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.