If your revenue team meets any of these tell-tale signs, then it’s time to check out a team selling platform to better allocate your deal resources.
Revenue leaders are getting more strategic about when and how support teams are looped into deals. But that's easier said than done, given the increased complexity that characterizes modern enterprise sales.
Today, a single deal can spans over 20 stakeholders. Dozens of internal deliverables requires sales reps to navigate manual and often ad-hoc workflows. Is it any wonder the vast majority of B2B buyers complain about the difficulty of their recent purchase journeys?
As businesses scale, the volume and complexity of your sales, especially upmarket, will demand a new approach to resource allocation. Without a better process, you could be losing opportunities due to unforced errors in your deal support processes. Worse? You might not even know it's happening.
Here are some tell-tale signs that your deal management is leaving money on the table.
In both mid-market and enterprise sales, a variety of departments and specialized experts are needed to move deals towards close. Some of the critical teams and players that might get involved include:
Maybe you’ve tried to appoint a project manager to spearhead this intricate web. But, without the right tools built to manage these workflows, collaboration will ultimately be spread across multiple places, such as docs, sheets, emails, and chats.
Without centralized tracking, it’s impossible to review and optimize these various sales motions and essential information may slip through the cracks.
To wrangle communication around a specific deal, teams will often create a dedicated thread in Slack or Microsoft Teams. In addition to violating the unspoken truth that “no one wants another channel,” there are three main problems with this strategy:
Many teams try to use or build on existing capabilities to manage deal resource allocation. This process is often time-consuming and can be just as expensive (in opportunity costs) as buying a purpose-built solution. Plus, it’s unsustainable: forcing a doc or sheet into complex use cases is like trying to stick a square peg in a round hole.
Take, for example, Salesforce Cases: Since this format was built to work through issues with customers, using them as a way to make internal requests is clunky, inefficient, and an overall poor user experience for your team’s needs. They’re also hard to update and duplicate as you learn about processes and navigate new products, leadership changes, or team needs.
Most importantly, cases — and other ad-hoc tools — don’t provide full lifecycle communication or deal status tracking, leaving teams to revert to using separate comms tools, calendars, etc. to collaborate around deal needs, limiting the data input inside of your CRM.
In order to plan effectively, deal teams need to know how they can rely on each other. That begins with transparency into how long different types of requests will take throughout the deal lifecycle.
If your team isn’t tracking deal deliverables, or internal service-level agreements (SLAs), your reps may be confused about how to efficiently progress and close an opportunity. It’s also hard for managers and sales leaders to assess where deals are blocked or behind schedule, if there’s no central tracking or benchmark.
Defining SLAs only matters if you have live tracking around them as well. If those promises live only in static docs or sheets, and if projects are being conducted across ad-hoc emails and chats, you won’t have any centralized way to review and improve your team performance.
With deal coordination spread across disjointed tools, revenue leaders don’t have the oversight they need to know what their team is working on and where each deal is in the process. Additionally, they don’t know what types of deals the support teams are being pulled into or how effective they are at helping to generate a technical win or closed deal.
If you can't see your deal support teams’ current workload or capacity, then you won't know if they can handle a new project or quick deal need. And, without a set process, sales teams may work with the individual they feel most comfortable with, who’s been on the team the longest, or some other personalized criteria, leading to a disorganized and uneven allocation of deal resources.
If your business meets any of these tell-tale signs, then it’s time to check out a team selling platform like Prelay to help you better allocate your deal resources. Revenue leaders use Prelay to organize their deal coordination within one purpose-built platform, integrated with your key sales software. Our “Assists” workflow streamlines resource allocation and deliverable management, so you can strategically loop the right people or teams into the deal at the right time.
No more unstructured data and lost deal context. No more endless email threads or siloed Slack and Teams channels. Every player gets notified only when they’re needed, and with upfront deal context, reducing the noise and distractions.
With deal coordination in one place, revenue leadership can manage and track the full deal process, and granular reporting is piped bidirectionally to your CRM and other key business and analytics systems. This means you have more visibility into what it took to close your deals, and you can create more consistent, repeatable, and scalable processes across your team, to maximize your winning potential.
