The Salesman.com Podcast How To Use Deal Management To Win More Business, In Less Time | Salesman Podcast
As a sales professional, you'll often find yourself working on more than one deal at once.
You'll hold conversations with different people with different needs and viewpoints. You want to close each of these effectively to ensure you keep smashing your sales quotas.
Staying on top of all this can leave you overwhelmed, confused, and sometimes lost.
Luckily, effective deal management can help simplify and organize the various aspects of your sales deals and improve your performance, efficiency, and conversions.
How Can Deal Management Help You Become a Better Sales Professional?
Effective deal management can drastically improve your sales performance. Here are the three most significant benefits of deal management.
Greater Preparedness
Having a deal process provides you with all the necessary information and tools to help you make informed, versatile decisions.
Suppose your manager is unavailable for a client call due to a bad connection. If your organization has a well-defined deal management system, you can:
- Speak on behalf of your superior
- Make the best decisions using the information available to you
- Keep the deal moving forward
You'll be better prepared to pivot and respond to situations and can create a more resilient and sustainable organization that recovers faster from setbacks.
Better Consistency
Your ultimate goal is to close as many deals as you can. But to achieve this, you have to eliminate any human error or personal preference-caused inefficiencies. Having a clearly defined deal management process makes this possible.
With refined deal parameters in place, you can engage proactively with prospects as per the set standard. What's more, having a repeated process will also strengthen your selling skills, helping you deliver consistent and improved client experience throughout the sales cycle.
Shorter Sales Cycle
Time can be a sales rep's best friend or the worst enemy. Whether it's your friend or enemy depends on your management style.
We've found that the longer the sales cycle, the less likely is the prospect to convert. Why? Many things can go wrong if the deal gets dragged. For instance, the prospect may lose interest or have another urgent matter to attend to; a pandemic might hit… anything can happen.
With a carefully established deal flow management system, you can speed up your sales process while maintaining an excellent prospect-rep relationship and providing a solution-based engagement.
What Are the 5 Stages of Deal Management?
Deal management is an entire process designed to inform you what to expect when selling and ensure optimal deal management. It can be broken down into five stages to streamline your processes, letting you make the most of available sales opportunities.
Stage 1: Process Planning
You need to create an effective deal management that can be implemented company-wide. At the same time, your strategy must align with your organization's objectives, needs, and resources.
That's why your deal management strategy should be flexible and streamlined to account for all kinds of client agreements effectively. Consider the following factors to develop an effective deal management strategy:
- What kind of deals is your company working with?
- Who is responsible for the different stages of the sales process?
- What issues have taken place in the past that resulted in a failed deal?
- What resources do you need to implement your strategy effectively?
Answering these questions will help you set the ball rolling for the next stage.
Stage 2: Process Implementation
Once you've outlined your deal management process, it's time to implement it.
We highly recommend using a deal management software tool like Monday.com or HubSpot Deal Tracking Software. You can import your data and onboard your suppliers into a centralized platform, allowing you to set up and execute all your deals with ease.
Onboarding is a critical aspect of the implementation stage. Every person involved in the deal should know about your goals and how to use ideal management software. Otherwise, you'll find yourself resolving tons of errors and issues introduced into the deal management process.
Ensure you and your team are aware of the new process and follow all procedures to the T to make deal management more reliable and efficient.
Stage 3: Pre-Deal
At this stage, you've established the foundation of your deal management process. Next, you'll implement it when creating new deals with your prospects.
If you want the prospect to invest in your product or service, you should focus on the solution and not the product. It's why effective negotiation and overcoming client objections is such a big part of the pre-deal stage.
Ensure you have access to all data that helps you understand the prospect's requirements and then tailor your sales pitch accordingly.
Stage 4: Handover (Optional)
If your organization has a system where the people negotiating the deal are different from people managing it, you have to hand the prospect over to them. On the other hand, if you're responsible for closing the deal yourself, you can skip this and move on to Stage 5.
The thing is, handovers can be tricky. Prospects don't like it since they're back to square one, where they have to communicate with a brand-new person they haven't interacted with before and, more importantly, don't trust.
Your job is to make the handover as smooth as possible, ensuring everyone involved in the deal management process knows what they need to do to see it to its conclusion. Be sure to walk the next person to the details of the deals and introduce them to the prospect to make the transition seamless.
Stage 5: Closing the Deal
This is the stage when you take the plunge and ask for the sale.
Make the prospect feel comfortable about saying yes to the deal. A good strategy is to create a sense of urgency by setting a deadline for the prospect to respond.
Be sure the prospect is aware of the terms of the deal. Once everyone has agreed on the terms and signed the contract, you've got yourself a brand-new customer. Congratulations!
3 Effective Tips for Better Deal Management
Below, we've compiled a list of tips that can help you improve your sales processes and add value to each client or customer experience.
Collect All Relevant Data
Measurable data allows you to initiate quality engagement with prospects, which will ultimately help you close more deals. Think of the whole process as mapping your roadmap before you start your journey: you'll have a better idea of where you're going, where you shouldn't go, and know where others have gone wrong before.
Try to find out more about your prospect—what are their long-term goals, threats to those goals, and their specific pain points. You can then use this information to establish trust and pitch your products or services.
Create Multithreaded Relationships
Sales 101: Never put all your eggs in one basket.
Buying decisions generally involve more than one person. So if your point of contact doesn't have the power to make buying decisions, there's a chance you may not close the deal.
Create a multithreaded relationship, where you connect with more than one person at the company. This will ensure the deal doesn't rely on a single connection, improving your chances of securing a sale.
Stay Patient During the Pricing and Procurement Process
Despite everything going perfect, you can still lose the deal if you don't handle the pricing and procurement process effectively.
You may feel like rushing the last few steps of the deal, but staying patient and strategic is incredibly important here. After presenting your prospect with pricing details, hit pause. Give the prospect time to respond and resist the temptation to throw out a discount to close the deal faster.
Be confident in the way you managed the deal to this point and the value you presented. Trust me, the prospect will notice. If you have successfully established a genuine connection with the prospect, you won't face any difficulty addressing their concerns when they get back to you.
Deal Management Tools
B2B sales teams often need deal management tools to generate intelligent industry insights and visibility of potential commercial growth. Deal management software can often quickly improve the number of deals that can be worked on in real time and reduce operational constraints at the same time.
If you're not happy with your current CRM or deal management software of choice, feel free to drop us an message and we can offer our unbiased opinion on some potential solutions for your business.
Next Steps
Are you thinking to relax after successfully converting the prospect? You don't want to make that mistake.
Following up after the close is critical in effective deal management. Make sure your brand-new customer gets the product or service on time and is satisfied with everything. It'll help you build better relationships, resulting in repeated sales.