Tag Archives: Sales
Where does “digital transformation” meet your customers? Usually in your sales quotes.
It’s no secret: Microsoft is keen on digital transformation, “reimagining how you bring together people, data, and processes.”
And while many companies are implementing best practices in Microsoft digital transformation (we’ll call it MDT for short, here), just as many customers of those companies are greeting MDT with a collective shrug, saying, “Well, that’s great for you: what’s in it for me?”
They’re right. Because while we focus on MDT for ourselves or for companies we’re equipping with D365 CE, Azure, and Office, the people on the other end — the customers of OUR customers — don’t typically realize the benefits of MDT (or, more often, don’t realize that they’re realizing the benefits of MDT).
But when you put a quote in their hands — a professionally designed, vertically-targeted sales proposal with optimized product and pricing configurations — you are, in effect, also delivering the benefits of MDT to them as well.
If you’re serious about digital transformation as a cornerstone to driving more revenue and optimizing your overall business, then the way you put a quote into their hands is by extending Dynamics with a configure, price, quote (CPQ) solution.
D365 + CPQ = connecting people, data, and processes
The point of MDT is to connect all three — people, data, and process — through your tech. But let’s talk about simply connecting people, first.
Connecting people
When you digitally transform your proposal process by (whether it’s CRM or ERP), you empower your own salespeople to create more effective, more professional sales proposals in about .
Where does this part of MDT reach your customers? In both the process and content of the RFP response they receive from you.
Process-wise, you’ll be able to send a proposal more quickly and cleanly to each prospect, and also be able to more quickly and completely follow-up on each step of the process.
An MDT approach can help transform the content of your proposals as well via a that ensures only optimal pricing and product selections or bundles are presented to your prospect.
As CPQ is a centralized solution, the improvements it delivers are enterprise-wide. No matter what rep might be sending a quote, you’ll know that the look and feel are professional, that the pricing is optimal, and that it made it into the right hands at the right time.
Connecting data (and processes)
helps you collect critical sales proposal data that you might not otherwise be able to capture. And that data can have an immediate impact on process improvements that drive more business.
First the data piece: while most CRM systems, for example, offer metrics around quotes sent and quotes closed, there are many other “moving parts” in the process that should be noted: replies, revisions, etc. When you apply MDT to your sales quoting process, you create the opportunity to uncover new data streams that can give you actionable insights to impact your bottom line.
Sticking with CRM as an example, when you connect this data to the rest of your sales funnel data, you get a clearer picture of what might be the most critical juncture in the process of turning a prospect into a customer: the timeframe when they move from receiving a quote to signing it.
MDT and ROI
When you digitally transform your sales quoting process by adding CPQ to Dynamics, you quickly empower your people and can uncover more data to fuel better processes. And as you’re applying MDT to the closing process, there may be no faster way to realize ROI on digital transformation.
Learn how digitally transformed its sales proposal process and saw quotes times reduce by 50%, errors reduced by 50%, and sales rep onboarding time reduced by more than 90%.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales now offered by iCepts
Microsoft CRM, now called , is now offered through iCepts Technology, Inc!
Since 1980, we have been providing business management and supply chain technology systems to small through mid-sized organizations. In addition to Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems from Microsoft, called , we have, over time, complimented our product offerings with additional inventory management and business applications such as , and solutions. We want to be your “one stop shop” for all of your technology system’s needs.
Now with Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales (CRM), our clients can access a robust application to effectively manage their customers and prospects with a tight integration to other Microsoft systems that we specialize in such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and Microsoft Office. You can have both Microsoft ERP and CRM in one place!
Dynamics 365 for Sales can help organizations stay on track of opportunities, timely follow up on actives and close sales faster through a broad range of advanced Customer Relationship Management (CRM) functionality such as:
- Lead Management
- Goal Management
- Opportunity Management
- Real Time Reporting and Insights
- Sales Process Management
- Account/Territory Management
Learn more about
Posted by iCepts Technology Group, Inc. A.
Take a Tour of the New Sales & Returns Sample Report
We’re excited to introduce a new Power BI sample report for you to play around with. This report includes new features, shows designs factors you should take into consideration when building a report, and has been optimized Power BI Desktop, service, and mobile. You can see how visuals from AppSource can be added to your reports, how they work well with other Power BI visuals, and learn how the Power Apps visual can be used in a report.
Click on the image below to explore the sample in the Community Data Stories Gallery, or Download the PBIX to follow along.
This report shows many powerful features of Power BI in the context of a sales and returns data story. The scenario this report is set in is a company that sells Microsoft themed skateboards and wants to quickly see the state of their sales and returns and analyze how they should modify their operations.
We want to extend a huge thank you to Miguel Myers and Chris Hamill who created this report! Miguel and Chris are members of our team who are truly gifted in bringing together data and design. If you want to follow some of Miguel’s best practices for report design, you can check out his YouTube channel. You can also follow Chris’ blog for Power BI creators, Alluring Analytics, or follow him at his Twitter.
The Sales & Returns report has been structured to have five main pages: Intro, Net Sales, Returns, Return Rate, Market Basket Analysis. In the following sections, we’ll go into the purpose of each of these pages and features to play around with.
The remaining pages in the report are hidden because they have been used to construct tooltips and other parts of the five main pages.
To get the full experience of the sample report in Power BI Desktop, please make sure to turn on your preview features in the report options dialog.
The intro page gives a description of the data story and lets people who are viewing the report know that the report is interactive. If you’re viewing the report in the Power BI service, you can even press the ‘Download PBIX’ button to get the PBIX file and play around with it in Power BI Desktop.
On the right side of this intro page, a gif shows interactive capabilities of the report. Throughout this report, you can go to the visual header tooltip icon (“?”) to see an animated tooltip that shows you different interactive elements within a visual.
If you press on the first small dot in the string of connected dots, the right side of the Intro page will show all the design factors that were taken into consideration when the report was made.
Audience is the intended report consumers. Platform is all the Power BI platforms that this report can be viewed on. UI/UX are the design considerations that the report author considered when building this report. Analysis are the features and capabilities the author included to let report consumers explore more about the data and act on the insights they’ve discovered.
The Net Sales page is the first of two pages in the report that give the state of the business. At the top, two cards are being used to call out the most important KPI’s, which in this case is Net Sales and Units Sold.
Below the KPI’s, are three visuals: Category Breakdown, Store Breakdown, and a Q&A visual.
Category Breakdown shows the net sales of Microsoft themed skateboards, and the visual to the right of it shows net sales by store. When you hover over a data bar in Category Breakdown, a report page tooltip will show up and provide more information about that particular product.
The Category Breakdown and Store Breakdown visuals have buttons at the bottom where you can toggle between the visual and an alternate view. (In Category Breakdown, you can see a tabular view. In Store Breakdown, a map.) These alternate views have been created using bookmarks.
The map visual in this report is the Mapbox custom visual from AppSource. Visuals from AppSource work well with core Power BI visuals. You can still click on them and they will interact with other visuals to relevant cross highlighting or filtering.
The Q&A visual lets you dig deeper to find additional details in the data. It’s a useful tool for report authors to build reports and for report consumers to explore the data. You can follow this link to learn more about how to use the Q&A visual.
At the top of the page, you’ll also see a button that says Key Influencers
Clicking on it will open a view of the Key Influencers visual. In the context of this report, you can use it to analyze the demographics of customers.
There is also a button to see a Decomposition Tree visual.
You can use the Decomposition Tree to drill into any dimension to understand what is driving a key metric. The Decomposition Tree is currently in preview, so if you are viewing this report in Power BI Desktop, please turn on the Decomposition Tree preview feature.
The returns page is set up to have the same structure as the Net Sales page, but with information about returns. You can take the same actions displayed in the Net Sales page and explore the state of Returns.
The Net Sales and Returns pages were also designed for a mobile experience. When you create reports for executives or people who are always on the go, it’s important to think about how you can also optimize your report for mobile. To create a mobile view, go to the View tab in the ribbon, and press Phone layout.
As stated previously, this report can be used to find out the current state of the business and used for analysis to help you take action.
Insights
Starting from the Net Sales page, you can right-click on a data bar to find different insights.
Once you select “Find where this distribution is different”, another window will open as an analysis is being run on your data. This window lets you scroll to explore possible explanations for where the distribution is different, and the visuals in the window are interactive. You can click on data points in the suggested visuals and slice the data by pressing segment buttons.
Drill Through
Another way you can incorporate analysis into your report is to use drill through. Staying on the Net Sales page, if you right click on a data bar, you will see the option to Drill through to two other pages that have been set up for this report: Return Rate and Market Basket Analysis.
Note: In this report, you can also go to the Returns page, right-click on a data bar in “Category Breakdown” and see your drill through options.
Let’s say you want to learn more about XBOX skateboard sales. Once you drill through to the Market Basket Analysis page, on the left, you can learn more about how the XBOX skateboard is performing. On the right is a custom visual cluster map.
The cluster map shows that customers who buy XBOX skateboards are likely to buy XBOX One skateboards as well. Because this report was created for multiple audiences, someone who is in an operations role could even prepare for an influx in sales of a product by pressing “Open Power App” and ordering more skateboards.
Because Power Apps visuals can only be viewed by those who are in the same organization as you, when you press “Open Power App” we’ve embedded a video that shows an example of a Power App you could embed for your own organization.
This is just one of the ways you can use a Power App visual into your Power BI reports to bridge the gap between workflows in your organization. This report empowers its report viewers to take action based on the data in their organization.
“What if”
Going back to the drill through options, you may have noticed that there was another drill through called “Return Rate”. If you right-click and drill through on the OneNote data bar, you are taken to a page that gives information about the returns of the OneNote skateboard.
The visual on the left tell says that the return rate of OneNote skateboards is 55%. The main two other visuals on the page show “What if” analysis. You can change the slicer towards the top of the page and ask, “What if the return rate changes?”
Changing the return rate in the slicer will change the forecast numbers that are projected and the associated visuals.
With “What if”, this skateboard company can learn how their profits can be affected. The “What If” Analysis Forecast visual can also help the skateboard company decide to order more OneNote skateboards in February but decrease their stock of OneNote skateboards in April. Toggling this visual to Extra Profit shows a stacked column chart that displays how much more the company can make by decreasing their return rate.
The large amount of purple in January shows that the company should increase their focus on reducing returns of OneNote skateboards in January and that June may not be impacted by returns of OneNote skateboards very much.
We hope this helps you play around with Power BI and gives you some ideas as to how you can build rich experiences in your reports. As more features are added to Power BI, our hope is to roll out more sample reports so you can see how new features can be used in context. We’ll have sample reports that are designed for accessible experiences, so stay tuned.
How To Be A Good Sales Ops Person
Albert Einstein said: “Try not to become a man of success. Rather become a man of value.” In most organizations, the sales operations job description is vast and diverse, and it’s sometimes a challenge to pinpoint what it takes to become good at sales ops.
One thing is for sure: sales ops should be multi-dimensional, which is not easy because humans can only operate in fixed or known dimensions, as the human brain, as complex as it is, has finite dimensions. Therefore, rather than wasting your time, energy, and effort trying to achieve the impossible or fantasizing about becoming a superhero, focus on the following five most important and pragmatic characteristics that will help you transform into a good sales ops person.
1. Strengthen your technical sales knowledge and skills
You must have a good understanding of the tools, applications, and analytics platforms that you will use to do your job. This knowledge comes through continuous learning and experimenting. You must also have good analytical and statistical skills to quickly understand and explain your analysis.
You should also have a good awareness of the technical terms that are part of every sales conversation, like RoI, BoM, PoC, segmentation, customer classifications, etc. Knowing these technical sales terms helps you collaborate with the sales team.
2. Be creative and improvise
There is no single tool or report that will fulfill your sales team’s complete needs. Always think about improvements that will make things simpler and more relevant. Try to put yourself in others’ shoes and think about what they need to make decisions quickly and accurately. Be ready to act quickly and deliver content with the data, reports, and tools at your disposal.
3. Stay close to the people and business
Don’t confine yourself to your analysis and spreadsheets. Be ready to wear other hats to add value to the business. There could be times when the sales team needs your support with their business, and you should not pull back because it’s not part of your written roles and responsibilities. Instead, seize the opportunity to strengthen your relationship with the team; sales team members are more responsive to sales ops they can trust and rely on. Sometimes just bringing hot coffee to a meeting can make a big difference.
4. Improve your organizational and interpersonal skills
Because sales operations is often a team sport that works across different departments (e.g., sales, finance, controlling, commercial, legal, IT, business applications, etc.), you need to be a strong influencer. Having good communication with others in sales and other departments plays a critical role in your job success.
5. Get the right attitude and mindset
A great sales ops person naturally has a personality that makes them a good fit for the job, such as an affinity for data, business acumen, results orientation, flexible tenacity, problem solving, and diagnostic thinking.
It’s important to know that a good sales ops person must have all the above characteristics; having just one or two will hold you back. Some people are technical geniuses but may not be good at getting along with others; others may be really good at the interpersonal stuff but need help putting together a basic spreadsheet.
In general, to be a good sales ops person, you should be willing to do what other sales ops people are not willing to do. Instead of wishing for things to be easier, work to become better yourself. Try to be well-rounded, someone who is good at all these things and not just great in one. In other words, work to become a jack of all trades, not a master of one.
Your organization’s culture influences its success. Learn about “Understanding Organizational Cultures.”
How to Take CPG Sales to the Next Level
Consumer packaged goods, or CPG, are the everyday items consumers use, such as food, beverages, clothes and household products. These products are ones that require regular replacement or replenishing. Due to the frequency of purchases and the low cost of switching brands, this market is extremely competitive.
E-commerce is now a popular channel through which consumers are purchasing these types of products. With the level of competition, businesses need to find ways to get ahead and stay on top.
All business decisions center around getting the best return on investment. Typically, a sales manager is tasked with determining the best ways to allocate the time and resources of the sales team for the best ROI. However, CPG sales largely rely on field merchandising or marketing reps who work remotely, scattered throughout different territories.
Field sales brings with it different variables that aren’t as prevalent in traditional inside sales roles — such as traffic, weather and various market conditions. However, with all the time reps spend out in the field, and the different variables they face, there is an opportunity to gather data. Field sales data can be extremely beneficial if you can collect and centralize it.
Too often companies make decisions around their products with very little information on the individuality of each market they are selling in. The emergence of technologies to support analytics is changing things by making data analysis much more attainable. Companies are able to gather and analyze data around the different markets they sell to, which is key to making smarter business decisions and getting ahead.
Three critical field sales data metrics can take CPG sales to the next level.
1. The Value of a Single Visit
As it is one of the most important key performance indicators, it’s a serious wonder that so many sales managers are unable to answer the very important question: “What’s the value of a visit?”
I can’t stress the importance of knowing this account KPI. Determining this metric sets the stage for a lot of other decisions. For example, you’ll know where to prioritize your travels when in a limited-time scenario — which is always!
In the above graph, we are comparing the value of a visit over a four-month period. Value of a visit is calculated by revenue/number of visits for each rep in each month. This type of analysis and related graphs could be useful in directing sales reps toward best uses of their time.
2. Visit Cadence and Revenue Output Correlations
Tracking your rep’s location visits is much more about the activities themselves than it is tracking their locations — and your reps need to know that! Actively recording their visit whereabouts and cadence provides foundational data that can be used to understand a visit’s impact on revenue output and other performance output metrics.
Combining location revenue output with visit activities and running correlation analysis will provide insights into which visits have the type of impact on location revenue that your company is hoping for.
After running this type of analysis, it appears that there is no correlation between visits and revenue generated out of a particular location, intelligent sales professionals should begin to consider shifting their attention elsewhere.
It is important to mention that in making this type of determination, one also should consider the type of visit being made. Certain visit types can be more impactful than others (i.e. demonstration events, product training/educational events, general account checkups). Recording the type of event that has occurred is essential in finding correlation coefficients associated with visit types.
In this graph, we are looking for the correlation between number of visits made to an account/store and revenue from the same account/store. We can see the revenue increases as the number of visits made increases. Intuitively, the linear relationship cannot go forever, since there will be a point where an extra visit to a store/account will not bring extra revenue expected. In analytical terms, this point is considered where rate of diminishing returns start. By analyzing more data, we can find the optimum number of visits that should be made for an account.
3. Visit Duration
Thirty minutes? An hour? Three hours? Reps often have some flex in determining how long they will tend to an account. However, uncertainty about the appropriate amount of time to designate for a visit is coming to an end — and it should be, considering today’s available technology.
Accurately tracking the amount of time a rep spends on location combined with performance output data of said location lends itself to an incredible insight metric: the inflection point where the law of diminishing returns starts.
This metric is important because it informs sales professionals of the optimal amount of time to spend on location before ROI starts to depreciate, allowing them to reduce costs and head to other accounts.
In this graph, we are looking at the correlation between duration of a visit and revenue. Here we tried to find the time where the rate of diminishing returns starts. In this analysis, that point is 51 minutes, which means each additional minute spent in a store/account will bring less revenue.
Whether in field sales, marketing or merchandising, sales professionals should expand their level of thinking as it relates to sales operations and execution. The available technology provides a platform for deeper thinking around performance, strategy and execution.
In a world where the CPG space is being impacted significantly by the “Amazon Effect,” brands have to become smarter and more efficient in order to remain competitive.
Austin Rolling is the cofounder and CEO of
Outfield. As a third-generation entrepreneur, he started his first company, a fashion website, at the age of 20. He holds a BA in Communication from Eastern Michigan University and an MBA from Texas A&M University. He has spent the majority of his career working in the consumer goods and IT space in field sales and marketing, management, and business development roles.
Squash the Beef! How Marketing Automation Can Help Bring Sales and Marketing Together
When most people talk about marketing automation, the discussion is usually centered around how this powerful software can help attract consumers, engage prospects, and turn solid leads into genuine opportunities. What often gets left out of the conversation, however, is how Sales can reap the benefits of marketing automation to have more productive conversations with more interested leads who are more inclined to make a purchase and remain loyal customers and brand advocates.
And therein lies the true beauty of marketing automation: At long last, this technology has officially squashed the age-old beef between Marketing and Sales! (Well, maybe that’s a bit generous, but it’s definitely a step in the right direction.)
Let’s take a closer look at how marketing automation can help bring Sales and Marketing together at long last!
Improve Data and Visibility
Modern organizations are far more concerned with hard data than old stories and gut feelings, which is one reason marketing automation is such a good fit for businesses of all shapes, sizes, and industries. Whereas data used to be manually collected from disparate channels and then clumsily cobbled together, marketing automation can aggregate accurate and attributable data from disparate channels to trigger personalized campaigns and provide a clearer picture of your holistic efforts. And when you integrate it with a trusted CRM, you can gain visibility into the entire sales cycle — from that initial website visit to the closed deal to customer evangelism.
For instance, you can use marketing automation to collect crucial information that allows you to track user behaviors (page visits, webinar attendance, content downloads, etc.) and then nurture those prospects with remarketing initiatives, automated email campaigns, and increased attention on their preferred social media platforms. If your marketing automation platform is connected to your CRM system, you can filter all of these interactions to your Sales team who can use this visibility to better understand the prospective customer and tailor a more informed game plan that they can leverage when the time is right.
Marketing automation isn’t just for new leads, either. In many ways, your existing customers are actually far more important than any potential business you might land because they, y’know… already exist. You can use marketing automation to collect customer behavior and engagement data and then use that information to coordinate with your account management team to formulate effective retention, advocacy, and upsell programs (always taking care to segment your audiences, of course).
Regardless of whether we’re talking about promising leads or loyal customers, the point is that building a dependable and user-friendly MarTech stack with marketing automation as your foundation helps sales and marketing teams to take a more holistic approach to the sales funnel. So when Prospect A performs Action B they’re hit with Campaign C — and everyone has transparent visibility into those activities for more targeted marketing and productive sales conversations.
Personalize Your Outreach
All of this awesome data and visibility gives marketers the power to create and deliver more personalized messaging and content through advanced segmentation. When you understand your customer’s motivations, you can beat them to the punch by delivering highly targeted campaigns and outreach in anticipation of their pain points and actions. And it’s this level of personalization that brings great customer journeys to life.
Let’s say someone clicks on a Google ad and downloads a specific piece of content, you can then filter them into a topic-based automated nurture email campaign. Once they begin to engage with your emails (opens, clicks, conversions, etc.), you can review those behaviors to gain an even clearer understanding of what they’re interested in and how your products and services might benefit them.
Assuming you’ve integrated your CRM with your marketing automation platform, your sales team can also use the information collected through your marketing efforts to personalize their touchpoints. They might want to share a specific piece of content with them on LinkedIn, for example. Or they might send an email mentioning how they noticed that they registered for one of your upcoming webinars and reminding them of the key details. And, of course, armed with this behavioral and demographic data, they can prepare themselves for more engaging phone conversations.
Perhaps most importantly (at least for content marketers like me), marketing automation helps improve your content strategy because it helps you understand what’s working and what’s not. In the modern age, relevancy is the name of the game, and marketing automation empowers marketers and salespeople to deliver relevant content and information to interested audiences. Is a certain blog, eBook, or webinar not getting great results? Give it an honest look, sunset or update (if salvageable) the asset, and modify your efforts moving forward.
Pass Warmer Leads to Sales
For most organizations, the ultimate goal is more sales and more revenue. But it’s not as simple as placing a product in front of a consumer and asking them if they want to buy it. You have to attract potential consumers with great brand marketing, establish credibility and gain trust through educational and engaging thought leadership content, and then guide your prospects along a compelling and informative customer journey. If you’re unable to accomplish all three, you’re not going to succeed as a marketing department because your sales team won’t have the information they need to convert leads into customers.
This is where marketing automation comes in. The right platform will have all the tools and features you need to accomplish the goals you set forth in your marketing plan. Unlike traditional email service providers (ESPs), marketing automation helps you go far beyond email marketing to execute at every level of the customer journey. Quality platforms like Act-On have everything you need to capture and nurture great leads to fuel your demand generation efforts and get those prospects in the door — including website prospector, the SEO audit tool, landing page builder, adaptive forms for progressive lead capture, and alerts to notify your salespeople when a lead takes an important action.
All of these unique features help provide sales teams with much-needed air cover as they attempt to drive more opportunities, wins, and revenue. They work together to build a relationship between the prospect and your organization, turning cold prospects into hot leads that are more inclined to listen to what your sales staff has to say and become legitimate opportunities.
Save Time, Resources, and Headaches
The bottom line is that marketing automation is extremely effective. It’s also extremely efficient and can help your sales and marketing teams save time and resources — allowing them to focus on developing the creative and persuasive techniques that make them so good at their jobs. And while marketing automation is often linked most closely to email marketing, it’s capable of so much more (like, a lot more).
For example, in addition to automated email campaigns, marketers can use the software to:
- Automate organic and paid social media campaigns
- Track website activity and behavior
- Dynamically deliver personalized content
- Score and segment leads
- Develop and execute remarketing campaigns
- Gather and distribute actionable data
Likewise, marketing automation can make salespeople’s lives so much easier by:
- Eliminating cold calls
- Providing useful information for productive conversations
- Accelerating the sales cycle
- Allowing them to troubleshoot in real-time
- Building trust prior to interaction
- Centralizing lead information
As you can see, marketing automation (especially when integrated with a CRM system) allows one hand to wash the other. Marketing gets to attract and nurture leads on their own terms while sales can do their job with more engaged leads. And it does so efficiently, saving everyone time and resources and eliminating unnecessary manual labor that previously led to added stress.
Integrate Act-On With Your MarTech Stack for Better Results Across the Board!
Well, there you have it. Marketing automation isn’t just for marketers; it’s helpful for your entire organization!
And if you really want to take things to the next level, you should explore all the different ways you can integrate third-party tools to build out a lean, mean revenue-generating machine. While we’re on the subject, Act-On has more than 250 APIs and integrations — including native integrations with several of the leading CRM systems, such as Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, SugarCRM, and Pipeliner (just to name a few).
If you’re not sure how connecting your marketing automation software with a CRM system can improve your bottom line, please download our eBook, “How to Automate Your Marketing Your Marketing With a CRM System.” It’s full of great information about how integrating your CRM system with a marketing automation platform helps businesses:
- Enable sales and marketing alignment
- Generate, nurture, and pass leads more effectively
- Gain more visibility into the sales cycle
- Achieve greater ROI and track results
To learn more, please book a demo with one of our marketing automation experts!
How to Accelerate Your Sales Cycle: CPQ Integrated with Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales
How important is it to you to respond quickly to customers’ requests for price quotes, and to produce accurate proposals that reflect their unique specifications?
Sales leaders we’ve spoken with agree that delivering accurate quotes in a timely manner helps their teams close deals faster. If you agree, then integrating leading-edge technology that ensures your sales team has the tools they need to accelerate their sales cycles should be high on your list of priorities for the upcoming year.
CPQ Partner Apps for Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales
In April 2019, that Dynamics 365 for Sales had partnered with the “best CPQ solution providers to deliver deep product integration with Dynamics 365 for Sales.”
These partnerships allow sales organizations to harness the power of configure-price-quote (CPQ) solutions to quickly, consistently and accurately configure their pricing and produce quotes from within their Dynamics 365 for Sales environment.
So What is CPQ?
(also known as Configure-Price-Quote) is a tool that integrates natively with Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales to accelerate deals by quickly producing price quotes and sales proposals. Product configuration options and pricing rules help sales reps create quotes in minutes without the need for Excel spreadsheets and manual calculations.
A sales playbook guides reps through the quote creation process to ensure customers are getting the right products at an optimized price. By reducing error-prone manual tasks, a CPQ helps businesses streamline their sales process and helps move deals along the pipeline.
Below are the ways CPQ and Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales work together to increase efficiency. Consider making the integration before your 2020 sales kickoff so your sales team can achieve better results in the new year.
The Benefits of CPQ-Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM Integration
reported on the benefits of CPQ in their study on best-in-class organizations. Let’s take a look at 4 of these benefits and how they will help your sales organization raise the bar on performance against goals and elevate the customer experience.
CPQ Improves Organizational Capabilities for Faster, More Profitable Sales Deals
Source: Aberdeen Group, March 2015
Improved Sales Team Response to Request for Quotes
Sales reps who don’t use CPQ waste time searching for updated pricing sheets, supplier lists, sales assets, and proposal materials because they’re not integrated into the workflow.
Aberdeen’s research revealed that CPQ users ship an average of 21.9 proposals per rep per month, versus 9.9 proposals per month per rep for companies that don’t use CPQ.
Lack of efficiency affects not only response time, but quote accuracy as well. When sales reps use Excel spreadsheets or stand-alone tools that aren’t integrated with their CRM, it’s difficult to respond to requests for quotes quickly and the chances for error increase significantly.
Generate Complex Quotes with Ease
In a separate , 86% of organizations that use CPQ report that their sales reps are kept well-informed of pricing, promotions, and suppliers (compared to 73% of non-CPQ companies).
A CPQ is updated in real-time and gives sales teams a single source of truth about current pricing, promotions, supply levels, and discounts and allows sales reps to generate complex quotes easily. CPQ integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM ensures an automated, streamlined workflow from which sales teams can rapidly produce error-free proposals, quotes, and other sales documents.
Pricing and discounting rules built into the CPQ ensure a degree of flexibility in pricing that gives sales reps the agility to manage pricing by exception without the need to check with managers. Customers appreciate not having to wait for approvals and it gives them greater confidence in your organization.
Use of Personalized Quote, Proposal and Contract Templates
Templates are an essential part of automating the sales process and the CPQ solution will be a central repository for quote, proposal and contract templates. This ensures all quotes that go out are on-brand, follow pricing and discounting rules, and adhere to legal and regulatory guidelines.
Templates are a great way to streamline proposal and quote production, but customization and personalization are crucial to ensuring customers feel like they are not just a number. Personalization helps build trust with customers and CPQ software pulls customer information and data from the CRM into the proposal to reflect customer needs and previous conversations.
Avoiding “No Decision” Sales Losses
The Aberdeen study brings up an interesting point about “no decision” sales losses and how CPQ helps eradicate these disappointments. The study reveals that 39% of sales organizations that use CPQ are able to avoid “no decision” sales losses, compared with 19% of companies that don’t use CPQ.
CPQ-enabled sales teams use , and workflow of questions, to gather deal specifics and plug them into the software. Information such as buyer data, product requests, and time constraints are entered into the CPQ early in the opportunity management process. Armed with this data, sales teams can evaluate the deals to learn, based on predictive analytics, which are destined to win or fail.
A Stronger, More Efficient Sales Team
CPQ enables your sales team to be more efficient, respond faster, and use data to learn where to focus their efforts.
Are you ready accelerate your quote to cash cycle? Integrate CPQ with Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales and you’ll soon see that your sales team is celebrating more closed deals and happier customers.
DealHub.io is a . Learn the advantages of DealHub CPQ integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales in this video:
4 Big 2020 Sales Enablement Predictions
Now is the time when growth-minded organizations and their sales leaders begin to evaluate this year while looking ahead to the next. It’s a time to identify opportunities for improvement, anticipate industry changes, and solidify a sales strategy that will align with the evolving expectations of business-to-business buyers, emerging technologies, and the company’s business goals.
Read on to discover what you can expect in 2020 on topics like the sales development rep role, decision making around tech adoption and implementation, sales leaders as online influencers, and more.
The Changing SDR Role: Real or Robot?
Prediction No. 1: In 2020, look for AI to increasingly help augment sales teams but not replace them.
2020 is not the year of the robot. While we’ve let artificial intelligence infiltrate many areas of our personal lives via smart home assistants that tell us when to wake up, workout and buy milk, it hasn’t quite made its mark on the B2B sales organization yet.
By 2020, 30 percent of all B2B companies will employ artificial intelligence to augment at least one of their primary sales processes, according to Gartner. This means an overwhelming majority of sales orgs are not yet on board.
AI is just starting to realize its promise of improving sales organizations through increases in efficiency, reduction of costs, and improved revenue streams.
We’ve made a great deal of progress since I first started in sales, and technology has been the biggest driver of that progress. I know the rate of iteration increases forever, but we still have a long way to go before the average company would trust its brand and reputation to full automation.
Why? Because technology — as it stands today — cannot replace a human connection. While AI may be faster and in many cases smarter, it can’t pick up the phone and build rapport, and most of the time it can’t close a high-ticket sale. We still need people for that.
Techstacks Continue to Grow
Prediction No. 2: In 2020, the tech stack will continue to grow, rather than shrink, as long as efficiency follows.
In 2020, I see less focus on the “cost” of sales tech and more emphasis on the return on investment, or outcome.
The average annual spend on sales technology was US$ 4,581 per rep per year and spans an average of 5.2 categories of sales tools per rep, according to InsideSales. The top categories of sales tools include CRM, social prospecting, presentations, pipeline management and data/list services. New sales tools launch every day, it seems, with promises to increase sales productivity, leads or closes.
While cost always will be a factor, what really counts is that these tools help enable sales reps to make touches faster and spend more time focusing on strategic, relationship-based sales activities. We’re starting to have more respect for the multiplier effect or efficiency gains you can get from these tools.
A New Generation of Tech Buyers Has Emerged
Prediction No. 3: In 2020, if brands don’t make a significant change in how they do business with millennials, they’ll surely fall behind.
Millennials — now in the 23-38 age range — make up more than
a third of the workforce.
Members of this generation commonly are involved in making Software as a Service purchasing decisions.
More than 45 percent of the 430 B2B technology buyers TrustRadius surveyed for its B2B Buying Disconnect research study were millennials — the most of any age group looking into B2B products and services.
I know that some brand teams today are designing content and messaging specifically for the “new” generation of technology buyers, but for me it’s more an overall shift in the way we do business in the sales industry. I can’t imagine the older generations in my family doing business the way modern sales teams do now.
The entire dynamic has changed, and I think that makes it really easy for us to fail to realize this messaging/tactics shift already has begun in earnest.
Case in point: “Vendors who were very influential during the purchasing process were twice as likely to be open about product limitations and connect buyers with current customers,” the TrustRadius report found. This is a fundamental shift away from how most of us are used to selling.
Sales Leaders to Make Their Brand Personal
Prediction No. 4: In 2020, if your No. 1 delivery method is still just standing up on that soapbox and screaming your message, you’re missing the mark and the ideal opportunity for brand building.
In 2020, successful sales leaders are sales influencers. The way humans interact with and consume information has changed. We’re mobile, always connected, and using technology to share and ingest massive amounts of data.
It may be a cliche, but the fact is people buy from those they know, like and trust. Today, the best way to get to know, like and trust someone is by consuming their content online.
Look at sales Influencers like
John Barrows,
Max Altschuler, and
Becc Holland.
They frequently post written, visual and audio content to build their brand and expertise. I predict a rise in the trend of sales leadership following suit to further elevate their companies, as well as their personal brands.
Look for more sales leaders to write thought leadership articles, appear on podcasts, create videos, and find other interesting ways to share their ideas online, solidifying their subject matter expertise to their core audiences.
Agility Matters
The B2B sales industry is changing rapidly, thanks to emerging technologies, a growing tech stack, a new generation of B2B buyers, and changes in the way we consume data, build trust, and make purchasing decisions.
2020 is the beginning of a new decade, and sweeping changes lie ahead. Sales teams that adapt to evolving customer expectations, while leveraging tools and technology to increase productivity, will gain a competitive advantage over those that remain stuck in their ways.
Joe Caprio is VP Sales at
Chorus.ai.
4 Ways Legal and Sales Can Collaborate
In order to win and close deals successfully and quickly, sales and legal need to maintain a united front. This means being on the same page when it comes to contracting, as a significant portion of their work together is creating, negotiating and sending contracts.
However, whereas legal wants to double- and triple-check that the terms are suitable, sales wants to send a contract off as soon as possible and shorten the time to closed-won.
Though sales cycles are different across businesses and industries, most cycles follow a similar path:
Prospect > Lead > Discovery > Opportunity > Proposal > Close
Because each business and industry measures its sales process differently, it is hard to determine the average length of a sales cycle.
Nearly 75 percent of respondents to a CSO Insights study reported that their sales cycle for new business-to-business customers took at least four months.
On the other hand, the average sales cycle length was 102 days, Geckoboard found.
Still, we can deduce that a quarter is the average selling time for industries across the board.
Identifying the Bottlenecks
External factors also might influence the length of your sales process. Enterprise deals, for example, may take longer than deals with small and medium-sized businesses. Warm inbound leads might close more quickly than cold outbound leads. Inefficiencies at every stage of the sales process can and will cause bottlenecks.
However, contracting is one of the biggest bottlenecks in the sales cycle, and is notorious for impeding sales velocity. As many as 85 percent of sales contracts still are executed manually, and with approximately 40,000 contracts within an enterprise, sales and legal typically spend more time than necessary on contracts that can be automated.
Following are some ways sales and legal each can provide cross-functional support for the other to ensure that the business wins the deal in a shorter time with little to no legal risk.
1. Decreasing Time to Sign
Much of the bottlenecking in the sales process happens around slow or traditional contracting processes. Eighty-six percent of respondents to a SpringCM study noted that contracting took anywhere from two to six weeks. The longer it takes for contracts to be reviewed, redlined and approved between the transacting partners, the longer it takes for the deal to close.
Traditional contracting manually slows down the sales process, leaves a lot of room for human error, and often gives legal more work to do than necessary.
To mitigate this, sales and legal should decide collaboratively what their ideal contracting workflow looks like, and jointly choose a solution that works for both parties.
Ideally, the contracting would be based on the natural workflow of the signer. Customers constantly on the go will take longer to review and accept a contract sent via email than one sent via SMS.
Even better, divide your contracts into standardized (contracts that have little if any changes no matter who is the recipient, like Terms of Service, nondisclosure agreements and certain service level agreements) and personalized (contracts that are “one off” and that have provisions specific to a signer), which will save you time on contract creation and negotiation.
Clickwrap agreements can help with seamless, enforceable acceptance of both standardized and personalized online contracts, and allow sales teams to meet customers wherever they are.
2. Defining the Sales Process
While sales will take the lead in defining the sales process, legal needs to have input, especially when it comes to bottom of the funnel. Sales teams might hesitate to do that because legal tends to take a long time in drafting contracts, wanting to make sure that everything is perfect.
In order for both teams to work together seamlessly and decrease time between opportunity and closed-won, sales and legal both should define the point in the stage that legal should enter, what will be needed from the legal team, and an ideal turnaround time.
An ad hoc sales process can lengthen time to close and create confusion. The lack of standardization can input more guesswork into your sales process and make each stage longer, or prevent a deal from closing at all.
The more rigorous the funnel, the more likely sales is to win a deal, studies have shown. This means understanding metrics in detail, knowing what kinds of contracts will be needed, working with legal to prepare them in a timely manner, and holding regular pipeline reviews to talk about deals at the top and middle of the funnel, including what their contracting needs might be.
Waiting until the end of the funnel to be rigorous in the process can lead to a longer cycle length.
3. Integrating Contracts Into CRM
Collaboration between legal and sales can lead to a more streamlined way of bringing contracts into the sales process. One step above that would be getting new customers to sign contracts in the environment where they spend most of their time, namely their CRM, or source of truth.
Sales teams often leverage their CRM as their source of truth to track opportunities and contacts and their progression along the sales pipeline. If a sales team spends most of its time in the CRM application, it would be easier to send contracts to opportunities without ever leaving it.
This not only allows contracts to be signed more quickly, but also means there’s a series of standardized templates that legal can draft, and that sales can use in specific deal types or instances that meet certain criteria.
This kind of integration allows faster and easier contract signing since they’re sent straight to clients for easy acceptance. Additionally, it allows for more valuable data in contracts. It also helps with contract execution in upsells, cross-sells, and renewals.
This approach helps optimize recordkeeping in the long run, which helps with transparency and the enforceability of agreements.
4. Drafting a Comprehensive Contract Playbook
Legal can share a sales-friendly version of the contract playbook to educate the sales staff about the company’s standard fallback positions. Within the contract playbook, legal outlines standard contracting terms and acceptable variations, as well as non-negotiable terms and an explanation of which terms are mandatory and why.
More detailed contract playbooks also include possible client objections and workarounds.
A contract playbook reduces the time spent on drafting contracts and going back and forth between legal and sales about how to do contracting.
This includes having an approvals matrix. Having an approvals matrix in place and a delegation of authority can go a long way toward saving time. If an organization does not have one in place, the legal department can work with sales (and other departments when necessary) to implement a policy regarding who can grant which approvals, and when.
The legal team can state explicitly which contracts and agreements are included in the policy, which titles hold which authorities, and specific deal dollar amounts that are approved for various title holders.
Collaborating to Shorten Sales Cycles
If sales and legal approach their relationship as a partnership, sales cycle lengths can decrease dramatically and further the mission of increasing sales velocity. Most of all, alignment on contracts and optimization of workflows in which they are included can impact sales cycles positively and reduce legal’s workload.
This can have a significant impact that not only strengthens the relationship between legal and sales, but also improves the bottom line of the business in general.
Brian Powers is the founder and CEO of
PactSafe and a licensed attorney. As the CEO, Brian leads the strategic vision of the company’s high-velocity contract acceptance platform. Prior to founding PactSafe, Brian’s law practice focused primarily on representing the transactional needs of tech companies. Brian is a frequent speaker, instructor and author on topics ranging from clickthrough contract acceptance to privacy-related consent management.
Analyze LinkedIn Sales Navigator usage data in Power BI
Power BI recently announced the GA of Power BI template apps, allowing Power BI users to gain immediate insights through prepackaged dashboards and reports that are created from a live data source without the need to connect to, model, or visualize the data.
The LinkedIn Sales Navigator Analytics Integration allows teams to seamlessly view and analyze Sales Navigator usage data within Power BI to increase sales effectiveness and maximize productivity.
The LinkedIn Sales Navigator for Sales Operations enables sales operations personnel to identify and analyze things like:
- Who is using LinkedIn Sales Navigator
- When the best day is to send an InMail
- The Social Selling Index across all users
Using the insights found in LinkedIn Sales Navigator for Sales Operations template app, sales operations professionals can:
- Uncover insights faster – Derive valuable insights faster by analyzing and visualizing your LinkedIn Sales Navigator usage data in Power BI within minutes
- Run deeper analyses – Perform deeper analyses and run comprehensive reports by merging other data sources (e.g. HR, CRM, sales acceleration) into one single view
- Optimize sales performance – Measure relationship-building activities and improve team and rep performance by identifying areas of opportunities for training or coaching
The LinkedIn Sales Navigator for Sales Operations template app also allows users to see Sales Navigator data next to data from other sources by pinning them to a common dashboard. For those users who want to mashup Sales Navigator product usage data with data from other sources, a new Sales Navigator connector is also available in Power BI Desktop.
In order to use this template app, you must:
- Have a LinkedIn Sales Navigator Enterprise plan
- Be an Admin or a Reporting User on the Sales Navigator Contract (Note: A reporting license on the Sales Navigator contract does not take up a seat on that contract)
- Be a Power BI user
The LinkedIn Sales Navigator for Sales Operations template app is available for download from AppSource.
You can find out more about how to use the template app at https://aka.ms/pbilisn
To view the full set of LinkedIn Sales Navigator announcements, visit their website here.