It's no secret that one of the main goals of sales operations teams is to reduce the sales cycle length. Reducing the length of your sales cycle is a crucial way to accelerate your revenue.
Streamlining workflows in your deal review process, standardizing quotes are all other ways to enable your sales team to close more deals faster.
But what does Deal Desk have to do with that and how does your Deal Desk strategy drive revenue acceleration for your business?
Depending on your company size, you might have budget constraints for building out a Deal Desk.
Don't worry, you don't need to start with hiring an entire team. As long as you can build the infrastructure of your Deal Desk, you'll be able to empower your sales reps.
The length of sales cycles varies by industry, of course. Some industries like direct-to-consumer have very short sales cycles. But others, like enterprise tech sales, could be much longer.
According to CSO Insights data, 75% of B2B companies take an average of at least four months to win a new customer.
A successful Deal Desk implementation reduces sales cycle length by 40%. And, by reducing the length of the sales cycle, you free up your sales team to keep bringing in more revenue.
If you need proof for your CRO that a Deal Desk is a worthwhile initiative, now you've got it.
Maybe you've been on the receiving end of feedback from your sales reps that contracts take way too long to get over the finish line.
With a Deal Desk Approval Matrix, sales reps and all stakeholders will know which deals won't require multiple levels of approvals and which deals need to go through managerial, Legal, and Finance review.
Implementing a Deal Desk process will keep everyone accountable and make sure sales agreements don't get lost in someone's inbox.
According to the research firm IDC, operational inefficiency can cost a company up to 20-30% of revenue per year.
Even though the status quo might feel uncomfortable, and revenue leaders know something can change, going through change is hard. There is a potential opportunity to improve workflows and automation in your sales process.
Incorporating a Deal Desk framework to automate approvals, update core business systems, and consolidate communication can also be a huge accelerator for revenue in your organization.
Automated Guardrails For Your Reps With RevOps Deal Desk
Create granular rules around sales agreement approvals. Automate approvals for standard deals, while creating rules for approving non-standard deals.
See RevOps for Yourself!
Another benefit of automation in your sales workflows is that it reduces the chance for manual errors. Data integrity can have a significant impact on revenue, and having approvals recorded reduces the risk of losing time fixing data entry errors.
You can leverage native automation in your CRM to build an approval workflow. This way, approvals are contained in one system and not living in the email inboxes of various stakeholders.
Stage names, approval statuses, deal notes are all things that can be changed with automation in your CRM.
For example:
Deal approval status = approved > update deal stage = Deal Approved > send email to prospect with contract for signature > send notification to sales rep
By creating a dedicated Slack channel (if you use Slack, you can use other tools such as Salesforce Chatter or groups in Microsoft teams), you will minimize the likelihood of communications around a deal falling through the cracks.
This also keeps all relevant information to specific deals in one place.
But deal-making is an inherently collaborative process. Even a consolidated Slack channel adds an additional layer of friction when putting together a sales agreement.
Collaborative deal-making decreases friction, increases win rates, and speeds up time-to-close.
RevOps Deal Desk Collaboration lets members of a Deal Desk collaborate in real-time on deal structure, pricing, legal terms, and any other part of an agreement.
Quotes are just one piece of the Quote-to-Cash process within your greater sales process.
What is Quote-to-Cash?
Quote-to-Cash refers to the end-to-end process from configuring an initial quote for a sale all the way through Revenue Recognition.
Source: Revenue Recognition 101: A Guide for Revenue Operations
However, standardizing your quotes is another opportunity to leverage your Deal Desk framework.
Standardizing with templates will give the sales reps guardrails, so quotes fall within the acceptable limits of pricing.
The bonus here is that you can incorporate automation with quoting process - Streamlining workflows and standardization are your friends here.
Use these as a starting point to get your Deal Desk Framework started, even if you don't have a dedicated team.
Your company can still benefit from the process and drive revenue faster.
