Much like an F1 dashboard the information and data on a deal dashboard can allow a team to win or lose a race. With poor decisions in a race, you may speed off too quickly, run out of gas or blow your engine, forcing a driver to lose the race. A deal dashboard allows you to make well-informed decisions with good governance that leads to quick and considered decisions about a deal; whilst conforming with rules and regulations. In turn, this gives your organization the best chance of winning the metaphorical race to sign a good deal.
Even a race on a straight track can become complex when conditions such as the rain, heat, or last minutes changes come into effect, the same can be said for a seemingly ‘simple quote’. Simple quotes are fine, but customers want more commercial flexibility as they contract for services over extended terms. Smaller customers are now beginning to demand the same flexibility and responsiveness as large customers and deal dashboards are a key factor in making these transactions efficient. It’s important to win deals but it’s even more important to make sure these are ‘good deals’ for your organization. A deal dashboard allows you to quickly assess whether a deal or race is worth winning. Make sure you win the deal with good governance, appropriate margins, quick data analysis, and confidence that you’re signing a deal that will hit key metrics for your organization.
The first lap of a race rarely determines the winner of the race, the same can be said for the first quote. The first quote in an enterprise deal is rarely ever accepted; normally it’s negotiated on either price, payment terms, payment method, wanting more features, or fewer features. Much like an F1 race car, a quote needs a quick, precise, and effective pit stop team to make the changes and alterations to ensure the race can be won. A CPQ system that allows you to make instant changes to a quote is much like having a state-of-the-art pit crew; minimizing time spent off the track. The need for constant revisions, financial approval of the quote, and the wait for technical configurations can slow down this process massively, and thus it is essential to have a deal dashboard onboard. Most systems do not inherently have the dynamic details of the cost to serve in them, meaning the quote has to be passed back through the finance and technical team, which delays the quote from leaving the door.
The power of a deal dashboard is a solution with multiple parts that allows you to complete a quick and robust detailed profitability assessment without having to involve the finance team; due to pre-set configurations within a CPQ solution. Furthermore, the ability to toggle the deal on different payment models, and complete quick changes and configure leveraging pre-existing business rules that have established hurdle rates all provide further benefits. These hurdle rates are pre-agreed to discount thresholds that allow you to turn complex quotes with customers in minutes and seconds VS having to put the quote through finance again and again.
What are the key features needed in a good deal dashboard?
The goal of powerful deal dashboards is to improve speed, governance and ultimately drive revenue performance. The system auto-generates deal dashboards in seconds, once the financial logic approval process and cost models have been built into the CPQ system, for all the organization’s products. If a threshold has been exceeded or something has been removed, the system’s governance catches to ensure you’re making an informed decision. However, 95% of the quotes because of the logic embedded in the system, the analysis is auto-completed to allow managers to feel confident in the governance, rules, and discount thresholds have been applied successfully. Whereas organizations that have not introduced these systems need to line up a meeting, prepare the data, complete a whole new analysis for this whole new deal set. The bottom line is organizations that have robust deal dashboards will be able to outflank and out maneuverer those who still rely on less robust systems and manual processes.
Some of the key features in an advanced deal dashboard include;
- The ability to change commercial aspects of the quote over time; quantity adjustments, cost adjustments, pricing adjustments, and configure adjustments.
- Fundamental level setting – Deal dashboards work extremely well for complex deals with a mixture of one-time and recurring revenue, which are typically multi-year type deals.
- Ability to look at a deal through different filters; top-line growth vs profitability, pre-paid deals revenue, etc
- Upfront acquisitions of the product; Break-even analysis that identifies clearly when a deal will begin to provide more revenue than the initial cost to set up
- Due to services being designed as on-demand offerings a service provider is able to leverage the following capabilities: start and stop specific AWS services
The benefits of Deal Dashboards
- Speed with good governance: Results in faster revenue cycles with better margins and reduced risk.
- Outflank and outmanoeuvre competitors: Increased revenues, wallet share, and faster product innovation.
- Eliminate bad deals: Decreased reputation risk, more predictable long-term profitability, higher customer retention.
- Remove repetitive tasks, enhance focus on selling: Increased employee productivity and satisfaction, increased revenues, increased customer engagement, and feedback.
- Customer satisfaction: More responsive to requests of the customer creates better repeat business chances
- Different payment models: the preferred method of acquisition is taken for every customer – faster time to close, increase customer satisfaction, increased customer engagement, and increased customer retention as you can be flexible to their payment models and needs.
About servicePath:
servicePath is on a mission to eliminate the use of spreadsheets and poorly implemented CPQ software for configuring solutions at technology companies. Companies that are serious about accelerated growth choose servicePath’s cloud-based Configure Price Quote (CPQ) platform. The platform smoothly handles complex pricing models, multi-step approval processes, and complex technology + service configurations. servicePath clients have shortened proposal times by as much as 90% and reduced their financial risk by millions. The company serves clients in the US, Canada, Europe, and the Middle East. Frictionless sales start with servicePath.
