It’s π-day and we’re thrilled to announce our latest product release! This release is focused on several long-awaited new features that assist those involved with deal desk to automate more of the review cycle, reduce review turns and enforce consistency while managing a highly transparent process. So let’s jump right into it.
When running a deal desk, your primary responsibility is to deliver a sales process that ensures all deals are structured in a way that is financially beneficial to the organization, while also matching the needs of the customer.
As the organization continues to grow and scale, your deal desk process must continue to deliver faster deal review cycles while ensuring that each deal is structured consistently with no errors, compliant with the legal and commercial requirements of your business, and will not only maximize revenue for the business but also meet the needs of the customer. Now that’s a lot to manage!
While the changing needs of your deal desk do not immediately happen overnight, we want to equip you with the tools you need to build a seamless deal desk and scale your operations.
This quarter, we’ve released numerous new features that improve the power and flexibility of Workflows to meet more complex business needs and speed up your deal review process. We’ve also made it easier to understand when and why a deal needs to be reviewed and approved.
Workflows now support:
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Our workflow rules engine now offers 45 different conditions available for setting up any workflow rule. By specifying the condition and combining them as necessary, businesses can be more precise about when a workflow action should trigger. A full list of all the conditions available here, however, let’s walkthrough some examples of conditions you might setup.
Since the rules engine now includes:
Agreement type, template name, overall total value of the deal (noted as subtotal), and total discount amount among others, you could assign specific approvers to New Order agreements where discounting levels might differ from Renewals or Expansion agreements.
Additionally, if your legal team wants to review every custom term added to the agreement, you can also specify when the term named “Custom Term” is on the deal, using the term presence condition.
One of the most common types of policy adopted at deal desk, is to allow different discounting amounts depending on the SKUs sold. Occasionally discounting rule applies to all SKUs, but more often a single SKU or selected group of SKUs must be flagged for approval by different people when discounting thresholds are surpassed.
Workflow rules can now be set up so that you can first start by requiring approvals when any product in your organization is sold with a discount of more than 10%. As your business’s product line evolves, you can select the specific SKUs that different members of throughout your company may be required to review and approve.
For example, your professional services team may be assigned to approve discounts applied to your “Services” SKUs, while your finance team is assigned to review the discounts of your “Software” SKUs.
Another hurdle for finalizing the Sales agreement is to ensure that the legal and commercial requirements of the business match the needs of the customer. Invoicing could become an accounting burden, if the business allows too many customers to pay by invoice on a monthly basis or a financial burden if Net 60 is offered too often. At scale, these allowances need to be checked by those involved with deal desk.
With RevOps’ new Workflow rules, you can now easily keep your Finance & Accounting team in the loop by notifying them to approve Topics that match when exceptions have been offered on Billing-related terms.
Lastly, the addition of setting who created the deal, allows you to require final approval from the manager of each Sales and Customer Success team.
By adding all these conditions, we’ve equipped you with the ability to loop in more stakeholders to your deal desk process so that the right people are notified and can focus on approving parts of the deal that are important to their part of the business.
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Now, if we were to create different rules for every example we’ve explored above, we’d likely have 3 or 4 different approvers that must all sign off on the deal before it can be shared with the customer.
The legal counsel is ensuring that any custom term language is compliant, the finance analyst or sales manager is confirming that the deal is financially beneficial to the organization and the accounting team is verifying the billing terms.
To speed up the review process and help each stakeholder understand when and why they’re needed to be reviewed and approved for the deal, we’ve added Topics as an action that could be triggered by a Workflow.
This more focused approach allows stakeholders throughout your organization to stay involved as needed. When specific exceptions have been requested on the deal, a Topic would be added to the deal. Those decision makers would then be notified to review, comment, and approve. And when the deal follows the standard process, these decision makers will not have to be distracted, saving them time.
Let’s walk through how this now works in RevOps.
Here, our Accounting team will be notified to approve our “Low TCV, Payment Terms” topic, when a deal is less than $10,000 and is offered Net 45 or Net 60 payment terms.
When a deal meets this condition, the RevOps Bot will add a Topic to the deal and notify the decision makers of our Accounting team to review and approve.
The Deal Owner, Deal Desk Managers, and everyone else collaborating on the deal can also see that the deal is pending review due to an exception requested by the Deal Owner, creating a more transparent and collaborative deal desk process.
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As you add and update Workflows to match the growing needs of your organization, you’ll also want to understand how each deal has been evaluated.
Our new Workflow Results lets you, your Sales team, and the rest of your organization, see why a deal may require additional review or why the deal may have been auto-approved. This visibility can help remind and communicate your deal desk policy.
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To ensure that each deal is structured consistently, we’ve added Guardrails that allow you to specify where your legal terms can be placed and which terms are allowed depending on the type of Deal created.
By determining the terms available, depending on the agreement template and applying structural consistency to your agreements upfront, you can be more confident that every agreement is compliant with the legal requirements of your business and reduce the review turns necessary.
This feature is currently only available in Beta, so contact us if you’d like to try it out!
In addition to all the new features we added to automate the approval process and enforce deal consistency, we’ve also released the following enhancements.
Improved Slack Notifications
Businesses can now select the specific Slack channels where they would receive notifications about their deal. When an error occurs while syncing RevOps deal data to the CRM, you can now be notified via Slack.
Both public and private channels can receive notifications from our RevOps SlackBot. To send notifications to the private channel, first add the RevOps SlackBot to a private channel then refresh the available channels.
Get started with this in your RevOps Slack Settings.
CRM Syncing for Line Item and Term Description
Line Item Description and Term Language can now be mapped to text fields within Salesforce and HubSpot.
Set this up now in your RevOps CRM Settings.
Email as Term Input Type
We’ve introduced “Email” as a new input type for Terms so that when collecting email information on the deal, you can validate that only a single properly formatted email address is being entered.
Displaying Contract Length
The contract length of your agreement can now be displayed in months and days, in addition to months as a decimal or hidden. When co-terming agreements that are often prorated, this can be helpful in making your contract length more readable.
At RevOps, our team has been working tirelessly to bring you a suite of new features and enhancements that will take your sales deals process to the next level. Our updates to Workflows is just the beginning! Based on your feedback, we hope to explore and add new features such as sequential approvals, order based team approvals, include counter signature assignments in Workflows and more. Let us know, at support@revops.io, what you’d like to see in our next release.
We look forward to hearing your thoughts on these new features and are confident that you’ll be just as excited about them as we are!
