Before going on to how to improve the deal closure rate; We would like to ask you few questions on your CRM that is :
1. Does your software answer specifically to your deals ?
2. Filter out the deals similar to this one made in the recent past and what was its outcome?
3. Details on, when we have won a specific deal from a specific location ? Against a specific competitor, What’s the Gross Margin rate or range ?
4. What are the chances of my win at a specific price ?
B2B sales today is not like earlier, it has a lot of decisions to make before closing the deal. And when it comes to solution sales like turnkey solutions, project managements or solutions, MTO’s, or any other kind of custom solution based software, each and every deal in such case is unique and different where every quotation you send here is unique and every negotiation here is challenging.
Let us assume a scenario, where in you are at the last stage of bidding process in closing the sale at the negotiation table. This is of course a strong option for your customer, wherein your chances of winning the sales deal is somewhere between 33% to 50%. The decision you take here is the difference between a sale won or lost.
The important and crucial decisions here at this stage is, whether to quote your pricing low or not ? In case you tell the client that this is the best possible low pricing quotation that you can offer and walk away, Will the client walk away to competitor or stay back to you ?
Here the answer is determined by using your account engagement and mapping & How closely your statement or proposition meets the need of the client compared to your competitor, not only these, partly the answer is also determined by what commercials you have at the table.
For Instance, let us assume that you really have answers for the following questions :
1. At a given price, what is my winning probability ?
2. At a given period of time in this region, How many deals do, I have lost or won against a said competitor (A deal that is similar in terms of providing a solution or its price value)
3. What is our gross margin rate in the specific deals ? Have we won or lost the deal ?
4. Details regarding the recent deals in this account & its outcomes.
5. What is my rate of winning deals against a particular competitor ?
By answering these questions, will you not be able to determine your own results ? So, what do you think ? Why are these answers not available ? What is missing that you are not getting answers to these questions ?
CRM - No doubt, one of the best tool organizations have to manage their sales team and their tasks; it's even great in providing a view right from beginning to the end (right from lead generated to it gets closed). CRM is really crucial no doubt, but it does lack details. Details about the internal pricing or quotation or the solution elements.
For E.g
1. What price do we propose ?
2. What was the final price we provided to the client ?
3. What was the Gross Margin rate ?
4. What are different solution elements ? and many more.
It’s pretty simple, To analyse with the proper sales win ratio, one needs to have a single view of all these internal details along with the client facing elements.
Client Facing Elements are as follows :
1. The pricing we quoted.
2. Our Final Price.
3. Key Competitors, their price.
4. List of solution components.
5. Clients requirements, their terms and conditions.
Internal elements includes the following :
1. Internal pricing mapped to customer offer
2. Rate of Gross Margin at each stage of our quotation provided
3. List of Partners in this deal, their pricing
4. What was the approval given ?
5. List of details excluded
6. Was this deal a one-off ?
7. How do we minimize the risk ?
And, if you have your sales team, it is highly recommended to capture external competitive data as a bonus and to get this done you just have to do the following two things :
1. A system to help you capture â Link â Process â Analyse (The internal and client facing elements)
2. Discipline - A dedicated and a focused team to carefully capture the competitor data into each and every deal they make.
And Yes ! This is the formula to improve the deal closure rate - 1 system + 1 discipline. Once you make sure that both the client facing elements and internal elements are at one place. The Data will start flowing. And we do have such a kind of
bid management tools with us.
Yes, We do agree it’s not so easy but even if the deal closure rate increases by 1 or 2%, you will have a positive ROI ! The core in making sales win loss ratio is having a centralized place like our
bid management tools to cub all the data’s related to bids, pricing, approval and competition. So that you can calculate and club all the data in order to make a winning batter at the negotiation table!