Forward Deployed Selling

You ship with AI. Now sell with it.

Forward Deployed Selling is the enterprise sales methodology for the AI era — refined inside AWS, across twenty years and deal sizes from $500K to $500M.

Install the free Claude skill and your agents inherit the full playbook in sixty seconds. Read it yourself the same afternoon.

Install the skill → · Read the doctrine →

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The old playbook assumed you had the information.

You don't anymore. Your buyer's AI just researched you, three competitors, and a build-vs-buy alternative before this sentence ended.

• Generic outreach is dead. Every inbox is drowning in AI-generated email.
• Discovery-led selling is dead. They already know what you sell.
• The methodologies built before AI assumed an information asymmetry that no longer exists.

FDS is the playbook for the world that replaced it.

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Built for selling in the AI era

The doctrine was developed in production — not abstracted from one. It assumes your buyer has AI, your competitors have AI, and the seller who shows up with the sharpest read on the account is the one who gets the meeting.

Proven where AI gets sold

Refined inside AWS, where enterprise AI deals are won and lost every day. The same playbook moves $500K motions and $500M transformations.

For your team and your agents — on day one

Read it like a book. Or drop it into Claude as a skill and every output your AI generates — outreach, account plans, exec briefs, call prep — comes back doctrine-shaped. Free. Open source. Sixty-second install.

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What changes in the first hour

Install the skill and your next three asks turn into:

• An intro email grounded in their last earnings call, open job recs, and recent product moves — not a generic "I noticed your company is growing."
• A map of every deal: who'll use it, who'll pay for it, who'll champion it, and whose quiet approval will kill it if you forgot to ask. Each one with what they need to hear before they say yes.
• A point of view sharp enough to earn the first meeting — sourced, defensible, and specific to their business.

Sellers using the doctrine target 3–10x cycle compression.*

* Design target. Measured benchmarks land in v0.7.

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Install in sixty seconds

Claude.ai — Settings → Capabilities → Skills → Add → upload this folder (or download the zip).

Claude Code — drop this folder into ~/.claude/skills/forward-deployed-selling/.

Claude API — upload via the Skills API. Cross-platform via the open Agent Skills spec (Codex CLI, ChatGPT) without modification.

Via the skills CLI — npx skills add vonarmen-wq/forward-deployed-selling. Cross-platform installer from Vercel Labs for the open Agent Skills ecosystem; supports 70+ AI coding agents.

Step-by-step install + verification prompt →

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About the author

Angel Armendariz is a twenty-year enterprise sales practitioner and Innovation Advisor to Fortune 500 enterprises. Field experience inside AWS, Saxony Partners, and Endava shaped the doctrine; this skill operationalizes it. IP holder: Caerus Capital Group, LLC.

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Going deeper

• Doctrine · the methodology in long form
• ARCHITECTURE.md · what's in this repo and how it loads
• CONTRIBUTING.md · versioning, contribution model, license
• KNOWN_ISSUES.md · open items and v0.6 candidate work

Apache 2.0 licensed. The "Forward Deployed Selling" name and "FDS Certified" mark are protected — see license.