Many sales leaders consider any day a salesperson is not actively selling to be a loss. The numbers, however, tell a different story. According to research, for every dollar a company invests in sales training it earns back  $4.53. That’s a 353% ROI, which is quite mind blowing. On the flip side, and equally astonishing, is the fact that 27% of companies don’t offer their teams any sales onboarding, training, or enablement. A significant hurdle on the path to success. 

Getting teams to be sales-ready is more than getting them to recite the product catalog or chase down signatures. To be sales-ready, teams should be prepared to confidently seize opportunities and move deals forward, to foresee customer needs and deliver on their expectations. 

Proper onboarding sets off the sales readiness journey, providing a detailed understanding of the company and its products on offer. But, it shouldn’t end there. 

Here are the top three steps to take on the road to sales readiness: 

1. Tools and Tech

Providing your team with the tools to power their success is the first building block of sales readiness. There are many online collaboration and project management platforms, prospect management tools, CPQ solutions, and others. The key is to understand the people and the processes, and then find the tools that would support them in running these processes more efficiently. 

2. Sales Enablement

With the proper tools set in place, it’s time to train teams on how to run them. A team that isn’t using its sales enablement tools is creating a double loss: first, lost potential of better processes and second,  the loss of resources invested in the tool. Sales leaders should aspire to provide their teams with the tools and the skills to use them. This includes building on existing knowledge and deepening proficiency, but also, continuously seeking new methods and tools to empower teams’ success.

3. Continuous Upskilling and Coaching

Chess masters don’t just practice before a match. They continuously learn to widen the scope of their abilities. They practice with a trainer to grow their skills, to eliminate their weaknesses, and master their craft. The same goes for salespeople. Being sales-ready isn’t about simply passing a test, or facing customers for the first time. Rather, it’s an ongoing process of acquiring new skills and developing existing ones to improve performance.

Sales readiness is an achievable goal, but it’s not a final destination. Being sales-ready is an ongoing process, a guided professional journey. Sales leaders are urged to prioritize the ongoing learning and upskilling of their teams, including putting in the time, effort, and other resources that this requires. Done well, it’s a perpetual, fluid motion that streamlines the journey and keeps everyone growing.

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While the benefits of digital transformation may be clear, and the threat of falling behind may be well-understood, for many, new processes are difficult to adopt. That’s because more often than not, people are resistant to change. 

Ramping up sales professionals is one process that can be dramatically improved through the use of new technologies. And DealHub’s guided selling solution for CPQ is the bridge between “technology” and “processes” that revenue leaders have been waiting for.

The Importance of Being Agile

In the past, quoting was expected to be a lengthy, time-consuming, and error-prone necessity. Despite being the core element of a sales proposal, quotes existed on a sort of island – detached from the broader processes that make up the quote-to-close sales cycle.

The introduction of CPQ technology disrupted this decades-long equilibrium. Price and product books that were once distributed via spreadsheets and computer files could be centralized into a single repository. Creating dependencies between list items in quotes became automatic and calculating discounts became instantaneous.

CPQ adoption is considered essential for even mildly complex sales organizations today.

But in terms of using it to streamline the quote-to-cash process, many organizations lag behind, viewing the benefits of a CPQ solution strictly from a quote-generation perspective. What they’re missing is the full potential of this technology to generate massive revenue impact across the sales cycle.

By leveraging DealHub’s advanced CPQ solution, revenue leaders can manage their technology, processes, and people across the entire pipeline, starting at the very beginning-the sales team onboarding process.

The Ramp-up Challenge

Ramping up sales professionals is a challenge common to many organizations. New hires come into the organization with lots of enthusiasm and little knowledge. Even if they know the space, they have no understanding of the specific sales strategies developed by management and/or the C-Suite.

This presents three major issues for sales and revenue leaders:

1. Time dedicated to onboarding and training: Although sales professionals can perform some value-generating activities during their training, their impact is usually minimal. Each Day that salespeople spend on learning about products and pricing is a day they aren’t selling. This problem is magnified as companies scale and grow their sales teams. Effectively they’re exponentially increasing the amount of salary paid out to team members who aren’t productive, yet. 
2. Maximize the value of every account, particularly subscription contracts: Even if sales teams understand the correct product and pricing strategies, it takes time to learn how to negotiate complex subscription contracts and increase renewals. Pursuing upsell and cross-sell opportunities, and knowing how to structure recurring revenue contracts to deliver a predictable and growing revenue pipeline, requires a more nuanced understanding.
3. Empowering sales professionals to independently make pricing decisions: Sales pros’ ability to navigate the decision-making process is a prerequisite to doing their job effectively. If the ramp-up process requires them to interact with multiple levels of an organization before they can begin to create quotes, it limits their ability to deliver immediate revenue impact.

Digital Transformation Starts with Onboarding 

These issues present significant challenges for sales and revenue leaders looking to hit sales targets and captain revenue growth. Ramping up new team members more effectively is one of the best ways to increase sales and revenue performance. If every new hire requires a huge onboarding investment, the solution can quickly create a problem. 

Visionary leaders must take onboarding efforts seriously. And it’s not just a hiring issue — it’s the tip of the spear in a larger digital transformation strategy.

Given the centrality of CPQ and sales onboarding to revenue generation, sales organizations that use next-generation technology to bridge the two will experience greater success.

DealHub CPQ solution is that next-gen technology. DealHub reduces onboarding time for new sales hires by 85%, empowering leaders to close their revenue gap not just by growing their team, but by empowering new hires to deliver revenue quickly.

Guided Selling Success

Understanding how pricing and product combinations interact with customer profiles is a huge barrier to Sales ramp-up. Legacy CPQ technology wasn’t a big help. It could handle the math, but only after manual data input. 

DealHub CPQ offers a dynamic guided selling playbook that automates not just the mathematics, but also the selection of products and pricing that go into a quote. It does so by asking sales professionals a series of questions about the core properties of the deal, and running their answers through a rule-base engine that’s been predefined by management. This engine then creates a quote that aligns perfectly with the strategies created by sales and revenue leaders.

This offloads the difficult task of figuring out the best pricing and product combination for any individual deal, and minimizes (if not eliminates) the need to understand how everything fits together. Instead, salespeople can begin selling as soon as they have strong knowledge of the products’ value propositions – something that’s significantly easier and faster to achieve.

This is just one way DealHub CPQ reduces onboarding and training time for new hires, while also helping them achieve immediate revenue impact.

The Subscription Management Factor

DealHub CPQ uses advanced subscription management to automatically maximize the value of all deals, regardless of how experienced the relevant sales person is.

New hires struggle with maximizing contract value because legacy CPQ technologies left product-bundling and staggered yearly renewal pricing models up to sales professionals. Getting those right is even more challenging than understanding basic pricing strategies.

In contrast, DealHub CPQ technology implements these strategies by automatically incorporating them into quotes. Leadership can input the most profitable bundles into the rule engine, and set them to be triggered whenever relevant – ensuring they never miss an upsell or cross-sell opportunity. In addition, DealHub CPQ automatically structures quotes for recurring-revenue contracts by allowing sales leaders to configure optimal buyer-specific pricing and interval increases.

Instead of settling for months or even years of suboptimal quotes by new sales professionals, leadership can now gain control over pricing strategy and execution at the point of quote creation. With all quotes accurately reflecting the latest strategy, regardless of who generates them, scaling teams is no longer at the expense of building a predictable revenue pipeline.

Streamlined Workflows

New salespeople need to be taught how the sales organization works together to close deals. In companies without an advanced CPQ, this leads to an inefficient combination of hierarchical decision-making and manual notifications. For example, if a salesperson wants to make changes to a quote that requires approval, they must know where to send it and then manage potentially multiple threads of conversation.

This process is complex, error-prone, and cumbersome for recently hired professionals. They might need multiple approvals from siloed departments, forcing them to negotiate across competing departmental priorities and personalities. Things inevitably get missed or overlooked until the new hire becomes familiar with the structure and best practices of the organization. Even veterans make mistakes.

DealHub eliminates the need for those manual workflows that result from using legacy tools. DealHub CPQ enables sales leaders to set automated notifications that go out to all relevant stakeholders and departments, simultaneously. Instead of new hires having to spend months learning how to navigate the approvals workflow process, they can slot themselves into the organization’s larger decision-making process from day one.

All of this adds up to one simple idea: a seamless and fully digital, high-value CPQ workflow that protects the integrity of your deals – so you can scale your sales organization effectively.

Mind the (Revenue) Gap

The current wave of digital transformation promises to create winners and losers in every industry. Visionary leaders must evolve to streamline their processes and empower their people.

The bar has been raised, and standing still in competitive marketplaces is no different than going in reverse. Accelerating revenue and Sales ramp-up time requires a rethink of your revenue operations from end to end.

How you onboard sales professionals is a key part of this conversation. They are the lifeblood of every successful sales team. Leaders who invest in DealHub CPQ can significantly reduce onboarding time, accelerate sales processes, drive greater revenue, and realize the full potential of digital transformation.

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DealHub customers know and love digital DealRooms, which have transformed the buyer experience, bringing sellers and customers together in real-time and providing a hub for important documents, from product and pricing to agreements and approvals. 

And now, there’s more! With the newly released DealBox, DealRoom users now have the ability, and the place, to securely store deal-related information, content, and other supporting materials, DealBox supports all file types like PDF, JPeg, PPTX, MP4 etc., except exe files, which aren’t supported within DealRoom. 

Built to save and share, DealBox enables full control of creating, editing, and presenting materials. Only relevant content will be viewable to users, depending on the level of permissions granted.

The DealBox widget provides the following functions:

• Build DealBox templates: Define rule-based templates and set default files per DealRoom.
• Protected files: Admins can set a file or folder to be “protected”, meaning that the file cannot be removed from the DealBox in live mode.
• Enable uploads and downloads: Authenticated users (permission based) can create new files and folders.
• Add comments to files: Using the button on the upper toolbar, permitted users can comment on single or multiple files.
• Action notifications: DealRoom members can be notified of any actions within DealBox.
• DealStream activities : DealBox will log all box-related actions such as file addition, deletion, or download, comments to files, and newly created or deleted directories.

DealHub’s DealRooms already provide real-time interactive content sharing and deal-management for all stakeholders involved. They’re also a single source of truth for any deal documents, like agreements, legal documents, etc. 

DealBox now facilitates storing and sharing other supporting documents, files, and materials associated with the deal, and enables various parties involved to view, comment on, and share materials. DealBox was designed to be dynamic and evolve as the market progresses.  

Using DealRoom, you’ve said goodbye to tracing emails, repeating discussions, and having to frequently update stakeholders. You’re accustomed to sharing and tracing legal and contractual documents on DealRoom, moving deals forward faster and easier. 

DealBox now opens a new venue for all supporting materials and content that is of interest to DealRoom members. Thanks to DealBox, DealRooms are now bigger and better, and provide a holistic digital customer experience, meeting both buyers and sellers’ needs.

The post Unboxing DealBox, the New Centralized, Secure Location for All Deal-Related Files  appeared first on DealHub.

If you’re an Ops leader determined to meet your growth and performance goals, let’s talk about sales tech, and what the right CPQ solution can do for you. 

Here’s a mind-blowing statistic: 85% of sellers reported losing or delaying deals due to key client stakeholders changing their role. All those lost opportunities, many because the most updated price quote or contract version is lost forever in an inbox that will never be opened again. 

Sales will always be about relationships and the personal touch, but with so much at stake, maybe it’s time to send in the machines.

The pains in the manual process

Ferraris used to be handcrafted. Each part of every car brandishing a prancing horse logo was a unique piece, made by hand. While we may all wish to own a Ferrari, if we’re being honest, we want to sell like Ford or BMW- in a high volume, automated, and predictable manufacturing environment, and a well-oiled sales process.   

The purpose of sales organizations, which aren’t supercar boutique manufacturers, is to sell.  Efficiently.  Manually creating one-off quotes can put a real dent in Sales performance, and a real hurdle on the company’s path to success.

Time is Money

The first issue with the manual sales process is time. Sales professionals are busy people, but as an Operations leader, you have to ask yourself- are they busy selling? 

Turns out sales reps spend as little as 30% of their time actually selling. What do they do with the rest of their time? Administrative tasks, data input, chasing approvals and signatures. We all  know running an efficient and productive sales team is what gets the gold. Literally. Freeing time for selling can directly affect the bottom line. 

If, for example, your sales reps are busy tracing the latest version of an agreement, or trying to push through approvals and signatures, then they’re investing precious time in contract management, not selling. 

Quote generation is another time trap, but a manual and lengthy quoting process can cost more than just time. With 35-50% of sales going to the vendor who responds first, it’s easy to understand why getting an accurate quote out as fast as possible is the key to success. 

A People Problem

Another problem with the manual process is, well, that it’s manual. Sales people are human, and as such, they sometimes make mistakes. Unfortunately, those mistakes are very costly. Research shows that a 1% increase in price can increase EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization) by 22%. 

Product offerings, pricing, and discounts are constantly changing. Your team working off an outdated pricing book; a sales manager eager to meet quota and giving extra discounts; or a sales rep making a tiny mistake in data entry, could all carry big consequences. 

Here’s a routine scenario: Company X, is a SaaS company with thousands of customers worldwide, and hundreds of products, services, packages, and bundles. Quotes are generated using a pricing table on a static Excel workbook. Contracts are created using Microsoft Word, and relying on manual input of pricing, terms, and other deal data. What could go wrong? Brace yourself. 

Deep Impact

33% of sales reps are authorized to give discounts, but 80% report that they aren’t very confident about the margins – if they have visibility into costs and margins at all. Often, they input data manually and generate one-off quotes. 

In many B2B sales processes, teams are using different versions of an Excel spreadsheet, and that spreadsheet has its entry limits. It’s also likely maintained by one person who’s going on leave or retiring.  Glitches in pricing can seriously bruise your bottom line.

A lengthy sales cycle is another potential injury to performance. We mentioned that most customers accept the first quote they receive, but it’s more than that. The longer a process is, the more likely it is for something to go wrong. There’s just more friction, and time for error. 

Adding insult to injury, manual processes make it difficult to see upselling and cross-selling opportunities, which hold great revenue potential. They also make it harder to manage subscriptions and renewals. 

Data analysis and actionable insights are also hindered by the manual process, relying on Sales reps or CSMs to continually and consistently update information. This hurts predictability and forecasting which are ever more critical in a competitive market. 

The result is the stuff every Sales Ops leader’s nightmares are made of: valuable admin time spent on menial tasks, inconsistent and inaccurate quotes, order changes, and frequent help requests. 

A New Hope

An often overlooked hero in the original Star Wars trilogy is a little barrel of a robot called R2-D2. He’s really an animated swiss army droid, who accomplishes more mission-critical tasks than some of his human counterparts. 

R2 carries secret plans to the Death Star space station, delivers Princess Leia’s critical message, and arms Luke Skywalker with a lightsaber exactly when he needs it most. In short, he’s a major contributor to the team’s success.

Just in case you’re not a Star Wars buff (what?!), let’s just say this: R2D2 is a Jedi’s best friend, and sales automation can be yours. As a Sales Ops leader, you can harness the power of technology to assist you in your quest to shorten sales processes and eliminate human errors. 

There are powerful sales tech solutions to alleviate all of the manual process pains, and help you accomplish your goals. 

1. CPQ Automation: Keep your teams updated with new products and pricing, reduce quoting errors, and increase sales productivity. CPQ takes away the pains of regular (and often ignored) email updates and cumbersome Excel spreadsheets. 

CPQ solutions can automatically suggest up-sell and cross-sell opportunities, based on the customer’s unique profile, and generate accurate quotes in minutes, saving time and making money. They also automate the approval process, and reduce admin burden. 

2. CRM: Customer Relationship Management tools are at the center of most sales organizations. Using a CRM, organizations keep track of leads and customers and organize automated tracks, update activities, and manage contacts. 

CRMs share data with other sales automation tools, so teams and their leaders can utilize them effectively. 

3. CLM: Contract Lifecycle Management tools help organizations monitor and streamline the contract phase of a deal. As if getting to the dotted line wasn’t hard enough, chasing signatures and approvals is tedious and confusing. 

CLM offers version control, visibility, and approval workflows that align all stakeholders and minimize the needs for any Ops intervention. CLMs often offer e-sign to various documents, shortening the waiting time and the process as a whole.

With the various sales tech tools available, it’s important to select the right ones. Something as simple as switching manual billing processes to automated billing on a platform like Chargebee can eliminate manual errors and improve your internal workflow, giving your teams a chance to focus on other areas of the business.

In order to be effective, tools need to integrate seamlessly with each other. Without this orchestration, managing a sales stack can be even more complicated, requiring more add-ons to keep tools connected. 

As an Operations leader, your main goal is to keep Sales running smoothly, with no kinks or pains. Harnessing the right sales tech can certainly deliver on its promise to automate menial tasks, drive sales efficiency, and deliver the data necessary for forecasts and optimization.  And, of course, close more deals faster. 

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