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CPQ Pro Tips

Eliminate Manual Entry

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Transcript

Hi everyone. Brenton here with Thriviti, and today I want to talk a little bit about data in your CRM system that can be fed by CPQs, such as DealHub and how that information can help to eliminate manual data entry. Now, the automation of data syncing between system is going to reduce the manual effort of teams, but it’s also going to improve the overall efficiency of your sales process. So for today, I thought we’d look at a scenario around deal statuses, mainly because I’ve personally observed time being wasted when manual entry of data is required. So whether that’s copying information from one system to the next to improve visibility, whether that’s during weekly sales calls, going over the pipeline and trying to investigate why a deal hasn’t progressed forward or why it has progressed forward so much when maybe some of the requirements haven’t been gathered yet.

And of course, the flood of emails, text messages and phone calls. As a manager or executive, they’re preparing for a meeting that requires the latest rollup information and they lack confidence in what’s in the CRM system. Now, all these situations really compound one another and add stress to the sales organization. So, what we’re going to review today is how some of those spots where manual entry creates that compounding problem can be resolved by leveraging some automation and pulling data directly from the CPQ system, such as DealHub. So here’s a common view for HubSpot users, the deal board, and just looking at the deal board, if you don’t know what systems are in place, you’re always going to second guess. Well, why hasn’t a certain deal moved along in the pipeline? But by applying some automation and instead of relying on manual updates, we know that this board is going to be pretty up to date.

So if we looked at these statuses here, we have very common statuses, initial contact has been made, a proposal has been created, and in HubSpot we can leverage the details that come from hub, such as has the quote been created and sent to the customer to help gate whether or not a deal should move down the pipeline. The same could be done for the close one stage, maybe the prospect has signed, but you’re still waiting for counter signatures internally, and that might be a requirement for you before that deal is considered completely closed and won. So here I am inside of a deal and we can see some of these fields. What is the quote status? What’s the deal status? Let’s take a look at the deal room link that brings you directly to the proposal that was sent to the prospect and even allows for you to take a look at the deal stream, the deal chatter, and understand what maybe internal conversations are going on.

All this information is I’m going to call free information already collected by the CPQ system and with just some very simple mapping of fields. As you can see here, we’re simply pushing the deal room link or deal statuses to the deal inside of HubSpot. We can then leverage that in a number of different ways, and we could take that one step further. Instead of having to double click into an opportunity to find these details, why not leverage some new functionality that HubSpot recently released around deal tags and surface it directly onto the deal cards. So when you’re trying to figure out, well, is this deal still awaiting internal approval? Do we just need to countersign the deal? Well, now you can simply create a deal tag leveraging a field that is automatically updated by the CPQ system, and you can see that information directly on the cards themselves.

Here we have the waiting for approval and awaiting counter signature items. And if I just very quickly as a last example here, flip to the presentation of a sales rep. Let’s say they’re trying to move a deal forward, taking a deal from the contact phase into proposal phase. You can see here that this sales rep doesn’t have the ability to update the deal status field, no manual entry needed, because that’s actually going to come from a DealHub directly. And because they can’t update the deal status or confirm if a quote has been created, they can’t move this along in the pipeline. So now they know exactly what they need to do in order to have this in a current and relative state. But of course, if all those criteria are met, this deal is truly closed in, won, it has been fully signed, then allow for that deal to move along in the pipeline.

So this is just one example of how automation really can help tighten things up and reduce the manual entry needed between systems. But just imagine all the other places that information that A CPQ collects could help this, right? Automatically pull in the right billing information and not rely on double data, data entry, proactively calculate some customer metrics so that you have that information at your fingertips. So I hope this has been a helpful video for you all and gives you some ideas on how you’ll be able to leverage details that already is available to eliminate some manual entry.