and global community. I like to talk and write about things that give people “spirit”. What often happens, is that I wind up getting the most spirit out of the exercise. I think today is one of those days.

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Categories: Front-line Managers

Remembering Jack Welch: Logos, Talent and a Disdain for Mediocrity

I was at the airport when I learned about the death of Jack Welch. The former Chairman and CEO of GE died Monday at the age of 84. As I boarded my plane that was taking me to meetings for my own company, I reflected on the impact his books Straight from the Gut and Winning had on my early business thinking.

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Categories: Company Alignment

Our Best Resources for Aligning Your Executive Team on the Sales Strategy

Many companies underestimate the importance of alignment, especially when it comes to the growth strategy and the overall sales execution process. Without alignment, it's difficult to scale and keep a buyer-focus throughout your organization. If your cross-functional leadership team isn't aligned on what the focus is for your customers, how can your sales team effectively execute?

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Categories: Front-line Managers

Effective Feedback Resources: Empower Your Managers

Developing effective feedback skills is an important component of being an effective leader. How can you coach your teams to success if you don't possess the ability to provide feedback in a way that's constructive and actionable. Below are some of our most often used resources for front-line managers on giving effective feedback.

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Categories: Customer Success  |  Sales Messaging

Champion Letter: Empower Sales Champions for Success

Champions are a key component to selling high-level enterprise deals. If you know how to effectively enable and test a champion, you have an effective tool to advance your opportunities. We have covered Champions in a variety of our content. Here are a few of our most popular resources.

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Categories: Sales Negotiation

The Power of Shifting Left in Your Sales Negotiations

"Shift Left" is a saying we often promote to our Value Negotiation customers. What we mean by this saying is that your salespeople need to start the negotiation strategy early on in the sales process. It needs to be a part of the far left columns in your sales process, not just in the late stages of the opportunity (the sections to the right of the page).

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Categories: Sales Enablement Technology  |  Sales Process

Platform Sales Strategies: Shifting to Effective Solution Selling

If you're making sizable shifts next year to enable your sales team to sell a platform solution, you need to ensure they're able to make that jump. These ideas look good on paper, but when it comes to actually getting your salespeople to convince the customer to buy, you likely need to invest in some enablement.

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Categories: Front-line Managers  |  Sales Leadership  |  Sales Productivity

Empowering Front-Line Managers: Strategies for Successful Sales Teams

How important are front-line sales leaders to the execution of your sales initiatives? Absolutely critical. Of course, it sounds like common sense when you say it, but many companies still don’t understand how to support their front-line managers in a way that truly supports success.

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