Deal Management: How to Close Effectively Every Time
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You want to give yourself the best chance of closing every deal.
To do this, you’ve got to understand how prospects move through your sales pipeline. Plus, you’ve got to be able to spot patterns that can inform your decision-making. This is exactly what deal management is about. And it can make a big difference to the success of your business.
What Is Deal Management?
Deal management is the process by which you can keep track of everything that’s going on in your sales pipeline. You gain a complete picture of your sales pipeline through deal management, allowing you to track, organize, and analyze deals.
No matter how well you understand the customer journey, it’s difficult to keep track of a complicated sales pipeline. However, with a focus on deal management, you can move deals through the sales process, standardize practices, improve the quality of your deals, and ultimate boost conversions.
It’s not just about getting more deals, but about making deals that work for the seller. The more you understand your sales parameters, the easier this becomes, and the right deal management software can help you to achieve this.
How Can Deal Management Benefit the Sales Process?
Every business naturally has some kind of focus on deal management. Whether that’s a very conscious effort or something that just happens in the background, it can have great benefits for your sales pipeline.
The more you focus on deal management, the better it will be for your pipeline and your revenue, as there are many valuable benefits to it.
Know Where Every Deal Stands at a Glance
Where a deal is in the sales pipeline is vitally important. It can tell you what information the customer is looking for at each stage, what actions they’re likely to take, and what action you need to take.
When you’re interacting with prospects, it’s important to know exactly where that deal stands. If you lose track of this, then it’s going to make your pitch much less effective. With lots of deals all going on at the same time, you need a visual way of seeing where each deal stands in the customer journey, and that’s exactly what deal management can offer you.
With the right software, you have real-time access to all the insights that will help you tailor your approach to that client and their position in the pipeline.
This also allows you to quickly get a picture of how much expected revenue is near closing and which deals need immediate action.
Create Consistency in Deal Processes
Different sales people take a different approach to sales. They each have their own strengths and weaknesses, and naturally, we want to maximize those strengths and limit the weaknesses.
If you can see exactly how each deal progresses and have a collection of data for each deal, then it’s possible to isolate the most effective techniques. When you have a large sales team and each person is working through their own funnel, you don’t have this collective data to inform your processes.
One of the most valuable benefits of deal management is the ability to create consistency in deal processes. You can use what you learn from historical deals to inform the decisions you make in the future, helping to make better deals, and more sales.
Provide Visibility and Oversight
To see what is holding a deal back, you need to be able to look into it in detail. Without deal management, there just isn’t the level of visibility and oversight you need to drill down into a deal and see where improvements can be made.
You’ve got lots of data you can use to help you make better decisions, it’s about bringing it together in a way that offers you insights.
For example, price optimization can be something many businesses deal with. When does it pay to offer a discount and when is it counterproductive?
With greater visibility and oversight, it’s much easier to control these decisions and make sure you’re getting the best possible deal while still getting it over the line.
Best Deal Management Software
The key thing that has made deal management much more accessible for businesses is technology. No matter how complicated your sales processes are, the right software will be able to give you a clear picture of your sales pipeline along with some powerful tools.
There’s lots of deal management software on the market, so the key thing is finding the one that works best with your business.
1. Salesforce
Salesforce is the world’s most-used CRM, but it offers much more besides this. With Sales Cloud’s opportunity management tools, you can streamline your sales process, focus on what’s important, create up-to-the-minute quotes, and keep your team updated.
With a whole host of tools to choose from, Salesforce helps businesses get deals over the line more quickly by enabling them to make better-informed decisions. The best thing about this is that with cloud computing, you can get set up in no time at all, and the software can quickly scale with your business.
2. HubSpot CRM
HubSpot aims to offer businesses a better way to grow. HubSpot’s Sales Hub features contact/deal and task management, email tracking, email templates, document sharing, in-app calling, meeting scheduling, quotes, and live chat to help organize your sales pipeline.
With a host of powerful add-ons, this gives you the ability to focus on deal management to a level that’s just not possible without automation. Get the insights you need in real-time, and approach your sales from a more informed position.
3. Pipedrive
As the name suggests, Pipedrive is all about allowing you to take control of your pipeline. It’s perfectly set up for you to see exactly what’s happening with all your deals at any given moment. This helps you to get a better picture of how deals progress, and how you can streamline this process.
Pipedrive is extremely simple to use and helps you to focus on the actions that need to be taken to progress deals through the sales pipeline. With high-level analytics, you can track performance and see how deal management is having a positive effect on your business.
4. Freshsales
Freshsales is a complete sales solution, providing salespeople with everything they need to progress and complete deals.
Using technology such as AI, Freshsales automates many sales processes, freeing up your salespeoples’ time for the most important tasks. This helps you to personalize engagement, shorten sales cycles, and grow your business.
How Can AI Help in Enhancing the Deal Management Process?
AI can help the deal management process because it can turn data into real-time insights. Businesses collect so much data on their prospects and the way they interact with their business. However, it’s difficult to manually turn this data into useful insights.
With AI, that’s no longer a problem. Data can be collected in a central program. And the software instantly runs through the numbers, looking for patterns that can make a difference to your sales process.
A McKinsey study showed that 80% of businesses that incorporated AI into their sales and marketing saw a revenue increase of at least 5%, so it’s clear that this technology is having an impact.
Conclusion
Deal management is an essential part of understanding how your sales pipeline works and how you can improve it. You need to have a clear picture of exactly what’s happening in each deal and use the data to improve performance.
With the right software, and by integrating the latest technology, you can use deal management to improve your sales performance. By seeing the big picture, you can agree deals that work better for your company, get more deals over the line, and boost revenue.
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