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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
