The idea behind this quote is certainly applicable to sales teams. In fact, it underpins the need for a sales playbook (a.k.a. guided selling playbook) in your organization. Creating a sales playbook and putting it in the hands of your team helps to create a better and healthier sales culture. It also creates an immediate positive impact on your bottom line, and we’ll get into that shortly.

A playbook puts your sales team on the same page, transforming them from a group of individuals who independently score an occasional win, into a revenue engine that’s been optimized to perform. Ask any sales leader if they’d prefer to operate with or without a sales playbook, and the response will be overwhelming, if not unanimous.

Building a winning sales team isn’t just about personality, work ethic or cultural fit. Process is something that affects each and every employee, and this is where a guided selling playbook can become a sales manager’s best friend. It’s what enables you to train reps along established guidelines, implement sales best practices across the org, and lay the foundation of a successful sales culture.

In a recent episode of our RevAmp podcast, Saro Zargarian, Director of Sales Operations at Blueshift, said, “When you hire and build a sales org, don’t just look for that individual who is great at what they do, but how that hire fits within the culture and mindset you’re trying to establish across the entire sales org.” He then went on to explain how a sales playbook was essential to enforcing that mindset.

What is a sales playbook?

A sales playbook is designed to queue up a series of questions that branch out into different paths based on what your sales reps enter and/or your customer needs. Each answer is then used to determine the most appropriate product or service, price, and other considerations that will help close the deal. The outcome? A simpler and faster sales proposal process, more satisfied customers, and more accurate offerings based on established rules and pre-approved best practices.

Guided selling leverages a sales tool that asks your reps a series of questions about the core properties of their deal. The answers are then run through a set of rules defined by management. The result is a quote that aligns perfectly with the strategies created by sales and revenue leaders.

The best way to implement guided selling is via a sales playbook that shows sales reps what they should do in any given situation during the sales proposal process. In addition to helping them make the most strategic selling decisions, it accelerates sales training for new reps, and is a valuable resource that any rep can use to recall and implement best practices in real time. The end result is that sales reps across the organization are more consistent in their selling behavior, and each one is empowered to close more deals – and bigger deals – faster. 

The sales playbook is just a small part of what CPQ automation has to offer. CPQ software configures the right products to sell to your customer, whether you offer simple or very complex products.

By creating a B2B sales playbook template, sales leaders can quickly get new hires up to speed and get their whole sales team operating uniformly and effectively. The first step is to establish CPQ configuration rules and scenarios based on particular constraints. Whether its configurations are based on customer type, location, company size, or a combination of other factors, a sales playbook lets you accurately sell to each and every customer.

The benefits of a sales playbook

Shifting from a culture where inconsistency is common and mistakes are made routinely, to one where speed and accuracy are the norm, doesn’t happen overnight. It takes hard work and dedication. But sales playbooks make it incredibly easy.

Let’s get into the four key ways a sales playbook can transform your sales culture.

1. Standardization of best practices

Best practices may include the establishment of repeatable and successful processes, like knowing when it is appropriate to give a discount and how large that discount should be. Using a CPQ with guided selling ensures your sales reps are not able to give discounts outside the profit margin without managers’ approval.

DealHub CPQ includes built-in playbooks that enable sales reps to operate freely within certain limits, like around pricing, for example. At the same time, it enables them to accelerate their sales process with automated discount-approval workflows.

2. Empower sales reps to sell more strategically

Enable sales reps to offer products that are better aligned with their client’s needs. Guided selling will also automatically remind sales reps of any appropriate upsells and cross-sells that relate to the requested service or product. Selling more strategically drives deals towards closing sooner – and, ideally, for a larger amount.

3. Prioritize people over process

Automating these manual processes allows your sales reps to scale their processes and reach more clients than ever before.  Your sales reps now have a chance to perform more discovery and focus on their new leads with all the time saved. By creating this environment of caring for your sales reps time, you foster a trusting and motivated culture.

4. Refocus your reps on their clients

Time is precious, especially in business. Give your sales reps more time in their day so  they can focus on the needs of their customers and build trusted relationships, instead of wasting hours trying to work through manual processes and disconnected tools. If your sales reps can send proposals and quotes to their prospects more quickly than your competitors, you can shorten time to revenue, scale your sales team more effectively, and close more deals. 

Transform your sales culture with a guided selling playbook

Salespeople are a unique breed – they’re often fiercely independent and highly competitive. And some might be hesitant when it comes to using sales software like CRM and CPQ solutions. But it’s important to remember that building a culture of guidance and best practices comes before everything. 

With the right tools to foster a positive sales culture, your salespeople will embrace being part of a winning team. Streamlining the product configuration, pricing and quoting process by automating those time-intensive and error-prone tasks can have several huge impacts.

Implementing a sales playbook will make new hires more effective more quickly, and will unleash the full potential of your seasoned salespeople. Standardizing best practices and putting guard rails in place sets the whole team up for success. This is why DealHub’s Revenue Platform empowers leaders to connect their teams and processes – to foster a sales culture built around people, not processes.

Do you consider the impact of processes on your sales culture? Saro Zargarian shares his thoughts on building a sales culture and the impact of a sales playbook in this RevAmp podcast episode. A sales playbook can usher in real change for your sales culture. But it also provides the powerful digital transformation your company needs.

The post How a Guided Selling Playbook Transforms Your Sales Culture appeared first on DealHub.

A few key benefits of a subscription model are the ability to attract customers with a lower up-front cost, regular opportunities for cross-selling and upselling, and the establishment of steadier and more predictable revenue.

However, when subscriptions need to be managed manually, this gives rise to important revenue challenges. Firstly, it puts a burden on sales and customer success teams who must invest time and effort into driving renewals and expansions – all while navigating the technical complexities of doing so. Secondly, it creates ample opportunities for revenue leakage, which we’ll now explore below.

How do renewals contribute to revenue leakage?

To answer that question, you have to drill down into the data to find the sources of revenue leakage. Subscriptions require a lot of data in multiple locations. Inaccurate data slows things down and leads to costly mistakes. The issue is that keeping that data accurate and up-to-date across all data sources (like your CRM) can require a great deal of precision, manpower and time. If done manually, these processes are prone to errors, which lead to precious time being spent on detecting and correcting them which slows down sales and time to revenue.

Constant changes in pricing can be another source of revenue leakage if improperly managed and you’re relying on manual processes. Pricing updates happen more frequently than you might expect, and the more frequent these changes are, the more amplified errors will become. Why do pricing changes happen so frequently? According to Patrick Campbell, Co-Founder and CEO of Profitwell: it’s strategy. In the last RevAmp Podcast episode, Patrick says “You should be changing something about your pricing every single quarter, and this doesn’t mean raising or lowering your price point every month.”

By the time pricing mistakes are caught, it could be too late. Now, you’ll only have two options moving forward: push the deal through and allow revenue to slip through the cracks, or make the corrections slowing the sales process down and wasting everyone’s time. Time spent chasing internal stakeholders leaves your buyers feeling frustrated and increases the chances they go with a competitor.

According to Forrester, product recommendations and upselling are responsible for an average of 10-30% of revenue. That means that a major cost of manual processes and poor subscription management is missing out on potential upsells and cross-sells.

How sales process automation helps prevent revenue loss

CPQ software that incorporates sales playbooks makes it easy to manage an ever-increasing number of subscriptions and renewals. What is a playbook in sales, though? Marketo explains it quite clearly: “Sales playbooks are a means of capturing sales best practices and communicating them to salespeople.”

A playbook helps you achieve three things: simplifying, guiding, and controlling your subscription processes. Each of these steps seamlessly connects your quoting and subscription services, ensures accuracy every step of the way, and minimizes lost revenue.

1. Simplify your subscription management

Lots of considerations go into a subscription-based pricing model. Keeping track of all your renewals, keeping up-to-date with pricing and plan changes, and communicating new offers and upgrades, can all complicate the sales and account-management process.

Don’t wait until an upcoming renewal to start thinking about payment terms and standardizing packages. A subscription management solution consolidates all your renewals into one place and creates easily accessible information for any internal stakeholder. Equip your sales reps with clear, simple guidelines when discussing upcoming renewal with clients and watch their success rate soar. 

2. Guide the subscription process

Sales playbooks guide the sales process and use rule-based logic to empower your sales reps to sell smarter. They will collect the right information and start making the right selling decisions now, and in the future. Without an advanced CPQ, your sales team (both reps and ops) may have to spend hours rebuilding deal structures for each customer whenever changes need to be made. DealHub’s CPQ makes it easy to make ongoing changes for each customer.

3. Take control of your subscriptions

Using workflows to automate different aspects of your subscription management process creates a fast and easy progression through the sales process. For example, you can use workflows to approve discounts outside the approved range. All relevant internal stakeholders get notified of changes, what the changes are, and given the ability to approve (or not) the discount request. Workflows mean no more spending time defining all the relevant changes for each stakeholder, or chasing them down for approvals.

Subscription Management Automation

The subscription economy is booming, with no signs of slowing down. Are you mismanaging those subscriptions and as a result suffering from revenue leakage and missed renewal and expansion opportunities? Or are you using sales process automation to grow recurring revenue and plug subscription revenue leaks?

To learn more about how companies are optimizing their stacks to deal with revenue challenges around subscriptions, download DealHub’s 2021 Benchmark Report for Revenue Leaders.

The post How better subscription management prevents revenue leakage appeared first on DealHub.

As the B2B world faces a digital transformation of its own, companies have a similar opportunity to scale their output and reach new levels of revenue potential.

This is certainly the case among sales teams, which typically deal with laborious and manual processes that limit their productivity and steer them away from their primary goal of selling.

The Problem With Traditional Sales Proposals

Manual sales proposal processes may be manageable up to a point, but all the time spent on administrative tasks and ineffective communications prevents your company from scaling up and reaching your revenue goals.

Tedious manual processes

Manual processes are an inefficient use of salespeople’s time. Sales reps typically spend several hours preparing proposals, contracts and legal documents for each client, even while following sales operations best practices. For example, 64% of enterprises that don’t use a CPQ need more than 30 minutes to prepare and send a quote, plus more than an hour to prepare and send a sales proposal.

These manual processes are also subject to human error, meaning updates might not happen on time and you’ll have small numerical discrepancies across the sales process. When it comes to large or complex price quotes or orders, you can imagine the potential revenue impact of a relatively small numerical error.

Difficulty maintaining price books

Pricing and packaging are not static and may change frequently. Some SaaS companies, for example, adjust their pricing every 6 months. In spite of that – or possibly as a result –  41% of surveyed professionals report that plan changes are their number one challenge.

Managing updates by manually hard-coding changes in the back end creates additional overhead and puts the burden on other teams to keep up. Worst case, it leads to sales reps using old and incorrect price lists they’ve downloaded in the past, resulting in lost revenue.

Unprofessional-looking documents

Good presentation demonstrates credibility and professionalism. But when all your sales outputs are created manually, reps end up using different proposal templates, formats and document types. This leads to inconsistency and often ends up looking unprofessional to customers. Automation allows you to set brand standards for your business proposals and standardize best practices across your team.

Ineffective communication among stakeholders

B2B sales often require buy-in from multiple parties within an organization, producing message threads and email chains that are lengthy and difficult to follow. This type of communication leads to frustration, inefficiency and miscommunication, and makes it difficult to secure approvals in a timely manner – often a determining factor in whether a deal gets done.

How Sales Proposal Automation Software Drives Results

By using online proposal software and injecting automation into your sales proposal creation process, your sales rep can generate accurate and professional-looking price quotes, no matter how large or complex, with minimal time and effort.

Here are five ways that sales proposal automation drives better processes, and ultimately, accelerates revenue.

1. Keeps your CRM up to date

Your CRM is filled with data that is used again and again throughout the sales process. Keeping that data synced between all relevant assets reduces errors and streamlines the sales process. CRM document generation is a key function of sales proposal automation software, in that it allows reps to instantly create sales documents by pulling updated data right from your CRM – saving them valuable time, preventing errors, and putting proposals in front of customers more quickly.

2. Streamlines communication via workflows

Centralizing cross-party collaboration is a key step to improving your sales process. DealHub’s solution to this is our proprietary DealRoom, which brings sales teams and customers together in real-time so you can collaborate, engage key decision-makers, and close deals faster.

Now let’s say a quote needs to be approved by Tina, who is in accounting, and Bill, VP of Sales. Tina logs into the digital DealRoom to provide her approval. But afterwards, John makes some changes of his own. In this case, a workflow can be triggered to automatically resend the quote to Tina for approval.

3. Sets guardrails for discounts

Reps want to make as many sales as possible, and discounts help them get there more quickly. Unfortunately, when not managed properly, this has a negative impact on the need to protect profit margins and obtain managerial approval.

By utilizing automation to standardize your sales proposal process, you can build dynamic guardrails on discounting into your CPQ. This means that any discount over a set threshold will trigger an approval workflow, resulting in a clear and automated process around approvals. Your company will no longer be leaving money on the table with inappropriate discounts that eat into your profit margins.

4. Provides buyer engagement data

Through digital transformation of your sales process, you can collect buyer intent data that was previously unattainable. For example: with our DealRoom solution, you can get real-time notifications that reveal where your buyers stand in the process, which stakeholders are involved, and where things are at a standstill. Then you can use those insights to sell more strategically – for example, by timing your follow-up, or by having senior figures step in and help overcome obstacles in the process.

5. Helps onboard sales reps faster

A sales playbook within your CPQ gives sales reps the tools and guidance they need to onboard faster and sell more strategically and efficiently. It takes them step-by-step through a series of predefined questions and fields to help them deliver fast and accurate quotes to buyers, and generate error-free quotes in any branded format. By enabling them to select the right configurations for each unique customer, you can facilitate pricing consistency, error-free quoting, and faster approvals.

Summing it all up

Underestimating the importance of sales proposal automation is a risk your company can’t afford to take. With B2B sales processes being so complex, revenue leakage can easily occur as a result of legacy tools and manual processes. Implementing automated workflows and processes will allow you to save time, effort and money.

DealHub’s #1-rated CPQ and contract management solution, powered by a guided selling playbook, simplifies and streamlines the selling process and enables sales teams to enforce sales operations best practices. Want to gain more insights into the impact of sales proposal automation on revenue and sales productivity?

The post How Sales Proposal Automation Drives Revenue Performance appeared first on DealHub.