According to research by Salesforce, 86% of employees and executives indicate lack of communication or collaboration to be responsible for workplace failures. It’s no surprise, therefore, that in today’s competitive market, business leaders are constantly searching for ways to improve their internal and external cooperation.

Over the past decade, online collaboration tools have become increasingly important to streamline internal operations and boost communication and collaboration. As employees are becoming more autonomous and the culture of remote working rises, collaboration tools empower teams to work collectively to achieve shared goals, regardless of their geographical location. 

83% of professionals depend on technology for collaboration, and with good reason. Sales collaboration tools and sales engagement platforms are deal-makers. Literally. Working with the right tools can elevate performance on many levels and in a variety of fields: 

• Speed up sales, reduce revenue leakage, and increase the bottom line. 
• Develop more efficient workflows and processes.
• Provide clarity of the sales cycle.
• Enhance internal relationships and team morale.
• Strengthen customer relationships.
• Provide better performance insights.
• Improve project management and organization.

Choosing the right collaboration sales tools is critical. We’ve compiled a list of the top sales team collaboration tools to help you make an educated decision on what your organization needs (in no particular order).

1. Asana

Asana is a work management platform that enables teams to organize, track, and manage anything from individual tasks to team projects. Asana enables teams to stay in sync and work collectively throughout the entire- project, while staying true deadlines and reaching their goals. With the ability to map out the steps of each project, teams can work together while monitoring the status of initiatives and managing individual workloads. Using Asana, teams can collaborate and streamline sales processes by easily monitoring tasks. 

2. DealHub CPQ

Pricing technology is a key enabler for sales reps. It  solves pricing issues and needs, driving better and faster pricing decisions. DealHub’s industry-leading CPQ offers the ability to quickly and efficiently generate accurate quotes, while simultaneously offering a deal acceleration platform with a rich and personalized buyer experience throughout sales processes. Using DealHub, team members can maintain communication throughout the sales process DealHub’s offering and integrations – including several CRM options, DealStream, Document Generation, eSign, and Sales Proposals – streamlines users’ internal operations and company-wide collaborations. This end-to-end sales platform significantly shortens lead-close process and amplifies revenue.

3. Flock

Flock is a team communication and collaboration solution that helps teams accomplish their goals. Using Flock, teams can streamline decision-making and problem-solving, by maintaining an organized platform for your conversations, channels and tasks. By implementing key features like channel messaging, video conferencing, file sharing, to-dos, poll, and reminders, teams are better positioned to hit business objectives. These features can be leveraged to maximize cross-team collaboration and engagement.

4. Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM

Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM helps users manage and maintain customer relationships, track leads, marketing, and pipeline, all while gathering actionable data. Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM works to streamline administrative processes and emphasizes customer relationships. With a centralized and automated CRM system, teams can stay on top of customer interactions and business opportunities. The platform improves the sales process, making it easier to sell by providing customers with a better buying experience and enhancing transparency within the teams.

5. Monday.com

Monday.com is a cloud-based, customizable work management platform. It helps companies streamline their operations by creating a more transparent work culture. The platform has a range of features from tracking and managing projects, to sales pipelines and CRM data capture. By sharing this visibility, organizations can recognize and eliminate bottlenecks quickly and efficiently. As a result, teams can collaborate to overcome obstacles and identify the most efficient manner of completing tasks and collaborating.  

6. Slack

Slack is a workplace messaging program. It leverages diverse features to enable quick and easy team communication. Although this software is primarily used as a text-based communication platform, it also allows users to have video calls, share files, and integrate with other software, like Dropbox, Evernote, Trello, and more. This solution offers great flexibility when setting up workspaces and groups, as well as integrated call and video conferencing tools. These features promote smooth collaboration, both internally and externally. 

7. Todoist

Todoist is a cloud-based platform that allows all your tasks and notes to sync automatically, breaking the barriers between different devices and locations. With features like due-dates, reminders, comments, file attachments, project sharing, and email forwarding, even the most disorganized sales team can keep track of their projects and their progress.  When considering the many features available to users, this platform provides a great solution for teams who struggle with internal collaboration and staying on top of tasks.

8. Visme

Visme helps to create visual brand experiences, even to those who are not professionally trained designers. Using Visme, teams can create visual content including presentations, infographics, and documents. Engaging visual content can transform communication and knowledge-sharing with employees, stakeholders, and customers. Visme can be used individually or collaboratively, and can be published online, embedded into individual sites, or downloaded for offline use. 

9. Wepik

Wepik is a powerful graphic design tool that utilizes artificial intelligence to help you create visually stunning content for your sales and marketing efforts. With an extensive library of templates, images, and elements, Wepik makes it easy for users to design professional-quality visuals that capture attention and drive engagement.

Wepik also offers a wide range of stock photos, icons, and illustrations that you can incorporate into your sales materials, ensuring your marketing assets always feel fresh and engaging. The platform also supports team collaboration, allowing multiple users to work together on projects and share their ideas.

10. Wrike

Wrike is a project management app that streamlines workflows and empowers sales teams to operate efficiently. Using Wrike, team members can keep track of what’s going on through a centralized dashboard. With the ability to create new tasks, track their progress, and mark as completed once finalized, this platform offers an efficient solution to those seeking transparent and organized workflows.  

11. Zoom

Zoom is a communication solution that enables teams to connect and collaborate regardless of geographical locations. Zoom offers video conferencing, chats, phone calls, webinars, and online events. As professional and business models change to include remote or hybrid, Zoom offers an easily adoptable digital tools to answer many communication needs, enhancing collaborations internally and externally.

Summing up

Cross-team collaboration saves precious time, strengthens relationships and trust, improves project management, and organization. Identifying the right collaboration tools is imperative to supporting and executing a successful business strategy. Using tools that enable sales staff to work efficiently, both individually and collectively, are essential, especially as remote working continues to be prominent within most fields. Finding the right tools is often a big challenge for many organizations, but overcoming it offers great ROI.

The post 10 Best Sales Tools for Team Collaboration appeared first on DealHub.

Cross-team collaboration is becoming increasingly important to an organization’s success – especially to  the success of sales. The speed of a sale is a strong factor in many buyers’ minds. As a result, speedy internal communication is essential to ensure that all aspects of a sales process is completed quickly and efficiently to close deals. Therefore, companies require a streamlined sales process that enables cross-team collaboration to save time, eliminate bottlenecks, ensure there are no duplicate tasks across teams, and to maintain a competitive advantage. 

How can this be accomplished? By creating a collaborative environment that nurtures efficient and ongoing cross-team communications.  This benefits sales, but it also improves each team’s performance, customer relations, as well as promotes a collaborative culture by eliminating the divide between departments. In this blog, we share ten tips for improving cross-team collaboration guaranteed to streamline your internal workflows and strengthen employee relationships. 

1. Set cross-team objectives and goals

When separate teams are all working towards their own individual goals, a larger sense of camaraderie and teamwork can often dissipate. By setting cross-team objectives and goals, teams can work together to achieve the cohesive goals of the company. Doing so weaves teamwork into the company DNA, , and motivates employees to work together towards a common objective – whether it is closing an upcoming opportunity or approving legal terms. This kind of supportive and collaborative culture can result in faster turnaround time, and boost sales. 

2. Drive individual and team-based KPIs

Another way to improve cross-team collaboration is by creating both individual and shared team-based Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Performance management through KPIs can help you quantify individual, team-based, and organizational performance . This kind of structure helps employees understand and reach their own goals, as well as larger objectives – shared by cross-functional team members.  By understanding what is expected of them, they can map their strategy, including other team members who can support them. . This allows better  performance evaluation to identify where more collaboration is required to improve cross-functional performance and improve sales-related metrics. 

3. Assess the gap – Identify existing obstacles and problems

By setting up methods for employee and team workflow evaluation, you can identify recurring obstacles that slow down your sales process. This allows you to tailor your sales process to utilize practices that work best, and smooth out practices and handoffs that regularly interfere with your employees performance. During this evaluation process, it’s important to consult with your employees and receive feedback on what can improve collaboration and  recurring bottlenecks, like discount approvals, or legal terms’ sign-offs. By identifying obstacles and finding collaborative solutions, you can better support your employees while simultaneously promoting cross-team collaboration and underlying workflows. 

4. Identify pivotal sales processes, and co-design new procedures to support collaboration 

Many employees have difficulty giving up control. When they fully own  their tasks, employees know  the results they can expect. However, collaborating with others and delegating tasks can   streamline the sales process. Your  employees will soon realize that collaboration makes the process more efficient, and to closing deals faster. Review your sales processes to see if there are parts of the process that can be improved with cross-team collaboration.

5. Invest in integrated sales tech that improves collaboration

According to research by GoRemotely, 70% of employees find that digital technology improved their collaboration efforts. 

As hybrid working is on the rise, sales tech is becoming increasingly important in sales processes. Since sales collaboration encompasses a range of diverse processes, and involves communication between different stakeholders, sales teams must integrate a number of sales tools into their daily collaborations. Since pricing is one of the most complex and important aspects of a sales process, a CPQ solution is a great example of sales tech that enables cross-team collaboration. 

A CPQ solution enables collaboration during the quoting process. It creates simple and advanced workflows, discounting and approval processes, and pricing updates. By utilizing CPQ, sales reps don’t need to be slowed down during the quoting process, and can communicate with all relevant stakeholders quickly and efficiently from one platform. It allows all relevant stakeholders access to the specific information relevant for them, in which they can see and modify proposals. By eliminating disjointed communication processes during the quoting phase of a sale, employees can work together effectively to create professional and accurate proposals to close deals faster. 

6. Create clear communication standards and procedures policies 

When encouraging cross-team collaboration, ensuring that you have clear communication procedures and standards is essential. By setting the standard for your employees, you can alleviate some obstacles they face by having clear guidelines for them to follow throughout the sales process. By including standardized and streamlined communication as a part of this process, you can ensure that cross-team collaboration occurs, boosting both internal workflows and a collaborative culture.

7. Encourage a culture of collaboration

Building a culture of collaboration can be incredibly beneficial for leaders and employees. It  helps employees engage with one another, and  fosters trust and helps drive organizational goals forward. Employees look to their leaders – so when their managers prioritize teamwork to maximize each employees’ particular skill sets, it’s easier for employees to jump on board. By encouraging transparency, communication, knowledge-sharing, trust, and engagement, you can lead employees from all departments to work collectively towards the same goal. 

8. Reward cross-functional collaboration

Cross-functional collaboration can be challenging to implement when it hasn’t been rooted in the company culture from the start. However, it’s not impossible. Having a strong shared vision, leading by example, and rewarding collaboration, can help employees transition to a cross-functional collaborative culture. Providing rewards, especially at the beginning of such a culture shift, can really encourage employees to embrace cross-functional collaboration, as they see the value in collaborating with other departments to achieve the overarching goals of the organization. Some rewards may include a personalized and handwritten note, treating employees to a meal, taking them on an out-of-office fun-day, or even a company celebration.

9. Measure the impact of your new cross-functional collaboration strategy 

Companies wishing to succeed need to identify the impact various practices have, especially after their initial integration. Measuring the impact of your new cross-team collaboration strategy is essential to ensure that you are setting your employees up for success, rather than complicating their daily practices. As there are many methods to implement a culture of collaboration, it’s important for leaders to regularly measure the impact of their strategy. In doing so, they can identify what works, what doesn’t, and what else can be done to improve cross-functional collaboration. This allows for a constantly evolving strategy to ensure that you’re creating procedures that work for both the organization and employees within each department.

10. Analyze and optimize

Once you are able to measure the impact of your cross-team collaboration strategy, you’ll be able to analyze and optimize your strategies for boosting collaboration. Remember, this process is dynamic and ever-growing. It’s important to stop and look at the data, consider whether the initial KPIs are the right ones, and get feedback and improvement ideas from employees. Doing so regularly will help you fine-tune the existing process and initiate even better ones. Having a solid process in place is good, but it shouldn’t stop you from making it better.  

Summing Up

Cross-team collaboration is not a new concept – salespeople have always relied on others to assist them in closing a deal, whether it be from Legal, Finance, etc. As  customer expectations rise, and more resources become available, cross-functional collaboration can be the factor that makes or breaks a deal. It improves internal relationships, allows for more efficient workflows, strengthens customer relationships, provides clarity and transparency within the sales process, improves upselling and cross-selling opportunities, and boosts the company culture and team morale. 

However, there is only so much progress that hinges on processes, people, and procedures. Eventually, the right tech is any business’s growth requirement. When it comes to streamlining communication and collaboration throughout the sales process, CPQ offers a solution that streamlines the quoting process and ensures all stakeholders are involved. They can see the right information, at the right time, to help push deals forward to the finish line. Don’t wait for your progress to plateau to invest in the right tools. Leverage sales tech now to take your company to the next level. 

Not sure where to start? In our next blog post, we’ll cover the top ten sales tools that boost cross-functional collaboration. 

The post 10 Tips to Improve Sales’ Cross-Team Collaboration Today appeared first on DealHub.

To enable digital selling and deliver a better experience for sales reps, most companies purchase sales tools and platforms that are designed to simplify and streamline sales processes. One of these key pieces of software is CPQ.

Whether or not you’ve already implemented a CPQ into your sales tech stack, it’s important to be aware of what it can offer and how it can help scale up your sales operations, grow revenue, and create greater alignment across your business.

This week on the RevAmp Podcast, we had the pleasure of hosting Frank Sohn, President and CEO of Novus CPQ Consulting Inc and host of the CPQ Podcast. With nearly thirty years of experience in CPQ consulting, he is the perfect guest for discussing the importance of CPQ and how it has transformed B2B sales on both a strategic and tactical level. This blog post will touch on the wealth of knowledge Frank brought to the show to highlight the importance of CPQ in turning sales processes into one fluid sales motion.

The history of CPQ

The first CPQ arose in the 1980s, and at the time, was called a configuration system – or “configurator”. It helped sales reps manage customer specifications, and in the late 1980s, became more advanced and integrated with early CRMs. In the 1990s, companies would often have a product configuration tool tied to an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and a user interface. These tools would collectively provide certain pricing capabilities. But according to Frank, although they offered a solution to particular pricing obstacles, they were often difficult to understand and adopt.

In the early 1990s, companies had begun to automate some of the arduous tasks that were once dependent on humans. At this point, configurators were being increasingly integrated into the selling process. As the millenium turned, many small- to mid-sized sales organizations were in need of a solution for hurdles they encountered in the quote-to-cash cycle. And by 2010, the CPQ concept had gained significant recognition and began to be increasingly incorporated into sales processes. 

Nowadays, CPQ systems are much more diverse and advanced in their capabilities – modern solutions include pricing engines, proposal generators, quoting systems, rules or constraint engines, and even approval and authorization workflows. The solution has expanded into many diverse industries, and technological enhancements are enabling sales teams to sell much more effectively.

What does CPQ software do?

So what is CPQ? If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you already know. But for those who don’t, CPQ stands for “configure price quote”. CPQ software enables sales reps to provide their prospects with accurate pricing and product configurations, meet buyer specifications, and deliver sales with agreed-upon terms.

CPQ tools include price-management mechanisms, enabling sales reps to choose between product options, packages and services, and also offer approved discounts. With a comprehensive, best-in-class CPQ, sales reps can automatically generate quotes that are error-free, on-brand, legally compliant, and include sales and marketing collateral that’s customized to buyers’ needs.

The benefits of CPQ

Together, the above CPQ capabilities enable organizations to streamline the sales process, reduce manual admin work, deliver accurate quotes to potential customers, and ultimately enhance both the seller and buyer experience.

When we talked to Frank about the benefits of CPQ, he said, “What you’re doing is taking what a sales rep does well, and making it available and repeatable to everyone else. It helps you standardize approaches and make them widely accessible, allowing reps to learn from and replicate the practices of your top performers, leading to more success.”

He noted that as sales technologies evolve to meet the demands of today’s market, what has become clear is that customers desire customizations that fit their particular needs. A CPQ helps you accomplish this by making it possible to tailor pricing and product specifications to the needs of each customer.

CPQ is an increasingly vital sales tool for organizations, and it can be greatly enhanced through integrations with CRM software. This enables sales and revenue teams to keep better track of customers, opportunities and deals; generate quotes, proposals and contracts more accurately and easily; automate internal approvals; and accelerate the overall sales cycle. 

How CPQ helps retain sales reps

As The Great Resignation continues to affect organizations of all types and sizes, we asked Frank about his thoughts on the impact of sales technologies on employee retention. He notes that CPQ has come a long way, and by empowering sales reps and alleviating certain bottlenecks, it makes their job easier and the sales process much smoother. And of course, happy team members tend to be loyal team members.

An important way to drive sales performance and retain successful employees is by helping them develop their skills. Sales tools like CPQ help them focus on active selling rather than laborious manual tasks that consume time and energy. Research shows that sales reps spend only 35% of their time actively selling. But when employees have more time to focus on that key part of their role, as well as building stronger customer relationships, they are more satisfied and successful.

Key takeaways about CPQ

It was a pleasure having Frank as a guest on the RevAmp Podcast. His in-depth knowledge and first-hand account of the evolution of CPQ made for a very insightful interview!

Hundreds of sales tools are on the market, having been designed to address different elements and stages of the B2B sales process. CPQ has emerged as a mission-critical tool for sales teams that need to support their reps with a way to handle pricing and product complexity, with a more frictionless sales process. By using a configurable and automated system to reduce the administrative burden and equip sales reps to do their best, fastest and most precise work, you can gain greater control over your sales operations and drive greater revenue achievement.

And that’s a wrap!
To listen to the full podcast episode, click here

The post The Benefits of CPQ Software for B2B Sales   appeared first on DealHub.

A tremendous need exists to streamline business processes – according to Siftery, top companies use an average of 37 different tools or platforms to run their day-to-day operations. And over 80% of business operations leaders say data integration is critical to ongoing operations.

This is where CRM integrations come into the picture. They’re an important tool for sales organizations that are looking to leverage automation and other technological capabilities to improve collaboration, accelerate time to revenue, increase sales productivity, and eliminate time-consuming, error-prone manual processes.

The value of HubSpot CRM integrations

HubSpot is one of the most popular CRM solutions for sales and marketing teams, and like other leading CRMs, it’s able to connect with hundreds of different third-party software applications – thus expanding its usability and versatility as a central business tool.

More and more sales teams are choosing software that easily integrates with their HubSpot CRM so they can improve productivity, streamline operations and communications, ensure data hygiene within their CRM, and reduce administrative overhead. This also enables them to gain the most value out of their existing CRM investment.

With more than 400 HubSpot integrations available on their App Marketplace, we’ve compiled a list of 11 popular sales tools so you can easily identify some tried-and-true solutions that will help you achieve a more frictionless sales experience. So without further ado, here they are in alphabetical order…

1. Chili Piper

Chili Piper is a Meeting Lifecycle Automation platform that helps revenue teams connect with buyers faster and convert more revenue. It works with HubSpot Forms by collecting and moving booking data in real time and syncing meeting data with the contact’s information, while automatically updating your HubSpot CRM.

Some key benefits of this integration include:

• Increasing conversion of inbound leads
• Eliminating lead-routing spreadsheets
• Eliminating manual data entry

If you’re looking to configure lead routing and improve scheduling functionality to convert inbound leads into qualified meetings, this is a worthwhile integration for your organization.

2. DealHub

DealHub offers a unified platform for price quotes, contracts and subscription management. Among other things, sales teams can use DealHub’s CPQ integration with HubSpot to generate price quotes and proposals. Having this quote tool in HubSpot makes it easy for sales reps to sell according to a predetermined sales strategy (using an intuitive sales playbook), send sales proposals in record time, and carry out a smooth and quick sales process.

DealHub’s configure-price-quote functionality also enables anyone – from sales reps to account managers to customer success managers – to easily generate renewal, upsell and cross-sell opportunities from within HubSpot CRM. This ensures a more frictionless sales process, and ensures data is kept accurate and up-to-date in a single location, easily accessible across the organization.

Some key benefits of integrating DealHub CPQ with HubSpot CRM:

• Accelerate selling with an intuitive guided-selling playbook
• Easily configure complex price quotes
• Generate accurate and professional proposals in seconds
• Ensure compliance and remove bottlenecks with automated approval workflows
• No-code configuration environment for easy CPQ maintenance

If you’re searching for the most complete and connected revenue workflow that sets your sales team up for success, DealHub is the highest-rated CPQ on the market – and it now integrates with HubSpot CRM.

3. DocuSign

DocuSign’s platform helps you manage electronic agreements and provides a suite of applications for automating and connecting the entirety of your agreement processes. It replaces printing, faxing, scanning and overnighting paper documents to transact business, by allowing companies to send, sign and manage agreements anytime, anywhere, from any device. This enables organizations to make every agreement fully digital to keep business moving forward. By integrating DocuSign with HubSpot CRM, you can create, customize, send and track DocuSign envelopes (a container for documents that need to be sent and signed.)

Iterating DocuSign with HubSpot CRM enables you to:

• Send DocuSign envelopes directly from HubSpot
• Track envelope status without leaving HubSpot
• Trigger contract automation via DocuSign
• Apply HubSpot Custom Fields in DocuSign

If you experience friction or delays in your agreement processes, this integration may be a valuable and even critical solution for not only your sales department, but your entire organization.

4. Drift

Drift’s platform helps companies grow revenue and increase customer lifetime value by combining conversational marketing with conversational sales. Their solution automates sales communications by adding live chat windows to websites, enabling customers to converse with businesses at any time, on their own terms. Integrating Drift and HubSpot CRM enables your company to transfer data directly from your Drift conversations to HubSpot.

By integrating Drift and HubSpot CPQ, you’ll be able to:

• Deliver personalized online customer experiences
• Automatically create and nurture leads in HubSpot
• Make sure email responses get the right follow-up

This is a great solution for companies looking to initiate conversations and campaigns in real time with website visitors.

5. Gong

Gong’s platform captures buyer/seller interactions, understands what was said, and delivers insights to sales teams. By integrating Gong and HubSpot CRM, you gain visibility into how your sales reps are interacting with your customers, and what’s going on in their accounts. In turn, this can enable you to replicate the behavior of your top performers. 

Integrating Gong with HubSpot CRM provides you with benefits such as:

• Gaining visibility into conversations with customers
• HubSpot dialer call analytics
• Shared data between platforms

If you’re looking to gain visibility into your customer conversations, and gather data about what works best and what practices that can be improved, this can be a valuable integration for your organization.

6. LinkedIn Sales Navigator

LinkedIn Sales Navigator helps businesses target and engage with the right buyer persona, and track key leads and company changes. By integrating it with HubSpot CPQ, you can view LinkedIn insights right in your HubSpot contact and company records, and send InMails (personal messages over LinkedI) directly from HubSpot.

Some benefits of this integration include the ability to:

• View LinkedIn data within HubSpot
• Send InMails directly from contact and company records
• Manage LinkedIn Sales Navigator tasks on mobile

If your organization is focused on optimizing targeting and engagement of leads on LinkedIn, this is a great integration option.

7. Outreach

Outreach is an email engagement and intelligence platform that enables teams to connect with prospects and customers in meaningful ways by providing detailed analytics about email outreach campaigns. As a result, you can determine the right approach to target your email outreach and boost communication with outbound sales prospects. By integrating it with HubSpot CRM, you can sync data between the two platforms to gain insights surrounding prospects and accounts. 

Integrating Outreach and HubSpot CRM allows you to:

• Sync Outreach and HubSpot data
• Configure default field mappings
• Sync only the data you want

This integration can be a powerful solution for organizations looking to improve the way they communicate and engage with customers, and track and optimize those activities.

8. Postal.io

Postal.io is a sales and marketing platform that enables customer engagement by helping companies personalize, automate and scale the delivery of direct mail, events, branded company swag, and corporate gifts. Integration with HubSpot CRM makes it easier for companies to drive brand loyalty, increase conversions, boost overall employee happiness, and improve customer health.

Key features of this integration include:

• Workflows to automate the sending of gifts and direct mail
• Creating, designing and sending postcards, note cards and brochures
• Personalizing swag items

If you’re looking to introduce personalization and automation to your gifting and event campaigns, this may be a great solution for you.

9. Salesforce

Salesforce is a wide-ranging platform that enables companies of all sizes to manage contacts and customer relationships, track and pursue sales opportunities, facilitate and manage deals, and much more. By integrating it with HubSpot CPQ, you can achieve consistency between your marketing and sales teams and processes.

Integration features include:

• Share valuable lead intelligence with your sales team
• Prioritize leads by sending lead scores from HubSpot to Salesforce
• Close the information gap between marketing and sales

If you’re already using Salesforce in your organization, integrating it with your HubSpot CRM is practically a no-brainer.

10. Salesloft

Salesloft is a sales engagement platform that provides sales teams with a single resource to execute many of their digital selling tasks, communicate with buyers, understand next steps, and get the coaching and insights they need to win deals. By integrating Salesloft with HubSpot CRM, you’ll be able to sync your contacts and accounts quickly and easily. 

Some key features of this integration include:

• Two-way data sync between the platforms
• Default and custom field mapping
• Sync only the data you want 

If you’re looking for a sales engagement system that helps you manage your digital selling process and that easily syncs with your HubSpot CRM, this may be a great choice for you.

11. Stripe

Stripe builds economic infrastructure to make it easy for businesses to start collecting credit cards online immediately – no merchant account or gateway necessary. By syncing Stripe with HubSpot CRM, you can create a smoother quoting and payment process. 

Some key integration features include:

• Create trackable quotes that can be sent to prospects
• Quick and easy payment right from  price quotes
• Automatic addition of new contacts and subscriptions to your CRM

If your organization encounters credit-card payment hurdles, integrating Stripe with HubSpot CRM may indeed be the solution you’re looking for.

Wrapping up

Now more than ever, sales teams depend on innovative tools and platforms that enable them to initiate, track, manage and close deals. This means that smooth integrations between those tools, and ensuring consistency of data across them, is paramount.

By using sales tools that are able to integrate with your HubSpot CRM, you can automate key parts of the sales process, reduce errors and inaccuracies that result from manual data entry, and facilitate greater collaboration, communication and strategy across your organization.

The post Top 11 Sales Integrations for HubSpot appeared first on DealHub.

Since a company’s success is often determined by its ability to meet strict sales and revenue targets, most companies monitor and aim to minimize the length of their sales cycle. Of course, many factors – like product type, complexity, cost and competitors – play a role in determining sales cycle length. But there are also a number of avoidable obstacles that unnecessarily slow it down.

Achieving shorter B2B sales cycles will enable you to achieve faster time to revenue and facilitate a greater number of deals in your sales pipeline, so eliminating those challenges should be a priority. 

Here are some of the most common obstacles that slow down the sales process by placing an extra burden on your sales team, followed by some suggestions to overcome them. 

1. Configuring price quotes

When you’re up against the competition, being able to send quotes quickly to prospective customers is of significant importance. How important? Research indicates sales reps that manually configure price quotes take 73% more time to produce a typical quote or proposal than those using a CPQ solution.

The problem is that sales reps typically build price quotes manually for each customer. Not only does this take a lot of time, but it also leads to pricing errors and inaccuracies – and the more products or greater product complexity you have, the more problematic this manual process becomes.

2. Building sales proposals

Sales collateral may also not be branded consistently or follow certain guidelines, meaning potential customers are exposed to materials that reflect a lack of professionalism or fail to deliver a consistent branded experience through their buying journey.

B2B sales teams also tend to be responsible for putting together sales proposals manually. This lack of standardization leads to inconsistencies from customer to customer, as well as from rep to rep. As a result, they may be offering different prices and discounts for each deal, and not as a result of any particular strategy.

3. Lack of buyer insights

Research shows that 70-80% of B2B buyers prefer to interact with customers online and remotely, which is an ongoing trend that has been accelerated since the start of the pandemic. As a result, finding efficient ways to communicate with customers is crucial to your success.

For example, when sending out a proposal, you don’t know who it’s been shared with, and it’s not always clear how or when it’s best to follow up. As a result, not only does your sales cycle slow down, but you’re missing valuable information that allows you to move deals forward in a strategic and efficient manner.

4. Inefficient contract management

Traditionally, buyers and sellers manage contracts by sending emails, PDFs and Word documents back and forth. Documents being shared this way is a lengthy and inefficient process that often leads to confusion around having multiple versions of the same document being sent to decision-makers. In addition, you can’t always be sure the right people are seeing it, potentially leading to unnecessary delays and miscommunications.

5. Lengthy approval process

In addition to coming at a high cost, B2B buying decisions can affect multiple departments and processes, which is why multiple stakeholders are often involved. Securing the approval and signatures from all the right people can be a difficult and time-consuming process. 

This issue is exacerbated when buyers and sellers need to communicate and align on a whole host of details across different departments and different time zones, without a single up-to-date repository for all of that information.

The solution: one fluid sales motion

With DealHub’s leading CPQ and CLM software, you can streamline your sales process and achieve one fluid sales motion. Let’s explore what that means.

Connect each stage of the B2B sales process

Rather than relying on many separate sales tools, consolidate a variety of them into one coherent stack for managing the entire quote-to-cash process. What does this look like? Connected sales proposals, document generation, CPQ, CLM, subscriptions, and eSign, all on one uniform platform. 

The benefits of implementing one unified platform across the buying process include:

• No longer needing multiple tools where one would do
• Enabling your team to use and maintain just one platform instead of many
• Empowering your reps to focus on selling instead of administrative work
• Complete oversight of the entire sales process so you can minimize friction points

Automate and eliminate time-consuming tasks

Nowadays, most manual and administrative work can and should be automated. Not just because they are prone to human error, but also because they require large amounts of time on a regular basis.

For example, by ensuring your sales tools sync automatically with your CRM, you can avoid manual data entry and ensure information is up-to-date throughout the entire sales process – and beyond. This allows your sales reps to focus on selling, and frees up your operations folk to focus on more impactful activities.

In addition, parallel approval workflows can dramatically streamline and accelerate the deal-approval process – by automatically sending documents for approval in a sequential manner, and triggering re-approvals when changes are made or suggested by certain stakeholders.

Gain real-time buyer insights

Real-time buyer insights provide you with information on where your buyers stand in the process, such as who has viewed your proposal, who it’s been shared with, who has or hasn’t opened it, and what content they’ve been interacting with.

This is just the tip of the iceberg of valuable insights that your sales team can leverage in order to follow up more strategically, loop in additional stakeholders when necessary, and accelerate the deal-closing process. 

What’s next?

There are many friction points in the B2B sales process that can slow down your sales cycle or even bring it to a screeching halt. And as we’ve attempted to demonstrate here, relying on a series of manual and outdated practices opens the door to inefficiencies, inaccuracies and costly setbacks.

Your solution is to leverage a unified revenue hub that speeds up and streamlines your entire quote-to-close process.

With one fluid sales motion, you can:

• Adapt your selling process to today’s digital realities
• Connect the different stages of your B2B sales process
• Automate and eliminate time-consuming and error-prone tasks
• Gain real-time insights that help you move sales forward quickly

Want to see how you can deliver one fluid sales motion for business?
Request a demo

The post 5 Common B2B Sales Obstacles and How to Overcome Them appeared first on DealHub.