Are you struggling to maintain the health of your sales pipeline, track deals, identify the most potential opportunities, and accurately predict sales? Then, the solution to your problem is implementing a sales deal management process.
In this article, let’s learn about deal management and how to do it effectively for your business.
What is Deal Management?
Deal management is the process of defining specific deal parameters and using them to negotiate and secure deals. These parameters might include anything from a customer’s purchasing history to the status of the product they’re interested in and the discount levels that they’ve recently been granted. Good deal management will also consider operational constraints, using such information to create the best possible deals for a company and its customers.
Sales Deal Management Process
The deal management process is a series of steps that you should take to handle deals effectively and efficiently. Make sure you understand each step of the process to know what to expect and how to optimize deal management.
Here are three common steps of a sales deal management process:
Step 1: Planning the Process
Look at how your sales team has worked with deals from the past to the present. Try to answer questions like:
- Who is responsible for each stage of closing deals?
- At which stage have you achieved the highest revenue?
- At which stage has your team been struggling with?
- What resources has your team been using to manage deals?
- What other resources should you provide your team to help them win more deals?
Step 2: Implementing the Process
At this step, it’s crucial to deploy a solution like Revenue Grid to track all your deals. Such a platform supports automation tools powered by artificial intelligence that helps you know where every deal stands at a glance. You can set up conditions to find the deals that fit your criteria and determine actions on them.
An effective deal management process can’t be achieved without measuring deal performance. Revenue Grid supports in-depth reports about closed deals, risks, revenue, sales stages, and more. You can use sales dashboards to keep track of your sales process and find profitable opportunities.
When integrating Revenue Grid into your tech stack, you should guide your team through learning the software and taking advantage of it for their job.
Step 3: Tracking Deal Performance
Poor deal management can break your business, so you should continuously track the effectiveness of your sales process and adjust accordingly. If a deal wasn’t closed, find out what caused that to happen and anything you should do differently in the future.
Tips for Better Deal Management
Here are two useful tips to help you improve your deal management process:
- Collect all relevant data: The right data is critical to converting an opportunity. You need all the information about prospects, including their historical transactions with your business, engagement, demographics, interest, etc. You also need to know about trends and challenges that come with a deal to determine how likely you can close it.
- Connect with relevant decision-makers: In a company, buying decisions often involve more than just one person. That’s why it’s valuable to have relationships with at least two stakeholders who have the power to influence buying decisions. This way, when you fail to close a deal with a person, you still have a chance to try with another.
Best Deal Management Software
As said earlier, adopting a deal management technology is critical for creating a successful deal management system.
Most deal management tools in the market support standard features like deal pipeline visibility, automation, and analytic reports. That said, not all of them are suitable for your business. The key is to determine what you want to see in your ideal deal management system and then use it to pick the right one.
It’s worth looking at your current customer relationship management (CRM) platform, as some CRMs come with this feature. Deal management in CRM allows you to see your entire deal pipeline and identify which deals bring the most profit. It has limitations regarding sales features, though.
How to Manage Deals with Revenue Grid
Here’s how Revenue Grid can help your sales team handle deals effectively:
- Manage sales pipelines from one place: Revenue Grid allows your sales reps to close deals faster and acquire more deals by giving them the Pipeline Visibility tool to capture, organize, and track all the opportunities that arise. Your rep will have clear and updated visibility into deals across all stages. They can monitor how many deals are in each stage, sort, filter by their expected close date, and make better decisions.
- Arm your reps with actionable deal guidance: Revenue Grid is developed with sales reps in mind. When looking at the dashboard, your rep can quickly get what you’re going with a specific deal, how much revenue a deal can bring, and which deals are likely to go south.
- Turn your sales data into interactive, contextual alerts: Revenue Grid supports three types of revenue signals that are useful to automate and streamline your sales process. The “Next step has been added” signal lets you know when the next step has been added for a deal. The high bounce rate in an email sequence tells you when one of your sequences is performing poorly so you can change or replace it. If there’s no next step planned for a deal, Revenue Grid also alerts you.
Now that you’ve learned what deal management is and how to implement it. That’s your time to start implementing it.