Ensuring execution is complicated. Leaders’ day-to-day strategic tasks create separation by default. Visibility is also an issue. Tech stacks that should facilitate communication often end up bloated, with dozens of tools spread across multiple departments and teams. That causes more harm than good; it’s impossible to maintain a comprehensible view of how strategy translates into action.
Lack of effective oversight causes strategy and tactics to decouple over time, until iteration becomes difficult or impossible. Without repeated execution, over a set period of time, with measurable results, leaders eventually lose control over the ‘predictable’ part of ‘predictable pipeline’.
In this post, we explain how you can use DealHub to close the revenue gap, eliminate the disconnected view of revenue execution, and build a predictable sales pipeline.
Advanced guided selling playbooks
DealHub is a sales pipeline execution solution. Unlike other tools that either only focus on one part of the pipeline, or that give visibility to your revenue stream, DealHub is a complete platform that executes all of the processes you need to close the deal.
Our advanced guided selling playbook makes this possible. There are three main reasons.
First, it has a native integration with Salesforce CRM and Microsoft Dynamics. Once connected, there is a seamless, bi-directional data sync between your revenue pipeline stages and your customer data. In the past, Sales teams needed to manually update fields and deals progressed, guaranteeing errors. Our playbooks make that process instant and automatic. The result is a single source point that ensures data hygiene.
Second, its collaborative recommendation engine and decisioning tree is 100% customizable without requiring any hard-coding on the backend. Previously, sales and revenue leaders set strategy, but could not directly enforce it. Sales reps still manually used pricing and product books to generate quotes. In contrast, our playbook asks reps a series of questions about their deal, runs responses through the rules engine setup by leadership, and creates a quote that accurately reflects the strategy.
Third, our playbook automates the approval workflow process streamlines cross-departmental communication. Management can use them to define and execute parallel approval workflows automatically, eliminating the mess of cross-departmental approvals and manual email chains of the past.
By unifying data, ensuring strategy gets translated into action, and streamlining communication, DealHub’s guided selling playbooks act as the beating heart that pumps revenue through every stage of your revenue pipeline, from opportunity to renewal.
Building a single sales motion
Our playbooks’ iterated processes generate reliable insights you can use DealHub CPQ + DealRoom to translate into more efficient pipelines.
In the past, you would use CPQ to create quotes and then hand them off to your teams, which would use manual processes to turn them into revenue. In contrast, DealHub CPQ combines with our DealRoom virtual roundtable that empowers teams to communicate with buyers via a single microsite, attached to a single URL, that records every interaction in real-time.
Predictable Sales Pipeline: The Opportunity Stage
The benefits of DealHub CPQ begin at the opportunity stage of the pipeline.
Discovery and Sales Content
In the past, reps would enter the summaries of their discovery calls manually into a sales tool to be used later. From there, they would use those notes to send content to the buyer to follow up.
In practice, this meant they might send an explainer video right after the call, respond to questions about a specific pain point with a text-based sales sheet, and then answer another email later with a case study. Each of those conversations may or not be delivered in a separate email thread. Even if your sales tool tracks these conversations, there was still no central place for reps and buyers to see everything that’s been sent, or for clean data for management and leadership about how reps are interacting as a whole across the entire team.
This meant your entire revenue pipeline began with your sales reps having conversations with buyers across multiple threads, with no way to centralize data about what was said.
DealRoom is a better way. Reps can summarize their call after discovery, where it will always be available as a reference point. They can then deliver custom content for specific personas and pain points, such as explainer videos and case studies.
Sales Proposal Creation
Having everything during the discovery stage in a single place makes creating a sales proposal easier for reps, and a more consistent experience for buyers, than ever before.
In the past, old CPQ tools were not enough to eliminate manual processes when sending a proposal. Reps needed to manually transfer the quote data, creating additional administrative tasks that undercut the productivity gains of the CPQ and risked errors in the data transfer process.
With DealHub CPQ + DealRoom, our advanced guided selling playbook automatically puts the same information from the quote into the sales proposal, and then puts the proposal in the DealRoom for contract negotiations. It’s a seamless process that ensures proposals accurately reflect the CPQ, which in turn accurately reflects your sales strategy, which in turn starts negotiations off from a position of success as you enter the buying stage.
Predictable Sales Pipeline: The Buying Stage
In the post-proposal buying stage, DealHub empowers sales reps by streamlining contract generation, negotiation, and execution workflow in the three main ways.
First, DealHub’s document generation functionality lets sales reps add text from legal clauses and other contract language, with summary pricing language from a CPQ, and put it into the DealRoom. Buyers can also download a PDF from the DR. This connects the quote to the actual contract language, increasing predictability and visibility by guaranteeing continuity across every contract in the pipeline.
Second, DealRoom’s CLM real-time redlining streamlines contract negotiations. In the past, redlining was a manual and disconnected process. Multiple stakeholders need to be managed across multiple threads, each making changes that may or may not impact what the others were doing. That led to multiple versions of a contract which then needed to be reconciled at the end of the process, causing confusion and inaccuracies. Now, DealRoom lets all stakeholders redline on a single, master version of the contract. Everyone knows what the current version is, making it easier to ensure everything matches up with the sales strategy. And without the need to do version control, the final contract will reflect what was negotiated.
Third, the flow continues with integrated Esign that closes the deal. Instead of yet another round of emails asking for signatures on a finalized version, all stakeholders can go directly to DealRoom and use the DocuSign integration to approve the deal.
Predictable Sales Pipeline: Renewal Stage
Closed/won is just the start of the relationship with a buyer. Renewals, upsells, and expansions from subscription management contracts is a major source of revenue.
It is notoriously difficult to maximize this process. Manual sales contracts mean many don’t accurately reflect upsell and cross-sell strategies. And the lack of an automatic renewal leaves huge liabilities where things might fall through the cracks.
Our DealRoom eliminates these problems. Leadership can configure the rules-engine to account for the upselling and cross-selling opportunities that maximize revenue. This includes which bundles to offer, as well as the nature of the yearly discount structure. Together, that guarantees that every contract offers the correct bundle with the correct terms and conditions, maximizing its revenue impact.
Analyzing your pipeline: advanced data analytics
Connecting your entire revenue pipeline is just the first step towards achieving more revenue. It must be continuously analyzed and improved to achieving maximum revenue impact.
DealHub CPQ + DealRoom provides visionary leaders with advanced data analytics that let you analyze every stage of your pipeline, as well as the overall pipeline results, so you can make adjustments.
DealHub’s CRM and ERP integrations let you collect clean data about your entire opportunity-to-close cycle. You can see which deals closed or didn’t, and then dig into the data to see why. This lets you learn what works and what doesn’t. Having This long-term data set provides invaluable insights for how your processes work together to translate into revenue.
DealHub also provides real-time notifications when buyers interact with your content. This gives your sales reps an edge by letting them know when interest in the content is high. That way, they will know when the time is right to ramp up their contact and try to close the deal. In addition, reps will know when there is little interaction and can decide to either step in and try to save the deal, or realize it is no longer worth their investment and move on.
Taken together, DealHub’s long-term and short-term data capabilities give you the ability to optimize your overall sales and revenue strategies, and also tactically capitalize on every individual deal in your pipeline.
To learn more about how the Revenue Platform empowers teams to move leads down the funnel, close and expand more sales, and grow revenue in one fluid sales motion, request a demo.
