DecisionLink Honors First Cohort to Earn Value Black Belt Certification

Ten initial black belt graduates have attained the highest level of value leadership certification, demonstrating mastery of the ValueCloud® customer value management platform


ATLANTA, Aug. 10, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- DecisionLink, the leader in cloud-based customer value management (CVM), today introduced the first cohort members to complete its Value Black Belt (VBB) program, the industry’s first for value certification.

“Congratulations to the first graduates of the DecisionLink Value Black Belt certification,” said DecisionLink Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder John Porter. “This is a significant achievement that places them on the vanguard of CVM, leading by example and exhibiting the best practices for transforming customer value into a strategic, actionable asset across the enterprise.”

As black belt graduates, these ten individuals have demonstrated their mastery of value leadership principles, including the knowledge, skills, and behaviors required to unleash customer value across the full customer engagement cycle.

  • Ben Allard, Vice President & General Manager, APAC, Apptio: Apptio has been on a journey to a value driven approach across the full customer engagement lifecycle for several years. It requires collaboration across sales, customer success, products, and marketing. With Allard’s leadership, Apptio has seen significant impact on win rate, deal size and velocity in the sales cycle. DecisionLink has provided a baseline to track value realization post sale.  
  • Megan Bozio, Senior Director of Global Sales Programs & Enablement, CrowdStrike: For the past 4+ years, Bozio has shaped, innovated and led CrowdStrike's Business Value Program into a powerhouse of business results, both for customers and her company.
  • Daisha Chung, Director of Global Business Value & Strategy, CrowdStrike: Growing business value at CrowdStrike has been rewarding for Chung. CrowdStrike’s continued success has been a function of executive commitment to value selling, automation of business case creation via ValueCloud®, and most importantly, targeted enablement generated and delivered to their sellers on a consistent basis.
  • Greg Cunningham, Principal Business Value Consultant, Confluent: A longtime proponent of customer value management during leadership roles at large enterprise companies, Cunningham led the creation, delivery, and support of self-serve value projection and value realization solutions while at ServiceNow.
  • Matt Denton, Senior Director of Business Value Consulting, Confluent: By leading the value management practice at Confluent, Denton helps customers identify, realize, and unlock value by leveraging data in motion across the enterprise. Confluent does this through value assessment and value realization engagements and the result is higher win rates, better renewal rates, and great expansion at time of renewal.
  • Chad Dull, Lead Solution Consultant, Value Engineering, Verint: Applied a history of value-selling at a Fortune 20 healthcare company to his role at Verint, where Dull helped to model and advance the use of DecisionLink.
  • Trent Isaacs, RVP of Solutions Sales Innovation & Enablement, Verint: As the leader of Verint’s value engineering practice, Isaacs implemented DecisionLink to support opportunities using value, helping the company significantly improve sales and win rates while decreasing instances of discounting.
  • Hadley Paul, Business Value Consultant, PagerDuty: With over 15 years of experience in the high-tech and software industry consulting with hundreds of customers globally to measure business value and transform sales organizations selling solution business value, Paul conducted value strategy, performance analysis, value assessments, and value realization and quantified the forecased and realized impacts of PagerDuty on their customers’ business by using DecisionLink’s automation, consistency and scale through ValueCloud®.
  • Linda Roach, Vice President of Product Marketing, Planview: A champion for customer success and value driver architect, Roach actively engages with customers and sales teams to demonstrate the tangible impact of Planview’s business value.
  • Gaurav Sharma, Senior Value Consultant, ServiceNow: As the owner and driver of ServiceNow’s value management platform, Sharma has helped scale value across the company, driving pipeline growth, sales closure, and renewals in the process.

Empowering Value Professionals
The DecisionLink VBB program is a rigorous role-based enablement, measurement, and certification initiative that empowers value professionals to engage customers in meaningful conversations throughout the entire customer engagement cycle from value discovery to value delivery to value realization. It is designed to ensure CVM and ValueCloud® success within 90-days.

The VBB program features four levels of achievement – Yellow, Green, Red, and Black Belt – for ten distinct roles across the sales, marketing, customer success, and value engineering disciplines. It ensures that value professionals across these teams are prepared to fully and quickly leverage the ValueCloud® platform and its powerful collection of applications. Beyond providing instruction in critical value-based skills and behaviors, VBB provides an adoption success tracking method and platform to ensure management visibility and business success.

The program specifies Certification Testing Objectives and two distinct checkpoints to measure progress : (1) education to be completed and (2) an Activity Readiness Test. As one company observed: ‘now we can get everyone in our organization enrolled and motivated to achieve their goals at the highest levels.

To learn more about ValueCloud® or the Value Black Belt Program, please visit www.decisionlink.com/value-black-belt-program.

About DecisionLink
DecisionLink’s ValueCloud® is the first and leading enterprise-class solution for automating and scaling customer value management. ValueCloud® transforms customer value into strategic, actionable assets empowering sellers, marketers, and customer success professionals to elevate tactical conversations about feature, function, and price into outcome-based discussions of business value. The ability to do this securely, at scale, and at any point in the customer journey is unique to DecisionLink and ensures customers for life. DecisionLink is trusted by top enterprise businesses, including Caterpillar, CrowdStrike, DocuSign, Marketo, VMware, and elite, fast-growing companies like Apptio, Contrast Security, Menlo Security, and PagerDuty.

For more information, please visit www.decisionlink.com, call 800.670.8301, or engage with us on social media.

Media Contact:
Allison D. Mitchell
Senior Director of Content Marketing at DecisionLink
allison.mitchell@decisionlink.com