5 ways Deal Desk streamlines sales coordination

If your organization sells complex, high-value deals, a dedicated Deal Desk can make your life a lot easier. Deal Desks give field sales teams the tools they need to configure, price, and quote deals and help them coordinate all the teams that ultimately approve and finalize a sale. In general, organizations that effectively use this tool are empowered to move faster, increase revenue velocity, and improve internal coordination.

If effectively set up, your Deal Desk will help your sales team in five critical ways:

1. Deal Desks help reps construct stronger deals

If you’re not in sales, you may not appreciate how difficult it is to memorize and sell a complex set of products and features, let alone maximize opportunities for upsell, cross-sell and bundling.

With an automated deal desk that includes guided selling functionality, reps can walk prospects through a highly configurable questionnaire to identify the right set of products and services. A good deal desk will also provide real-time actionable data and enable reps to assess what-if scenarios to see how changing deal parameters will impact the deal.

2. Deal Desks automate the opportunity to contract workflow

Manual efforts introduce tremendous risk into your deal, because they increase the likelihood of error. Nowhere is manual effort more common than in the quote and contract process. For many companies, quotes are detached from the contracts, which means all the relevant customer data must be copied and pasted from one system to another, making it really easy to botch a decimal, or copy down the wrong SKU, or miss an important clause.

By leveraging the standard opportunity information and key terms gathered in the sales stage to drive the quote, and then automatically including that information in the contract language, you will drastically reduce risk by eliminating manual errors. As a side bonus, you’ll also be able to shorten sales cycles, avoid contract bottlenecks, and drive more revenue.

3. Deal Desks provide a single view for all stakeholders

By centralizing all of your data within the cloud, where it is accessible by all involved, you can gain greater visibility into the progression of your deal. Know who needs to do what and when, to keep the needle moving and avoid the deal stalling. This will increase your inter-department coordination, shorten sales cycles and enhance your organization’s revenue velocity.

4. Deal Desks ensure mistakes don’t get through

If it’s important at your company to get deals right (and I am sure it is) an automated Deal Desk is a life saver — especially when it comes to automating and streamlining the sales approval process.

With an automated deal desk, parameters can be set to ensure reps are creating deals that are not only good for their quota, but for the company as a whole. This includes specific rules that prevent rogue discounting and ensure compliance with existing agreements, pricing term, and financial agreements, but it also includes rules around up-sells, preferred product lines, rebates, automatic increase clauses and more. By fast-tracking deals that meet the targeted mix of products, services, discounts and commitments desired by the company, the result is increased efficiency, reduced errors and better margins on deals.

5. Deal Desks enable self-service for customers

The cherry-on-top of an effective Deal Desk is the ability to offer a customer-facing catalog, usually in the form of an e-commerce channel, which allows buyers to navigate product offerings, review items they want to purchase and move quickly to transact business.

You’re able to eliminate manual steps, lower selling costs, and literally turn deals in your sleep. In effect, you are capable of transforming how you go to market, organize price structures and present a unified brand. This investment begins the omni-channel transformation; pivoting from an informed, responsive sales force to an equally informed e-commerce customer.