3 Ways to Help Your Team Close Deals Faster Using Success Plans
The familiar routine gets underway when the quarter is drawing to a close. Sales leaders get into that highly pressuring situation when forecast numbers start to slip, deals aren’t closing as expected, and that feeling of urgency starts to creep up.
This is often because the root of this problem is the lack of visibility into deal health, thereby making the identification and resolution of the issues difficult to do in time. Success Plans provide the mutually agreed-upon action plan that equips the sales teams with better visibility into the deal, helping them close through more effectively and faster.
Understanding the Need for Success Plans
First, it is very important to understand why Success Plans are necessary before getting into how they can help specifically. Sales processes are complex, with a lot of stakeholders involved, each with their priorities and timelines. Without a clear and structured approach, deals can very easily get stuck or fall apart. Success Plans give a codified system that allows not only the sales team but also the buyer to be on the same wavelength regarding what should happen and when that should happen. That alignment is what keeps the momentum going to drive deals to a successful close.
1. Get Full Access to Deal Health, Mitigate Risk via Dashboard View
Among the worst things in sales to happen to a forecast is to be dependent on a few large deals, then find those delayed or fall through completely. Without a clear view into all the deals in their pipeline, this tends to occur all too often for revenue leaders, sending them out of sight and out of control. Without this kind of visibility, it’s almost impossible to coach reps on the right deals, to disqualify bad leads, and to scale the sales process transparently and collaboratively.
Success Plans addresses this through a dashboard view—a complete view of all the deals of his team at one glance. It shows managers which opportunities are at risk and demand immediate attention, so they can spend more time focusing on critical issues rather than searching for details.
The dashboard view enables the sales leaders to understand if a big deal in jeopardy is on track, delayed, or in trouble. They can then drill into the detail to determine why it’s delayed and work with their sales reps to get it back on track before it’s too late. With this kind of proactive approach, deals can be closed in time, and the revenue targets can be met.
2. Drive Your Team to Accelerate Deals and Improve Win Rates by Using Buyer Engagement Signals
Sales Leaders mostly complain that they hardly know where deals are stuck, and they usually get vague responses from their reps. That is something that may slow down the velocity of sale and win rates. One of the complaints that have been rampant among sales leaders is not knowing where the deals have gotten stuck.
When they ask their reps for updates on that, it is always common to get vague responses, which delay further, thereby missing out on opportunities. Buyer engagement signals solve this problem by alerting the seller and the manager as to when one of the buyers engages with the mutual action plan through an activity like viewing, sharing, or downloading for example. This gives on-the-spot insight into how interested buyers are, and whether the sales rep is engaging the right stakeholders, hence proving to be imperative in moving the deal forward and keeping the sales reps focused on the right opportunities.
By paying attention to the right signals, sales representatives can focus their time and resources on those deals most likely to close, thereby improving win rates and accelerating the selling cycle.
For instance, when one can be certain that the buyer has not shared the mutual action plan with the decision-makers on the buying committee, or when none of the resources your sales representative has shared have opened, it becomes crystal clear that either the buyer is not intent on the deal, or they have already started working with other companies.
3. Streamline Sales Process with Quick-Start Blueprints
Success Plans also provide quick-start blueprints for standardization, defining the sales process on behalf of the sales managers. In other words, these are blueprints that provide a template. The template drives consistency, reinforces best practices, and enables new hires to ramp up more quickly. One of the best ways to assure that consistency and improvement of results are achieved is to standardize the sales process. Success Plans enable sales managers to create templates with the type of deal and set of steps to follow using quick-start blueprints.
Quick-start blueprints define the steps need to be taken to drive a deal towards completion. This reduces the time it takes to close deals and enhances sales efficiency overall. These are the guides that take the reps through and make sure that reps don’t miss any key steps or fail to progress deals. Consistency is critical when building a high-performance sales team and driving long-term success.
Conclusion
Where it becomes more and more important as the quarter closes to close with a bang. Success Plans do more than provide unparalleled visibility into deal health; they provide overall business planning, budgeting, and enterprise risk management. With these strategies in place, sales leaders may drive their teams to speed up close times, heighten win rates, and make the processes of selling much more efficient. Well, the good thing with Success Plans is that their benefit extends beyond merely accelerating deal closure; even the sales teams are guaranteed efficiency, focus, and success. With a clear framework for success, these plans ensure every member of the team is working toward the same goals and that deals are closed quicker, more accurately on target.
