The quote-to-revenue process encompasses almost the entire customer lifecycle — from configuration and quoting to billing and renewal. And, with the growing complexity of B2B sales environments, businesses need a comprehensive CPQ, CLM, and billing platform like DealHub to manage it.

But, it’s not just about investing in the right software. It’s about knowing what to do with it.

That’s exactly what compelled Moshe Korach, Head of Customer Service and Education @ DealHub, to create the program in the first place.

It all began three years ago when I developed an ILT course for DealHub employees. Recognizing the need to standardize best practices, align team knowledge, and enhance the customer onboarding process, I saw a potential for a broader impact on product adoption, customer satisfaction, and brand awareness.

Moshe Korach,,

Head of Customer Service and Education,

Who DealHub Academy is for

The Academy is designed for DealHub customers — you’ll log in with your work email. Depending on how you use DealHub and your role in the company, there are a number of different modules and learning paths.

There are three main personas the program caters to:

Admins

Partners

Business Owners

DealHub Admins

DealHub Admins frequently hold multiple roles within their organizations. Our admin learning paths and resources are made to fit those nuances.

As an admin, DealHub Academy will show you how to:

• Design the optimal DealHub environment for your business
• Maintain the environment with confidence and efficiency
• Effectively use DealHub terminology and interact with the system
• Manage users, teams, and permissions at scale
• Troubleshoot common issues to ensure smooth operations

Once you’ve completed the training, you can take an exam to prove your DealHub mastery. Upon passing, you’ll earn your Essential Admin Certificate, which you can use to promote your expertise, enhance internal credibility, and advance your career.

Coming soon: DealHub Advanced Admin Certification

DealHub Partners

The learning path for DealHub Partners is designed to teach you how to leverage DealHub’s Revenue Hub to drive value for your clients.

It includes:

• Self-learning modules for essential functions like approval workflows and sales playbooks
• Instructor-led training for advanced topics such as integrations and customization
• Enhanced, hands-on labs to familiarize partners with the system’s nuances and practice real-life client scenarios

Whether you’re a reseller, implementation specialist, RevOps partner, or technology partner, our course material will train you to be highly independent and resourceful when supporting your clients.

*** To gain access to your partner training and certification exam, reach out to the PPM! ***

Business owners

For business owners using DealHub, we’ve created a short video series giving you a concise intro to DealHub’s features, benefits, and best practices.

The series covers:

• The sales and revenue platform: CPQ, CLM, and DealRoom
• How DealHub streamlines the quote-to-revenue process
• Key features and benefits of each product module

If someone’s new here and needs a general product overview, they need look no further.

The team behind DealHub Academy

Developing and launching an internal LMS requires a comprehensive team of internal and external professionals with complementary skills. Transforming DealHub’s product training was no different.

Moshe Korach, Head of Customer Service and Education, used his strategic vision and 20+ years’ experience leading professional services teams and developing formal and custom training materials to spearhead the project.

Vika Kaganovskaya, Customer Education Specialist, managed the entire project, from planning the learning experience to overseeing end-to-end content production.

Ran Goldstein, Head of Customer Success, leveraged his personal experience with DealHub’s customer base to align the content with DealHub’s strategic goals, CS metrics, and user needs.

Tal Marciano, Visual Designer, designed the entire Academy from scratch — content, courses, illustrations, and LMS user experience.

Noa Bohadana, Customer Success Manager, spent hours every week passing off system and customer insights, and verified all content was accurate and relevant.

Roy Konfino, Head of Solution Architecture, developed DealHub Academy’s syllabus, use cases, and certification exams.

Dor Bar Aliya, Solution Architect, created the hands-on exercises and proofread content for errors in the product’s capabilities.

The DealHub Academy development process

While it was Vika Kaganovskaya who lead the initiative, a program like this wouldn’t be possible without our internal experts. According to Kaganovskaya, it’s them whose personal experiences with our product and customers gave them firsthand knowledge to create the most relevant and impactful materials.

I’m most proud of our dedicated team, particularly our Advisory Board of professionals, who are committed to ensuring the quality and relevance of our content. Their expertise and willingness to continuously learn and share their knowledge have been invaluable. Being a Subject Matter Expert is demanding, and our team has excelled in bringing real-world insights and examples to our courses.

Vika Kaganovskaya,,

Customer Education Specialist,

Our team’s process was to first identify what knowledge and skills were most critical for our customers. Next, we identified how we could best teach that information using role-based training tracks with interactive content.

Here’s an overview of our six-step process:

1. Conducting a needs analysis

We began by gathering feedback from our customers and internal teams to understand what content would be most valuable. Our education consultant conducted interviews with the CS team to learn about current knowledge gaps, and which types of training could result in the highest return on their investment.

2. Designing the learning experience

Once we knew where to start, we could begin mapping out the specifics of how we would deliver our content.

The certification syllabus is the first key element. This is what defines the knowledge and skills we expect our admins to demonstrate before getting certified.

From there, we determined where we would use video, interactive exercises, and hands-on labs most effectively. We also decided on the most appropriate learning path for each of our key roles (admins, advanced admins, and partners).

While creating a content map and use cases for each learning path, we ensured everything supported various learning styles — visual, auditory, textual, and kinesthetic.

3. Designing the visuals and creating the media

Our education specialists and visual designer worked closely to create an engaging and visually appealing experience. The learning materials included high-quality graphics, video content, and interactive elements to keep learners engaged. We also incorporated gamification elements, like quizzes and rewards, to test knowledge and make the learning experience more enjoyable.

4. Selecting the LMS

We host our Academy on a learning management system (LMS), which acts as a central hub for all our courses and content. We chose an LMS that supported easy content management, tracking, and reporting, and was user-friendly for both learners and administrators.

5. Three-level launch process

Before launching our program to the public, we first tested the program internally. This allowed us to make necessary adjustments and test the program before a public release.

Then, we onboarded a select group of customers to gather feedback from our end-users. Their feedback at the start and end of the learning path helped us evaluate whether or not the program made a tangible difference in their knowledge and skills.

Following the internal launch and pilot program, we could make the finishing touches that brought us to the finished product — a comprehensive program with a variety of interactive courses and resources.

How we structured the content and course material

Our curriculum’s structure reflects David Kolb’s Experiential Learning Theory. It caters to different learning styles through a combination of self-learning modules, instructor-led sessions, and hands-on labs.

It offers:

• Practical engagement through realistic exercises in a DealHub sandbox environment
• Interactive elements like simulations, scenarios, and quizzes
• High-quality visuals and multimedia content, according to Richard Mayer’s Multimedia Learning Theory
• Feedback integration through self-assessment and learning experience surveys
• Gamification elements to make learning more enjoyable and rewarding

Each module moves into the next. Clearly defined learning paths ensure incremental knowledge building and maintain learner motivation.

User feedback and impact since the launch

DealHub user Miranda McGowan, Corporate Systems Administrator at Continuant enrolled in DealHub Academy to build up her skills within the platform during her onboarding process. In her words, the experience was “transformative”.

The structured curriculum and interactive learning modules not only deepened my understanding of the system but also provided practical strategies I could immediately apply to better equip my team.

Miranda McGowan, Corporate Systems Administrator @ Continuant,

,

Like many others, it gave her the ability to empower her sales team with practical training. This led to increased efficiency, better adoption, and higher ROI on their DealHub investment.

The Academy is also useful for functioning and experienced DealHub admins to enhance their system capabilities. Gopal Sohun, Senior SalesForce Developer at Property Finder, shares:

I recently completed the Essential Admin Learning Path course as part of the Academy, and I couldn’t be more satisfied. This course is a perfect blend of theory and practice, offering hands-on labs in a sandbox environment that solidified my understanding of DealHub.

I highly recommend this course to anyone starting their Admin journey or looking to refresh their basics. The certification at the end is a great bonus, adding value to my professional credentials.

Gopal Sohun, Senior SalesForce Developer @ Property Finder,

,

What the future holds for DealHub Academy

We’re currently developing an Advanced Learning Path, which DealHub admins can use to build on their foundational knowledge. This set of modules will help them solidify their expertise in more specialized areas.

Topics include:

Advanced Pricing and Discounting

Enhancing Guided Selling with Product Filtering

Working with Partners

Contract Revision Features of the DealRoom

Integrations (Salesforce, HubSpot, and more)

And, as the product evolves, so will the Academy. Vika Kaganovskaya, our Customer Education Specialist says, “We work closely with the product team, aligning with the product roadmap and change logs.”

With new updates and product rollouts, the first thing we’ll do is update the course materials. Since we’re tightly aligned with the product’s lifecycle our training will always be accurate and relevant.

Get started with DealHub Academy here.

The post Streamline and scale quote-to-revenue with DealHub Academy appeared first on DealHub.

If your organization is still using outdated software or chasing after employees from other departments to gain the necessary approvals, then you’re putting your organization at a major disadvantage. Digital approval workflows with a CPQ for Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales optimizes and streamlines your sales approval workflow processes so sales reps can efficiently close deals in a timely manner. 

In this article, we jump into why automated approval workflows with Configure Price Quote software (CPQ) are necessary, and five examples of automated workflows that make the sales process more effective. We also provide you with the top three essential approval workflow capabilities.

Why automated/digital approval workflows with a CPQ for Microsoft Dynamics users are necessary

Automated approval workflows are necessary for a number of reasons. Not only do they streamline the sales process by providing faster response times, but they also help to reduce errors in the system which can lead to higher customer satisfaction rates. Here are five reasons automated approval workflows are essential to the sales process.

1. Improve cross-team collaboration

Imagine this scenario: a sales rep is trying to close a deal, a large one at that. They not only need to get approval from the finance department to sign off on a discount, but the legal department needs to approve the new contract. Unfortunately, this sales rep may be using inefficient solutions, like email, to get these necessary approvals, and this can really slow down the quote-to-close process. 

With automated approval workflows, like DealHub CPQ offers, it’s not only very clear who is required for specific approvals, but sales reps no longer need to bother that employee for the approvals because the system does it for them. Automated approval workflows improve cross-team collaboration and communication and make it easier for sales reps to focus on selling.

2. Increase speed and efficiency for sales teams

It’s imperative that deals are closed quickly. Automated approval workflows are an efficient way for sales teams to get the sign-offs needed in a short amount of time. With CPQ software, once approval workflow standards and conditional logic have been set, sales reps can easily, quickly, and efficiently move through the sales process and close more deals. 

3. Enhance organizational transparency 

McKinsey reports, organizational transparency “accelerates information gathering, helps people coordinate their efforts, and makes those in positions of authority accountable to others.” Automated approval workflows enhance sales rep productivity, efficiency, reduce misunderstandings, and foster trust among different departments. It also creates a work atmosphere that is healthy, pleasant, and gratifying. Not to mention, it lessens the workload on the Operations department. 

4. Ensure processes stay consistent

Consistency allows organizations to minimize uncertainty and quickly respond to changes in the market. Automated approval workflows ensure a consistent and streamlined sales process that helps to reduce errors and bottlenecks. In addition, automated approval workflows make it easier to onboard and train new sales reps. This results in higher transparency, trust and control.

5. Provide a better customer experience

With all the sales tech available, it is becoming increasingly difficult to create and maintain a customer experience that exceeds the high expectations that exist today. Automated approval workflows also help to foster excellent customer relationships by removing non-value-adding manual tasks, allowing sales reps to spend more time nurturing prospects. 

3 examples of automated sales approval workflows with a CPQ for Microsoft Dynamics 

1. Discount approval workflow
   Discount approval workflow is employed by sales departments to automate the process of approving certain discounts. When sales reps offer discounts, getting approval can take a lot of time. With a discount approval workflow, you can ensure that your reps are generating quotes with consistent and accurate pricing that follows your discount guidelines without slowing down the sales process, or causing revenue leakage.
   
2. Billing approval workflow
   Billing approval workflow is the process required to validate and pay an invoice. It’s used to ensure that bills are cleared correctly and efficiently by facilitating transparency, maintaining timely payment cycles and avoiding any discrepancies that may arise due to manual errors.
   
3. Legal or compliance approval workflow
   Legal or compliance approval workflow often revolves around contract management and it works to streamline and structure your organizations legal processes. It works to simplify and expedite contract requests and approvals.
   

Conclusion

Overall, automated approval workflows should be used to optimize your sales and quoting process across teams and support your sales reps to accelerate deals and reduce errors. It helps streamline your teams and processes, minimizes revenue leakage, enforces accountability and timely compliance, and improves internal communication. 

In our next piece, we’ll cover the 9 steps to streamlining your deal workflow to boost your sales. 

The post 5 Automated Sales Approval Workflows to Optimize Your Sales Process Across Teams appeared first on DealHub.

We at DealHub recently partnered with Pavilion (formerly known as Revenue Collective) to survey more than 100 revenue leaders and gain an understanding of how they’re dealing with pricing and subscription challenges, managing their sales stack, and delivering quotes and proposals in today’s increasingly complex workplace.

Here’s a short preview of our findings, which may help reveal friction points within your own organization and create cause for improvement. Want to see some other seriously surprising findings? You can download the full report here.

FINDING #1:

80% of reps don’t have a good grasp of sales margins

Why does it matter that most sales reps aren’t knowledgeable or confident about their company’s margins?

Many reps have autonomy over when and how much to discount. Without being aware of the margins for every configured package, they may offer less-than-optimal discounts, leading to revenue leakage.

This is something that can be fixed by improving or automating workflow processes and through better sales training.

FINDING #2:

41% report that plan changes are the main challenge in subscription management

Companies change pricing and packages frequently, but sales reps aren’t always kept up to date on these changes.

Companies can empower their sales team, improve the accuracy of quotes, and proactively optimize revenue by using software that helps them manage and communicate plan changes.

FINDING #3:

What companies spend annually per rep on sales tools

According to our survey, companies with 11-20 sales reps spend an annual average of $1,417 per rep on sales tools, which is the least of all groups we surveyed. 

Every B2B organization should periodically calculate this figure for themselves. If you find that it’s well above this benchmark, this may be a sign that it’s time for a revenue operations expert who can find solutions to consolidate your spend and connect your stack.

Want to benchmark your sales and revenue operations against other companies?

Download the full report

And if you’re ready to consolidate your tech spend and connect your sales stack, take the next step by requesting a DealHub demo today. 

The post 2021 Benchmark Report for Revenue Leaders appeared first on DealHub.

What is G2

G2 is the world’s largest tech marketplace where businesses can discover, review, and manage the technology they need to reach their potential. As of March 2021, there are 80,000 products listed and more than 1 million authentic reviews posted.

Unlike other analyst reports, companies use G2’s Momentum Reports to learn which products are innovating and growing, which are remaining stagnant, and which are falling behind in any given category every quarter according to authentic customer feedback.

How did DealHub CPQ become a Momentum Leader?

DealHub is a leader in the CPQ Spring 2021 G2 Momentum Grid because it is the ‘Highest Rated CPQ’ on G2 and has continued support from its customers.

Customers’ satisfaction attributes include:

• Quality of support – 98%
• Ease of doing business with -97%
• Ease of setup – 89%
• Meets requirements – 94%
• Ease of use – 95%
• Ease of admin -90%

Why does DealHub continue to get high customer satisfaction ratings for its CPQ?

• We are driven by going above and beyond for our outstanding customers and continuously prioritize their needs
• Our CPQ in-house Implementation team works very closely with our customers right from the beginning in order to ensure a smooth deployment within weeks
• Teams can deploy new pricing and bundles without developer resources
• Advanced approvals and automated workflow help shorten the sales cycle
• CRM synchronization in real-time reduces admin work for sales reps and operation teams

“Our customers love DealHub because it requires no-code to add new pricing or bundling after deployment and because they have access to our in-house award-winning CPQ implementation and customer success team,” said Eyal Orgil, Chief Revenue Officer of DealHub.io.

The DealHub platform has also been recognized as a Momentum Leader for Spring 2021 by G2

DealHub CPQ is powerful by itself. Connected to our other products, sales teams can move leads down the funnel, close and expand more sales from anywhere and predict revenue in one fluid sales motion.

CPQ: Easily quote complex and configurable products with no-code.

Sales Proposal Software: Separate yourself from the competition with branded and personalized DealRooms.

Sales Enablement: Guide sales teams to offer the right pricing and packaging when delivering a quote and the more relevant assets when sending a DealRoom.

Sales Engagement Software: Engage with prospects from proposal to close.

Contract Management: Create personalized contracts automatically. Streamline contract signings with workflow automation and advanced approval processes.

Salesforce CRM Document Generation: Close deals with reliable document generation that easily integrates with your Salesforce CRM.

“You are obsessed with your product as much as you are obsessed with the happiness and satisfaction of your customers, and that really shows, because you made the top sales products list 2021 and also the highest satisfaction across more than 80,000 products listed on G2.com” Henrique Moniz de Aragão, GM EMEA at G2.

Here’s What Visionary Operations Leaders Have To Say About Dealhub:

Great CPQ Solution! Amazing support! We were looking for a Salesforce CPQ replacement. We wanted some flexibility and modernization of software without restrictions. The Dealroom, online redlining, and the Dealstream were all added benefits. We had some very, very unique use cases and they were able to find a solution for most, and for the rest, we should have solutions in the coming releases. The support has been amazing. I’ve had some very rudimentary questions as well as some complex asks, all worked out with the implementation team without missing a beat.”

The post The 2021 G2 Momentum Grid Leader for CPQ & Proposal Software appeared first on DealHub.

The value of using Customer Management Software (CRM) has become ‘common sense’ – 91% of companies with more than 11 employees are using a CRM. With a revenue forecast of over $40 billion in 2018, CRM is the fastest growing software market.

Yet, the CRM alone cannot serve all the aspects of the sales process. There are also different expectations by different stakeholders: while managers go to the CRM for the reporting and accountability functionalities, Salespeople, on the other hand, want tools that will help them do their jobs faster and easier. But those salespeople expectations are not always met. This problem becomes more critical to the company’s performance when it comes down to the bottom of the sales funnel:  the configuration, pricing, and negotiation phase. Many deals are lost dues to slow response rates and inefficient processes.

In many of the companies we speak with, sales teams still use manual, stand-alone tools. Even though these companies are fully integrated with Salesforce or other CRMs – when it comes down to quotes and proposals, they still rely on ‘good old’ MS Excel and Word.

All the effort expended to improve efficiency with a CRM solution is simply wasted when companies have a quoting process that’s totally unconnected, bottlenecks the sales cycle and loses them business. In these cases – A CPQ solution can be the game-changer.

Inefficient Quoting Processes are Harming Your Business

Inefficient workflows can hamper sales teams of all sizes. The problem is so pervasive that the Aberdeen Group conducted a research study on the subject, looking at the efficiencies gained when companies deploy CPQ solutions. To start they found that companies with best-in-class workflows create 10% fewer iterations of the typical sales proposal, which saves a tremendous amount of time while reducing proposal errors and delays. Aberdeen also determined that companies using a CPQ solution saw their customer renewal rate increase by 3.9% and their lead conversion rate improves by 3.6% annually whereas non-users saw slight declines in both categories.

On top of the efficiency-related benefits, the Aberdeen report found that companies that use CPQ are seeing year over year improvement in their business performance vs. companies that are not using CPQ:

• CPQ users are able to grow their revenue at a 48% greater rate, year over year, than companies that don’t use CPQ.
• CPQ users are able to grow their profit margins at a 57% greater rate, year over year, compared to non- users.
• CPQ users shorten the length of their sales cycle at a 13 times greater rate than the degree to which non-users lengthen their sales cycle year over year.
• CPQ users increase sales rep retention at a 3 times greater than non-users decrease sales rep turnover.

Understanding the Sales Effectiveness Benefits of CPQ Solutions

When companies take too long to deliver a quote or send out a disorganized sales proposal, not to mention quotes with configuration or pricing errors, it hinders their ability to win business. CPQ solutions help companies avoid this problem. In short, they improve the way in which proposals are generated by offering key features to guide the process: configuration wizards, proposal templates, automatic pricing updates, automated approval workflows, real-time collaboration and more.

According to the Aberdeen Group, optimizing sales workflows with a CPQ solution provides tremendous efficiencies:

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By integrating a CPQ solution directly into known CRM processes, companies can ensure that all customer or prospect interactions are top notch – especially at the final step in the sales cycle when they are the most important.

Improving Adoption Rates with CPQ Integration

In one of our previous blog posts, we questioned why some sales enablement projects fail. In that post, we looked at the fact that it all comes down to adoption rates – designing and implementing solutions that your sales team will actually use. Any of you that have tried – and failed – to force a new piece of software on their reps know how well that usually goes.

Instead, integrate your CPQ solution into a piece of software they already use (and you probably worked hard to make that happen) – your CRM system. Rather than bouncing from tool to tool – which decreases productivity, salespeople can leverage powerful quoting capabilities from right inside the CRM system, without changing any corporate business processes.

Clearly, companies that invest in CRM solutions understand the value of using software tools to optimize sales team efficiency. Integrating a CPQ solution is the next step towards reaching peak efficiency.

DealHub + Salesforce

At DealHub, we recognize the value of a smooth experience for the sales reps– that’s why we provide out-of-the-box integrations for Salesforce and other leading CRM solutions. After all, if your workflow isn’t streamlined and seamless, your sales process won’t be either. When the two are fully integrated, sales teams become more efficient – a benefit that directly impacts revenue generation across all product lines, geographies and individual sales contributors.

Originally published April 30, 2015, Updated August 2, 2018

The post Why Your CRM Needs an Integrated CPQ Solution appeared first on DealHub.

In reality, motivating your sales team requires more than this. If you want your sales team to sell more, it’s also about what you do… and don’t do, that will get them excited. How you communicate with your team, the tools you provide your team and the sales processes you implement all matter.

Sales Motivation Do’s and Don’ts

If you manage a sales team or sales operations, check out this quick list of do’s and don’ts to make sure you’re incorporating them into your sales processes and communications:

Do:

• Keep your sales team updated on new promotions, SPIFFS and campaigns: Your product or marketing team has spent a great deal of effort to create promotions and campaigns to help your team win more business. It’s not enough to say we sent out an email and now it’s up to the sales reps to know about the promotions. If your reps don’t read your emails (because they get 100’s of emails a day), find other creative ways to update them.
• Make sure sales teams always has the latest and most up-to-date pricing: If you’re still using Excel configurations or sending out price lists, you may want to consider an automated sales quoting solution. These tools simplify the sales quoting process and reduce the “administrative” work that sales reps hate. They also link directly into your CRM so they simplify sales processes. You’ll motivate your sales reps to sell more and have the added bonus of fewer errors in your sales quotes.
• Provide reps with suggestions for upsells and cross-sells… and when to promote them: You need to help your sales reps understand where they can increase deal sizes and how to improve the probability of winning more deals by adding value to their proposals. Do this and you’ll motivate them to explore opportunities they might not have considered and benefit from higher average sales prices.
• Make it easy for sales reps to get approvals for special pricing: If special discounts are the norm in your sales process, make it easy on your team to get approvals. Even if approvals are not a daily occurrence, keeping your sales team motivated means keeping them doing what they do best… selling, not chasing after approvals from product or sales managers. You may want to consider implementing automated workflow approvals like those in your CRM or available with CPQ solutions.
• Make it quick and easy for reps to configure products and services: One of the foundations of sales motivation is to make it quick and easy to configure and price solutions so they can get on to the next opportunity. If it was only that easy. What can you do if your products and/or services are too complex to configure and price? You can keep doing the same thing you do now – train them a lot and expect long onboarding time for new hires, or you can implement sales quoting tools to cut proposal time and get them back in the field selling.

To learn about integrating a sales engagement and CPQ solution with your CRM, you may also be interested in reading: Maximizing the Value of Salesforce with DealHub.io

Don’t:

• Surprise sales reps after the fact with changes to programs and promotions: There’s nothing more de-motivating for a sales rep than investing time and energy selling a solution with the wrong price or one that is no longer active. Sales reps base their strategies and tactics on the solutions they have to offer and the promotions you provide. Make sure they have all the updated information and when you make changes, make sure they’re updated well in advance.
• Overload sales teams with long, boring emails they won’t read: Sending too much information is as bad as never having sent the information in the first place – it will never get read. Keep your updates to sales reps short and to the point. If you need to provide more information, provide links to where they can get more information when they need it.
• Constantly bombard reps with training on new products and pricing: Training is essential, but if you need to constantly train sales reps to keep them updated on new products and pricing they’ll quickly turn you off. Choosing between closing a deal with an older product they’re comfortable selling or going to a training class… well, I’m sure you can figure out which they’ll pick. If your organization is adding new products or services regularly, you should consider an automated pricing and configuration tool with guided selling to help simplify the quoting process.
• Make sales reps go looking for information they need to create winning proposals: There’s no better way to demotivate a sales rep than to make them “waste” time looking for support information to include in a proposal. Make sure sales knows where to find the latest information they’ll need to include with their proposals.
• Create complex pricing that nobody can understand: When your product team put together pricing, it may have looked straightforward… at least to a rocket scientist. If your sales reps don’t understand your pricing (without a lot of training they don’t want to attend) then your customers won’t understand it either… or your sales reps won’t be able to explain it to them. Look for ways to simplify pricing. You’ll make life easier on your sales reps and reduce quoting errors in the process. CPQ sales quoting tools can do wonders for motivating sales teams that sell solutions with complex pricing.

Sales Motivation Isn’t Only About Money

Motivating sales reps involves more than just how you compensate them. Take the necessary steps to improve the efficiency of your sales processes and the way you interact with your sales teams. Look for better processes and new tools that make selling easier for your sales reps and you’ll motivate them to sell more.

DealHub’s unique collaborative sales engagement process makes quoting easier and faster, with real-time insights on your prospect’s engagements and level of interest. Unlike other CPQ solutions, Dealhub is fast to implement and easy to use: simply plug in your product data, configure your business rules and start quoting. DealHub CPQ ranked at G2 Crowd as the easiest to use CPQ software.

We’d love to show you how DealHub can streamline your quoting process and help keep your sales team on target and motivated. We invite you to see a demo and let us know what you think!

Article originally published February 26, 2015. Updated July 24, 2018.

The post Sales Motivation: How to Motivate Your Sales Team to Sell More appeared first on DealHub.

IDC defines sales enablement as getting the right information into the hands of the right sellers at the right time and place, and in the right format, to move a sales opportunity forward. So providing your sales team with the information they need and enabling them with the tools to do their job is essential.

IDC found that a lack of proper sales enablement results in $14 million in wasted sales and marketing expenses and $100 million in lost sales opportunities for a “typical” $1 billion company. Granted most of us are not typical $1B companies (though we have hopes and dreams), but we can agree that many organizations, of all sizes, are not getting sales enablement right and it ultimately has an effect on sales.

What your sales team knows and the tools available to help them is what drives sales. Here are three areas that you need to ensure your sales teams are updated on at all times to grow your sales.

#1. Pricing and Configuration

This one should be obvious but it’s so important and yet so often missed that it’s necessary to mention here. Sale reps and channel partners need to be updated on all pricing and configuration changes… even before they happen. Yet as important as this is, many sales organizations fail to keep their teams updated effectively. What do I mean by effectively? I mean more than just an email that’s sent in the belief that sales reps and partners will notice them (among the hundreds of other weekly emails) or the quarterly conference calls.

The issue becomes more critical when pricing and product changes occur regularly. And when the inevitable happens and quotes are created using the wrong pricing or configurations, order entry issues increase and sales costs go up.

To reduce quoting and pricing errors, organizations need to consider using CPQ sales quoting and configuration solutions. They not only automate the process of creating sales proposals, which increases sales productivity but ensure sales reps always use the most up to date pricing and configurations.

#2. Cross-Selling and Upselling Opportunities

Sales models have changed, especially for organizations selling SaaS and subscription models. With more and more traditional solution providers moving to or looking to implement, subscription models, customer lifetime value is the name of the game. It’s no longer about securing that one big deal. Sales reps and sales teams as a whole are measured by their ability to acquire and maintain customers for the long-term.

Keeping your customers satisfied with the long run means not only showing them continuous value for the existing solution you’ve sold them but finding ways to provide enhanced value. That makes it is essential to offer them new and complementary solutions.

To do this effectively your sales team needs to be kept up to date on cross-selling and upselling opportunities. Your sales enablement program needs to update sales reps on which solutions to sell, when to sell them and how to effectively present their value. You also need to educate your team on which customers can benefit from the addition of the various products in your portfolio.

While information sharing and sales training are usually the first things you would think about for improving this, it’s not enough. Sales enablement should be built into your sales process. You should consider implementing sales tools that can automatically suggest up-sell and cross-sell opportunities during the sales process. Many CPQ solutions can provide this capability. They can help sales reps propose the right up-sell and cross-sell solutions based on the customer profile and the solutions the customer has already implemented.

#3. Sales Support Materials

Looking back at the IDC definition of sales enablement, it talked about getting the right information into the hands of the right sellers at the right time and place, and in the right format. So looking at your own sales process, is your team getting customers the information they need and in the format, they need to make a decision?

Many of the customers I speak with send sales quotes that are single one-page pricing tables. Sometimes they do this as it’s easy – they simply copy their Excel spreadsheet. Other times it’s the way the quoting solution they’ve implemented generates quotes. There’s no question the customer gets the pricing information they need. Yet, if only selling were that simple.

It’s more than likely a sales proposal will need to be considered by more than one decision maker or influencer within the customer organization for approval. Did your sales team meet with each of them? Does each buyer have the information they need to make a decision? Could there be any information they’re missing that could help move the opportunity forward? Making a decision is never about price alone. Each of these buyers has their own interests and requirements that need to be addressed.

Keeping your sales team updated on the materials and collateral that will help customers make a decision – and decide to purchase your product rather than a rival’s – is crucial. CPQ solutions can also help with this. They’re able to automatically provide your sales reps with the right product information, case studies, ROI calculations and other forms of support materials to help customers decide on the right solution for their needs.

Sales enablement is critical to the success of your organization. Whether you choose to implement traditional sale enablement methods or automate sales enablement within a sales quoting solution, make sure your sales team and channel partners are equipped with the information and tools to move their opportunities forward and win business.

Looking to improve your sales enablement processes?
Sign up for a free demo today to see how DealHub can help you in growing your sales productivity.

The post How are you ensuring your sales team is selling effectively? appeared first on DealHub.

So how do you make your solutions stand out from the rest? How do you capture the attention of your channel partners to promote, quote and sell your products over the others they have in their portfolio? Good question.

Ultimately, it comes down to two simple truths. Channel partners are more likely to sell the solutions of vendors that:

• Make it easy for them to sell – Channel partners will always take the path of least resistance or least effort. This means products that are easy to sell (and easy to quote), from vendors with whom they are familiar with.
• They like better – A personal connection goes a long way with regard to channel loyalty. Partners will gravitate towards vendors who keep them updated and provide them with any assistance they may need. The closer the relationship, the more likely they are to focus on your products and services.

But, really, the bottom line is… well… all about the “bottom line”. Channel partners will promote the solutions that give them the highest probability of winning deals and greatest profit. Taking it down a level, the channel sale rep will sell the solutions that will ensure they make their targets and commissions!

With that in mind, here are eight ways to motivate your channel partners to ensure they view your solutions as the means for making you—and themselves—more successful:

#1. Make it quick and easy for your channel partners to create professional-looking sales proposals.

If you’re throwing pricing spreadsheets and PDF sales brochures to your partners, you’re not making it easy to sell your products – just the opposite. Even if you are familiar with accessing information quickly and efficiently from these files, this won’t be true for your channel partners. Remember, they’re most likely managing similar materials for multiple solutions from multiple vendors.

You need to think about how you can reduce your channel partner’s workload and they’ll go with you. If you can, provide them with access to your automated sales quoting tools or CPQ solution, if you have one, as this can significantly simplify the process and time need to create professional looking proposals.

#2. Make it easy for channel partners to calculate their margins.

What’s in it for your partners? They want to work with you to be easy, but they also want to maximize their profitability at each opportunity. Help them with both and you’ll make them want to work with you. Make it easy for them to calculate margins and incorporate winning discounts and you’ll be saving them a lot of headaches and added work.

Partner profitability is based on the margins you provide them. Whether you’re proving a price list, spreadsheet, or access to your CPQ quoting solution, make sure your channel partners can easily calculate their profit margin.

#3. Help channel partners make the deal bigger and better.

Again… it’s profit, profit, profit. You need to ensure your partner is aware of the upsell and cross-sell opportunities they have available when quoting your solutions.

A CPQ solution will greatly help in this area as it can offer up upsell and cross-sell options automatically. Not only does this make it easier to quote, but it eliminates the need to bombard your partners with update emails (which they probably won’t read) and ongoing training (a big-time channel pet peeve).

#4. Make it possible for channel partners to easily create multiple quotes.

Channel sales reps, like your own reps, want to look at multiple configuration options and pricing scenarios to determine which ones are best to offer their customers. Customers may also request different options to consider.

You need to make it effortless for channel partners to create and develop more than one quotation, with the ability to mix and match different options. This means creating quotes needs to be quick and easy, as we talked about above.

#5. Make it easy for channel partners to configure error-free solutions.

If your solutions are complex or difficult to configure and price, don’t expect your channel partners to be excited when it comes time to create a proposal. Unless they’re quoting you on a regular basis and very familiar your products, they’ll lack the confidence to create quotes, error-free quotes, and you’ll need to provide extra guidance or risk that they’ll choose another product to promote.

Make sure your price lists are easy to read and easy to follow. If this is a difficult proposition, be sure to provide automated tools that simplifying quote building and eliminate errors.

#6. Provide channel partners with updates on campaigns and promotions in a timely manner.

If you’ve taken the time to develop a promotion, make sure your channel partners are aware of it. Don’t keep them in the dark for a sales opportunity that could (should) benefit both of you. And, definitely, don’t allow them to get upset with you by feeling that they lost out on the chance to increase their probability of winning a nice deal.

Make promotions—and promotional reporting—easy to digest. Don’t bore your channel partners or burden them with more information than they’ll need to know. Keep them updated, but don’t overdo it. Automated sales quoting tools can also be used to here to update your partner reps in real-time when they’re preparing their proposals.

#7. Minimize or, better yet, remove the need for continuous training.

When you update your solutions or add new products, your channel partners see new potential revenue streams. They want this opportunity, they just can’t afford to spend hours learning (or more accurately, re-learning) every single detail.

Although you give them the technical specifics of the new offering (i.e. features), you can save a great deal of their time by automating the quoting and pricing processes. In other words, you should make it easy for products and services to be quoted through the use of automated tools. If you have a CPQ solution with guided selling, make it available to your channel partners.

#8. Help new sales hires get ramped up quickly and easily with your products.

If your channel partners experience a lot of churn in their sales teams, their new hires will be more apt to quote the solutions that are quickest and easiest for them to learn and understand. Channel partners can’t afford long sales rep on-boarding processes, especially if the portfolio of solutions they offer includes many different vendors’ products.

Automated sales quoting tools offer a great advantage here. They can jump-start your channel partners with the ability to quickly start generating even complex sales quotes and become acquainted with your products. These tools make it easy for new hires to quote as quickly and effectively as experienced sales reps.

Summary

Companies sometimes forget the “partner” aspect of channel partners. They are not your employees and not thinking only about you and your products all day. And it’s definitely not a one-sided relationship. If you don’t support them, guide them and make it easy to quote and sell your products, they’ll go the path of least effort, and that may not be with your products and services.

Have tips of your own on channel sales enablement? Be sure to share your thoughts in the comment section below!

The post Increase Channel Partner Sales: 8 Ways to Motivate them to Sell More appeared first on DealHub.

Order entry should not even be something a sales reps think about—the hard work has already been done—but the folks in order entry can be a major headache for reps. Not only do they create needless administrative work, as far as sales reps are concerned (and especially around hectic times at the end of a quarter), they can actually block deals from being booked, resulting in missed quotas and commissions. In other words, their decisions can affect the livelihood of salespersons!

For these reasons, many sales reps see order entry as their mortal enemy. Ok… maybe not that bad, but definitely not their friends. It doesn’t have to be this way. As we’ll explain, with the right sales quoting solution, order entry and sales can actually become—dare we say it?—best friends.

In order to bury the hatchet, these two groups need to understand where and why the tensions exist. With that in mind, let’s take a closer look at why sales rep view order entry as their adversary and what can be done about it.

#1. Manual Quotes, Manual Mistakes

If your sales reps use tools like Excel and Word to prepare, manage and send sales quotes, then it’s only a matter of time before human error gets the best of them. Even the smallest mistake – like messing up an SKU or quoting the wrong quantity of a product – can result in a deal being rejected. Purchase orders that don’t match what order entry has in their system are automatically sent back.

By eliminating the manual tasks associated with creating quotes – like copying and pasting from Excel to Word – a CPQ sales quoting solution can eliminate common data entry mistakes. Perhaps it’s better to think of it this way: Almost all of sales processes are now either automated or leverage some type of technology. Why should quote creation be any different?

#2. Rogue Discounting

One of the surest ways to get an order rejected is when a sales reps quote the wrong or unapproved prices to their customer. Sometimes this is the result of a mistake (see the previous point), but sometimes, sales reps decide to “go rogue” and provide discounts or alter prices on their own accord. Of course, sales reps should only be able to discount based on the company’s discount policy, but with the lack of an integrated and automatic approval workflow process in place, unapproved quotes can become commonplace.

With a CPQ solution, pricing and discount policies can be governed, eliminating the possibility of rogue discounting and the order rejection that follows. Furthermore, sales quoting solutions can automatically create PDF proposals, which sales reps cannot alter even if they wanted to.

#3. The Approval Process

Did the quote get the necessary approval(s) by all of the key stakeholders before it was sent to the customer? If the answer is “no” then there’s a good chance the subsequent order will be rejected. This often occurs when a discount has been made (see the previous point), which has not been authorized by management but could also be due to a lack of approval by Product Management for a new product, or the support manager for missing support services.

CPQ solutions can address this issue very effectively by providing integrated approval workflows, which ensure key stakeholders are in the loop on quotes before they’re sent, especially when special pricing or product offerings are involved. Once approved, CPQ solutions can also make sure sales quotes can’t be changed, whether by accident or intent after they’ve received approval. Using a CPQ, sales reps can be certain that quotes sent to customers are fully validated and orders based on these quotes will not be rejected.

#4. Selling the Wrong Products and Services

Here’s an easy way to get an order rejected: Quote a customer a product or service that no longer exists. This might sound somewhat absurd, but it’s a mistake that is quite common. Generally, this can be attributed to outdated product lists or (again) configuration errors made as a result of manual data entry. If there is one group that is prone to this type of mishap, it’s channel partners. Because they are somewhat outside the loop, they often don’t get informed about important product and services updates. As such, they work from outdated price lists and send proposals for products that are no longer valid.

A CPQ solution ensures that only current, valid products can be quoted by sales reps or channel partners. Moreover, it ensures that these quotes include accurate, approved prices and configurations. As an added benefit, a CPQ solution can also provide upsell and cross-sell options sales reps may not be aware of, which can benefit the reps with added commissions.

Summary

What’s the key to a solid friendship? Communication and mutual understanding. Sounds cheesy, but it’s true. The same applies to sales reps and order entry departments. Until these two groups communicate effectively and understand what the other needs (made easier with a CPQ solution), they’ll continue to view each other as adversaries.

The post Sales Reps and Order Entry: 4 Ways CPQ Solutions Can Help Them Play Nicer Together appeared first on DealHub.

Mention the phrase “productivity killer” with a sales manager, and they’ll probably associate it with their sales reps looking at Facebook and Buzzfeed all day. They probably won’t associate it with prospecting, research, and proposal generation – but they should.

Instead of selling – the process of educating, engaging with, and converting prospects into buyers – today’s salespeople indeed find themselves spending an inordinate amount of time prospecting, researching, and most importantly, drafting customized quotes. This results in a huge opportunity cost, where every hour they spend doing administrative tasks is an hour they could have better spent on their next prospect.

Here are 5 things keeping your sales reps away from talking with customers and ways to reduce the time they spend on them.

Drafting proposals

A typical salesperson will easily spend 10-15 percent of their day generating quotes. This number gets even higher the more complex your products are – where some proposals can take hours to put together. Obviously, if a proposal has to be created from scratch for each opportunity or the information the rep needs to generate an accurate quote isn’t readily available, sales productivity takes a huge hit. It’s therefore critical for companies to implement a CPQ (Configure Price Quote) solution that makes it possible for reps to easily and quickly generate complex quotes and automatically turn them into detailed proposals.

Sales call preparation

For most sales reps, 10 percent of their time every week can be spent planning. Having well put- together sales strategies and being prepared for sales calls is important, but it shouldn’t take that much time away from selling. You need to identify your sales team’s process for planning and organizing new sales to figure out where time is being spent and where time can be saved. A cloud-based CRM like Salesforce.com can help organize your sales team, centralize all of their prospect information, and speed up the process of planning for client interactions.

Staying up to date on the industry and your products/services

In order to sell effectively, reps need to have a complete understanding of the products and services they are selling, as well as what their competitors are up to and industry trends. Unfortunately, this means spending a good portion of their time reading and following industry news. Instead of leaving reps to take time finding this information themselves, you should make the updates they need readily available. Providing your team with sales dashboards that include widgets that highlight marketing, product, and competitor information will keep them in the loop and minimize the time spent out of the field.

Chasing down technical and management approval for quotes

If you sell complex products or services that involve negotiations and/or large discounts, the time it takes to get approval from sales managers and technical teams can become a real bottleneck in the sales process. Sales managers and team members need to easily work together, not slow each other down. Look into your approval process and see who or what is slowing things down and where you can add tools to streamline the process. Rule-based workflows can make it easier and quicker for sales to gain approval for quotes and provide both sales and managing the needed insights to understand the status of opportunities.

Collaborating with channel partners and third-party vendors

To gain the maximum benefit from your sales channels means your partners need to be able to function on their own, as an extension of your team. Yet in many organizations sales reps, pre-sales engineers and/or sales operations teams remain very active in generating sales quotes for partners, canceling out many of the benefits of using channels. Sales collaboration tools can improve the process of working with partners, dramatically reducing the time your team needs to spend helping them do what they should be able to do on their own. You should also open up your CPQ to allow channel partners the ability to generate quotes on their own. The easier you make it on your partners, the more they’ll sell and the more time your sales team will have for their own selling.

Your sales team exists to promote and grow your company. But if they’re not maximizing their time selling, your sales will be impacted. Give your team the tools and resources they need to speed up or eliminate the non-sales tasks that are taking up their valuable time so they can get back to doing what you need them to do… sell.

The post 5 Productivity Killers for Sales Teams (and how to avoid them) appeared first on DealHub.