Dealmaker is the only on-demand
virtual learning and sales performance platform

Dealmaker Platform

The Dealmaker Sales Performance Automation platform is built to make the sales professional as productive as possible, the sales leader as confident as they can be, and both more successful.  The Dealmaker platform works equally well within your CRM system and in a standalone capacity.  It encapsulates sales learning, sales methodology, sales process, sales forecast and sales performance reporting in an easy-to-use on-demand application. 

Dealmaker is also intelligent.  As the selling teams develop their accounts, following the sales process and methodology and collaborating on their opportunities, Dealmaker captures the information objectively and provides detailed guidance and coaching to improve the chances of success – all automatically.

The Dealmaker platform provides one place for learning, selling, informing, and working deals.  Insight for sales leaders into sales learning, account and deal progress, notifications, forecasting and pipeline performance across the organization is ‘always on’.   Dealmaker automates and optimizes the following selling and leadership activities:

Opportunity Management - Target Account Selling® (TAS®) Methodology

Opportunity Management methodology is the ‘how’ of sales – ‘How am I doing in this opportunity compared to the competition?’  Target Account Selling® (TAS®) methodology has been developed over a 20-plus-year history, and is the world’s leading sales methodology for organizations and enterprises with demanding selling processes and sales cycles.  In use by more than 750,000 sales professionals worldwide, TAS continues to be improved by The TAS Group, and benefits from feedback provided by some of the world’s most admired selling organizations. 

Dealmaker automates TAS opportunity management to optimize the main four main levers that determine your sales success: the number of qualified opportunities you’re working on; the average deal size of your qualified opportunities: the win rate or close percentage of your qualified opportunities; and the average sales cycle of your successful opportunities. 

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TAS Assessment

The TAS Assessment, TAS 1 – 20, is 20 pivotal and fully configurable criteria designed to objectively assess the opportunity and based around 4 key questions.

• Is there an opportunity?
• Can we compete?
• Can we win?
• Is it worth winning? 

Each of the 4 key questions has associated criteria that help you assess the status of the opportunity.  Dealmaker guides you to where there may be inconsistencies between your sales cycle and your customer’s buying cycle.  TAS 1- 20 is the roadmap for deal qualification and assessment of the opportunity, and it helps you navigate your way to identify and remove risk, and chart a course to win the deal.

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Competitive Strategy

Competitive Strategy shows how to win against your competition, by selecting the correct strategy based on the particular circumstance of this opportunity and the relevant competitors.
Dealmaker advises you on a strategy to take within the opportunity, prompting you through a series of questions and, based on your responses, providing you with the competitive strategy that you should pursue.

You enter the details of your strategy, even if there are no competitors called out for the opportunity. It is also important to be aware of the likely competitive strategy of your competitors, so that you plan appropriately.

TAS provides you with 5 different competitive strategy types, to cater for offensive or defensive circumstances, and the technology intelligently guides you to select the correct strategy for the particular situations.  Opportunities are sometimes lost because the competitive challenges have not been correctly assessed.  TAS can help you avoid that loss.

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Political Analysis

Political Analysis helps you build a political map of the customer’s organization, so that you can win more deals by safely navigating the power structure in an account.
Through this map, you can analyze the customer’s organization, and ultimately shorten your sales cycle by spending time with the right people discussing the right issues. By determining who the decision makers are, who they’re influenced by, who’s on your side, or who might be an adversary, you can ensure that you focus your attention on winning the minds of the right people.

The intuitive graphical interface allows you to easily map out not only the formal structure of the organization, but also the informal structure, including the political structure and the influence flow, allowing you to influence the decision makers without always going directly to them.
Once you have mapped the organization, Dealmaker guides you to select the correct relationship strategy for each of the key individuals, based on the formal or organizational structure of the account, as well at the informal power structure in the account.

Mapping the effective power structure in the account, taking appropriate action to influence the influencers, and gaining adequate coverage with the decision makers, reduces the risk of being blindsided by a competitor who might be better connected. Getting the relationship strategy right significantly improves your chance of winning the deal, and TAS Political Analysis helps you do that.

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Collaboration Map

The Collaboration Map in Dealmaker is a graphical tool used by a salesperson to assist the customer to describe their business problems, through a visual representation of the connected causes, people and impact. Through this discovery of problem, cause, impact and solution, the salesperson can prioritize areas to address and solutions to apply.

It is through uncovering, in dialogue with the customer, the impact of not dealing with problems and causes that you can help the customer get a better understanding of how together you might find a solution.

Once you have validated the customer’s perspective, Collaboration Map enables you to propose solutions which correctly address the problems, causes and impacts your customer is suffering from.

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Decision Criteria

Decision Criteria helps you win more opportunities by figuring out what is motivating your customers to buy.  You can detail what you feel the key issues are in the opportunity, and then rank those issues for each key player.  Dealmaker then calculates the overall rank of each key issue across all key players, which helps you with your focus and overall strategy.

Mapping your Unique Business Value to the important criteria for your customers is critical to help to maximize the value of the deal, and increase your opportunity to win.  It is important to be able to assess your position on each of the key issues relative to the competition.  This, together with the overall rank of each issue across all key players, is managed by the technology so that you can see at a glance how you rate according to the customer’s Decision Criteria.

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PRIME Actions

PRIME Actions enables you to shorten your sales cycle and be more successful by helping you plan and execute the right actions to win the opportunity.   You add your PRIME actions and these are driven through to your CRM system which will manage your calendar and the workflow of these actions.

As you add your actions, Dealmaker will prompt you to ask yourself the core purpose of this action, ensuring that you’re focusing on activity that will help propel the opportunity forward.  Dealmaker also lets you know when Actions are overdue.

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Account Management – Enterprise Selling Process and Portfolio Management Process

The TAS Group’s Account Management methodologies have been developed over a 20-year history, and are the world’s leading sales methodologies for organizations and enterprises with demanding selling processes who take a role-based approach to Account Management. 

Dealmaker automates TAS account management methodology to maximize the opportunities from your existing accounts.  When you truly understand the customer’s business you can develop compelling customer-specific value propositions based on their business drivers and business initiatives. This helps you Achieve ‘Trusted Advisor’ status with the customer so you can create to create high value with them and deliver your products and services across the account.

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Account Plan Set-up and Editing

Dealmaker is designed to improve Account Team productivity and communication.  Setting up an Account Plan is quick and easy.  You can set up plans for multiple accounts, or for a single account with multiple units.  Dealmaker reads your CRM system so you can easily pull in the required account, solutions and team information.  After a few minutes you’re ready to start building your plan.

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Opportunity Map

Dealmaker automates your customer research and strategizing process, capturing all key information to guide you through planning, finding and creating opportunities.  Graphical tools allow you to map the organizational structure of your accounts and business units and record your level of relationship.  When you have done your research and established the customer’s business drivers and business initiatives, then you can create the potential opportunities for fitting your solutions to create value for your customer and address their business initiatives. 

The opportunity map records all your opportunities across your solutions and the customer’s accounts and business units, allowing you to see the black space where you are blocked from selling, and the white space where there are gaps in your coverage and which you can try to fill.

Here you can convert your potential opportunities into real or current opportunities, and Dealmaker immediately updates your CRM system with this information, so that your CRM system and Dealmaker are always in synch. 

Dealmaker connects Account Management with Opportunity Management, so that you can build your plan, then work your plan, all within the same system.   After creating your opportunity, you can click through from the Opportunity Map straight into the TAS Plan for that specific opportunity.

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Value Map

Sometimes with your key accounts you’ll want to do more analysis on your potential opportunities, in order to rank order and select those opportunities with the most value to you and your customer.  Dealmaker automates the value map analysis for you.  Creating the maximum mutual business value for you and your Accounts comes from understanding your customers’ business. 

The Value Map allows you to plot the opportunities against configurable ‘value to us’ and ‘value to customer’ criteria for both your organization and your account.  A configurable scoring system for the value criteria helps you and your account team to decide at a glance which opportunities offer the best value for you and your Account.  Once you’ve decided which opportunities are important, you simply check them as targeted and Dealmaker updates the opportunity map accordingly.

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MarketView

When organizations have created a number of Account plans, and account teams are actively working them, it is very important to understand what is happening across all of them.  You can only achieve this if you have a comprehensive view of your marketplace.  Then you can get one window on your addressable market and see where the gaps are.

MarketView provides you with a rolled-up view of the accounts in your marketplace, the opportunities in the account plans and the deals that have been closed to date.  You can create your own reports that reflect your business, and any reports you create are automatically available to those above you in your organization hierarchy, and can also be shared with peers or subordinates who own accounts included in the reports.

As a sales person, you can create a single view that includes all of your accounts in one report.  As a manager, you can create a roll-up view of your team’s accounts, providing you with a single report for your entire business.  As a global account team, you can create a MarketView report across the various regions.  You can even create custom views, for example to compare your performance across different vertical industries.

Dealmaker automates your specific best practices for account planning and account management, enabling you to deepen relationships, maximize revenues and sustain profit growth. 

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Sales Process

Sales Process is the ‘where’ of sales – ‘Where am I in this opportunity and what do I need to do next in order to progress it?’ 

Sales Process in Dealmaker delivers an optimized set of sales activities that unlocks your customer’s buying process to help you create value for your customer and win more sales. When your sales process is aligned with customer’s buying process it accelerates the sales and helps you take control.

Sales Process guides each sales person through the right steps for each stage in the pipeline.  Based on our business rules, these activities can be mapped to your customer’s buying activities, so that you take more control of the sale.

As each activity is completed by the sales person, they simply click to update, and add comments as appropriate.  Dealmaker then calculates the probability of closure and the close date, based on your typical configured sales cycle.  Closure probability assessment is no longer a subjective exercise; it is consistent across the sales team.

Following a standardized sales process, with appropriate guidelines, customized to your business, and to how your customer buys, helps you achieve more sustained and predictable revenue.

Dealmaker is easy to use, and opportunity progression can be recorded in just a few seconds.  The sales person is then guided to the correct next steps.  Sales managers are able to independently review the progress of their team’s opportunities in real time and can focus their attention on those opportunities where they can help the sales person win.

If you do not have a defined and adhered-to sales process, or else you would like to validate the one you are currently following, go to www.dealmakergenius.com where you can create your own customized sales process in 15 minutes or less.

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Forecast Analysis

A sales forecast is the probabilistically determined revenue that a company will achieve in a given time period.  What is the selling organization likely to close within a specified time period, typically by month-, quarter- or year-end?

Forecast Analysis in Dealmaker delivers accurate sales forecasts by predicting sale closure probability objectively based on rules-based measurement.  The sales process science in Dealmaker takes the guesswork out of forecasting.  Dealmaker removes salesperson subjectivity, replacing it with objective in-depth analysis of your team’s actual performance and knowledge of what it takes to close deals.  The result is a more accurate forecast with early warnings about problem areas for better coaching sooner.

In Dealmaker Forecast Analysis you can elect to view your forecast by role, allowing you to analyze individuals or teams within your organizational roll-up. You can also forecast by Account view, which incorporates the MarketView capability from Dealmaker Account Management, which allows the organization to see its addressable market across account portfolios, global accounts and vertical industries.  This horizontal analysis complements the vertical analysis by roll-up, and together they give you a clear and complete ‘matrix’ view of your organization’s selling activities.

At a summary level, you can view Quota, Closed, Pipeline and Weighted Pipeline value.  Dealmaker then selects the actual opportunities that it calculates should close in the reporting period, based on your business rules, and your sales cycle.

Dealmaker also analyzes distribution of deals across the sales stages, as well as the ‘mix’ of deals in the forecast, identifying where a forecast is dependent on a small number of very large deals, or comprises too many small deals which might present additional risk to you making your number.
The detail on each opportunity can easily be accessed, so that you can see the status at a glance. Managers can also ensure they focus immediately on those opportunities where their coaching help is needed. They can drill straight through to the opportunity to determine what needs to happen to get the deal over the line, and how to help the sales person. 

Dealmaker frees up sales professionals and management, so they spend less time chasing details and calculating forecasts and more time focusing on selling and coaching.

When a sales team uses Dealmaker to follow a standard process, sustained and predictable revenue growth is achieved, and with Forecast Analysis, you get accurate on demand sales forecasts.

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Performance Coach                               

Pipeline is the totals of potential revenue against target revenue at each stage of a defined sales process, depending on the selling organization’s typical sales cycle.

Dealmaker Performance Coach accelerates your pipeline velocity by providing metrics on what is working and what needs to be changed. It helps you learn from the past, identify present risks and positively impact your future.  Performance Coach presents data collected in Dealmaker as your sales teams follow best practice sales methodology and sales process in their opportunities, without making any demands on their productive selling time.  

Performance Coach Snapshot tells you how much you need to have in each stage of the pipeline to make your sales targets, and it provides a snapshot today that identifies shortfalls, weaknesses, or risks to your target achievement in the future.

Performance Coach HealthCheck helps you understand the true value of your pipeline, by presenting to you which deals are being worked on, and which are not.  Within your total pipeline value, you will see deals that we classify as inactive, deals that are stalled, as well as deals that are being actively worked.  This gives you the focus to take early action, especially with those opportunities which are nearest to closing.

Performance Coach ‘What’s Changed’ gives a complete picture of what’s happened during any period of time that you want to look at.  The past is really a great predictor of the future, and the ‘What’s Changed’ module of Performance Coach gives you the necessary insight to learn from the past so you can predict and impact the future.

Performance Coach Velocity tracks the progress of each deal through each sales stage for each individual or team.  One of the key things that determine the revenue you can achieve is the speed at which you can move deals through the pipeline, through each stage in the cycle.  Understanding the velocity for each sales person, for each team, for each region, gives you greater opportunity to get insight into how you can move deals through the pipeline faster.

Performance Coach Activity provides reporting intelligence on user activity in Dealmaker.  It is a fact proven across Dealmaker customers that the most successful salespeople are the most active users of Dealmaker.  Research also shows that being able to track progress and activity on deals is a prime motivator for sales people and provides valuable insight to sales leaders.  Performance Coach Activity tracks and displays the number of logins to Dealmaker within the specific filtered timeframe, to monitor, fine-tune and encourage adoption of selling best practice in Dealmaker.  Daily logins to Dealmaker might be one of the key non-revenue, or new behavior objectives that you have identified as a critical success factor, and Performance Coach Activity allows you to benchmark this for each user, and pinpoint any ‘change execution’ challenges.

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Virtual Learning

Dealmaker Virtual Learning enables assessment, learning and certification for sales professionals.  The configurable curriculum management system enables sales professionals and managers maximize productivity through on-demand learning and reinforcement in order to accelerate sustained sales improvement.

Virtual Learning takes care of the initial knowledge transfer, in an easily accessible and consumable way and can be aided by remote coaching or classroom training.  . 

As an integral part of the Dealmaker platform, the knowledge is always available to the sales person – when they are working their deals.  You can also access the latest educational features and news.  The curriculum can be configured or appended to, so that all of the knowledge the sales person needs to complete their deal is readily at hand.

After acquiring the key knowledge concepts, the sales person can become certified by successfully completing a test.  Sales leaders can also track and measure the progress of their teams on an ongoing basis via the certification reporting interface in Virtual Learning. 

Dealmaker virtual learning and sales performance automation work together in one learning-by-doing platform.  In this way you learn and apply knowledge more successfully, and enhance your sales productivity.

 

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