Thank you for taking time out to evaluate Dealmaker in more detail. This short post gives you an outline of the Dealmaker software platform, and gives you detailed instructions for what you can see in the Dealmaker for Opportunity Management test drive.

Dealmaker Software Platform

The Dealmaker® intelligent software platform helps you sell smarter and manage better. Our customers realize 21% more quota attainment than customers of other solutions, as well as increased CRM adoption.
Companies like Xerox, Kodak, and Alcatel Lucent are part of our 20,000 strong user community around the world who rely on Dealmaker every day to help accelerate and manage their sales organizations.

• Real-time automated deal coaching, configurable sales process, system calculated opportunity close dates, and smart reasoning guide you to deliver better sales results. Here’s a taste of what the embedded intelligence provides:
o Automated deal coaching, applied in context, identifies risks and vulnerabilities
o Configurable sales process(es) mapped to the customer’s buying process shows the next steps to take to advance the opportunity
o Relationship strategies that are automatically defined to help you sell to each buyer
o Accurate sales forecasts and performance analytics (See below)

• Dealmaker’s predictive sales analytics, pattern-based sales forecast engine, and pipeline management system provide:
o Accurate sales forecasts
o Sales performance insight and foresight
o True real-time visibility into the value and health of the pipeline

• Embedded opportunity and account management methodologies and skills programs help you to:
o Create new opportunities,
o Assess the health of each opportunity to better qualify
o Maximize penetration in key accounts,
o Develop effective competitive strategies,
o Win the current deals in your pipeline.

• The Collaboration Map is a visual tool that you can use with your customer to help them better understand their business requirements to help you collaborate with your customer to prioritize the best solutions to provide. It enables you to:
o Create customer focused solutions
o Deepen the value that you can provide

• Online learning delivers an interactive, self-paced learning experience with rich video content and self-assessment and certification capability. Continuous access to a configurable curriculum supports sustained productivity improvement. With Dealmaker Virtual Learning you can:
o Learn at your own pace – in bite sized components
o Self-assess and self-certify
o Constantly revisit to refresh your knowledge as needed
o Create custom learning curricula (including your own content if you wish) for different learning audiences

Dealmaker can be tailored to your business to reflect how you use sales processes and methodologies.

Instructions for the Dealmaker for Opportunity Management Test Drive on salesforce.com’s Appexchange

Sales Process

Select the ‘Express Logistics 100 Enterprise Licenses’ opportunity either from ‘Recent Items’ on your left (you may need to click the collapsible sidebar in the top left of your screen), or from the Opportunities tab (make sure you are viewing ‘All Opportunities’) and then from the Opportunity Detail screen click the Dealmaker button.

Dealmaker is fully integrated with the CRM system, displaying the data directly within the CRM system. The opportunity details in the Details section top-left are also taken from the opportunity in the CRM system, so that you never have to enter data twice.  When you select the Qualifier Assessment option you are presented with the Dealmaker opportunity screen at the current pipeline stage.

Based on the rules that you have set up, Dealmaker places every opportunity in the right sales process and the right place in the pipeline. Many companies have multiple products, channels and routes to market that vary the sales process in some way; be it the length of the sales cycle, the steps to sale, the average deal size or even the stages in the pipeline. Dealmaker provides the ability to specify a different sales process for any combination of these “features” of an opportunity. If you have multiple sales processes, Dealmaker will automatically determine which process each opportunity fits into based on the “type” of that opportunity.

The pipeline structure is determined as part of your sales process or processes, so that it fully reflects your own customized sales process. You may have more or less stages in your pipeline, have different pipelines depending on the sales process you’re working with or you may name your stages differently. The pipeline in Dealmaker will reflect the stages set up in your CRM system to match the way that you do business.

In the Pipeline Qualification Status section at the top right of the screen you can see where you are in the opportunity.  Each stage in the pipeline is shown at a % completion level, so in a glance you can get a quick view of what’s left to do to close the deal.

In the Qualifiers and Verifiable Outcomes section, we can see that each stage of the pipeline has tasks, events or milestones assigned to it. These are the best practice steps that you have determined are appropriate for your business, and for which you have set the appropriate level of importance. An opportunity cannot be marked as having progressed beyond a stage unless all of the essential steps have been met.

Looking to the Dealmaker Details portion of the screen, as the sales person completes each of the best practice steps through each stage of the sales cycle, Dealmaker will calculate the projected close date and likely closure probability of the opportunity, based on how much progress the sales person has made.

Probability is no longer subjective! This means that 48%, to take a random example, means the same for everyone.  It means that certain things have been achieved, particular milestones have been passed and the sales user has checked off the relevant Qualifiers. Note that instead of filling out forms or templates, Dealmaker delivers the value of the methodology in just a few clicks.

One of the comments that we regularly hear from our customers is that Dealmaker allows the sales people to manage themselves more successfully. The sales manager is able to independently review the progress of the sales person’s opportunities in real time and is driven to focus attention on those opportunities where he or she can be of most value. To this point, the sales users can red-flag any opportunity where they need support.

Dealmaker includes customized help for the sales user at each step along the way. If the sales user needs a prompter to remember what the Qualifier meant, or what the step is trying to achieve, the customized Help text is made available against each Qualifier to provide support.  Also, a Related Info link provides access to any further documents or templates that he may require to complete the qualifier step – items like proposal templates, case studies, whitepapers, etc., are made available here.

Note also that you can export to Excel, for printing or archiving purposes, your full opportunity plan from either the Sales Process or TAS Assessment screens.  You can also export each individual screen if that’s all you need.  Finally, you can also export the whole plan into PowerPoint.

TAS Assessment

Click the Sales Process drop-down to pull up TAS Assessment.

The TAS methodology includes a set of 20 pivotal criteria designed to objectively assess the competitive status of the sales opportunity and help you answer the question “how am I doing in this opportunity?” These criteria can be fully configured for your business, and indeed Dealmaker can automate and optimize any opportunity management methodology.

The summary section in the top right of the screen gives you a quick view of how you are doing relative to the competition. This data is pulled straight from your CRM system, removing the need for rekeying.  If you are lagging behind in any area, you can determine what steps you need to take to address the issue and correct your competitive position.

A comments field is provided for some of the key assessment criteria. This is configurable per account.

Dealmaker is an intelligent application that guides the sales professional through the sale, since selling is a complex exercise and there can be a lot to remember and execute on.  For example, note that Dealmaker points out inconsistencies in our methodology, where our TAS Assessment is contradicted by our work so far in the Sales Process qualifiers.

All the information I’m putting into Dealmaker can be used to review opportunities with my peers or my manager.  Opportunity presentations and reviews are a frequent occurrence, and it can be very time-consuming putting together a presentation slide deck on your opportunity for that important meeting.  Not so with Dealmaker.  You can export the entire plan into a PowerPoint deck.  In a few clicks and a few seconds, Dealmaker will extract all the information and arrange it in a presentable, slide-by-slide format for you to edit and finalize.  It will even convert your political analysis and collaboration maps into a similar map using the SmartArt feature in PowerPoint. Dealmaker is designed to make the sales organization as productive as possible, and this represents a huge time-saver for the sales professional.

Competitive Strategy

Click on the Competitive Strategy button towards the top of the screen.

Knowing how to win against your competition, selecting a single strategy and sticking with it, unless a major change occurs in the opportunity, is extremely important in winning a deal.

When you first access the competitive strategy screen you will need to set the criteria in order for Dealmaker to advise you on a strategy to take within the opportunity. Dealmaker will prompt you through a series of questions and based on your responses, will provide you with the competitive strategy that you should pursue. If something changes within the opportunity, you can change the criteria on this screen and the advised strategy will update accordingly.

Dealmaker allows you to enter the details of your strategy, and you can do this even if there are no competitors called out for the opportunity.  You can override a recommended strategy by un-checking it.   It is important to be aware of the likely competitive strategy of your competitors, and the competitors have been pulled through from the opportunity information in salesforce.com.  You can indicate your competitor’s anticipated strategy in the free text boxes you can also summarize their strengths and weaknesses.

Political Analysis

Click on the Political Analysis button at the top of the Dealmaker screen.

One of the key reasons deals are lost is because the sales person has been unable to navigate the power structure of an account.   With Dealmaker, however, you’re supported in the building of the political map of the 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. Understanding the political structure within the account, as well as the organizational hierarchy, you can avoid surprises in the sales campaign. By determining who the decision makers are, who they’re influenced by, who’s on your side, or who might be an adversary, supporting the competition, you can ensure that you focus your attention winning the minds of the right people.

The formal structure of the organization includes the organizational hierarchy (who reports to whom), the buying role (Approver, Decision-maker, Evaluator, User) of each individual for this opportunity, the adaptability to change (Innovator, Visionary, Pragmatist, Conservative, Laggard) of each person, your status or how they perceive your organization/solution (Enemy, Non-supporter, Neutral, Supporter, Mentor) and, finally, your level of coverage with the individual (No contact, Brief contact, Multiple contact, In-depth). The key icon indicates the key players in the opportunity.  Once you have mapped this information, you have a full view of the formal structure of the organization.

However, although extremely important to understand, this is not the full story. Knowing the informal structure, both the political structure and the influence flow, within the account will give you insight into how you can influence the decision makers without always going directly to them.

Each individual within the opportunity has a political position, based on their rank and influence levels. Those with a very high rank and/or influence level are deemed part of the inner circle. Those with a medium level rank and influence are in the political structure but not the inner circle, while all others are outside the political structure.  Those individuals who are part of the political structure, but their rank and influence are not high enough to be considered part of the inner circle, are signified in the graphic by the green figure on the edge of the circle. Those who do not have sufficient influence to be considered part of the political structure are shown in the graphic with a gray figure outside the circle.

Influence within an account, as opposed to rank or authority, flows in non-traditional directions, from subordinate to superior or across departmental boundaries. In this opportunity we can see a number of influence lines.

Now that you have mapped the organization, you can look to determine what my relationship strategy should be within the account. If you hover over any individual’s name, given the formal and informal structure within the opportunity, you can see what my relationship strategy should be with him or her to improve my position and the opportunity.

Adding contacts to the chart is easy, you can enter a name or just leave the field blank and the system will return all contacts from the CRM system in your target company, if the box is checked, or contacts from other companies, if you uncheck it.

Collaboration Map

Click on the Collaboration Map button at the top of the screen.

One of the biggest mistakes many of us make is not spending enough time to work with our customer’s key decision makers to understand their business problem, the underlying cause of that problem, and the consequential impact.   In TAS terminology we say Key Business Requirement, Consequential Pain, and Tactical Pain.

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 pains. Through this collaborative discovery process, the salesperson can prioritize areas to address and solutions to apply. It is only when we uncover, through dialogue with our customer, the Impact of not dealing with the causes of problems can we help the customer get a better understanding of how together we might find a solution.

For each Key Business Requirement, Consequential Pain and Tactical Pain, you can see that we can record important details, including what the issue is, who at the customer owns the issue, and whether they have confirmed our understanding.  A green check mark indicates that they have confirmed.  As with the political analysis chart, the design is with flexibility and usability in mind.  You build your chart by dragging and dropping boxes on each other.  You can also collapse and expand Tactical Pains that fall under the Consequential Pain, for example, to maximize the available screen.  You can also save a map as a template, or even import a template to start a new map, as a useful starting point for similar opportunities, which greatly aids productivity.

Decision Criteria

Click on the Decision Criteria button at the top of the screen.

Understanding what is motivating your customers to buy is crucial in any opportunity.  Dealmaker encapsulates all of the great TAS Methodology in the software.  In the decision criteria screen you can add the individuals you feel are key players by selecting them from a drop down presented directly from SFDC.  You can also 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.

On the bottom left you can indicate, using a traffic light system, your assessment of your position relative to the competition on each of the key issues.  A green up arrow means well positioned, a red down arrow means positioned at a disadvantage, while the amber equal signs means you’re pretty much at parity with the competition.

Your position relative to the competition, and the overall rank of each issue across all key players, is nicely summarized for you at the top of the screen so that you can at a glance how you are doing in this element of the deal-winning game.  It is this ranking of the key issues for each key player that you see when you hover over the key icons in the political analysis screen that I showed you a few moments ago.

You can export to Excel, for printing or archiving, the full TAS Plan from either of the two Assessment screens, and you can also export to Excel any of the individual screens.

PRIME Actions

Click on the PRIME Actions button at the top of the screen.

Coach Me

Click on the Coach Me icon to the right of the PRIME button.

With comprehensive sales process and methodology, sometimes we need coaches to help us see areas we might have missed, and Dealmaker often guides the sales person on inaccuracies in their plan and makes recommendations on strategy.

Imagine if your CRM system knew everything about the deal you were working on and proactively coached you on what had to do to win the deal.  The benefits of coaching to revenues, training ROI and customer service are well documented, but we don’t always have as much time to spend on sales coaching as we would like, so not enough coaching happens – and revenue performance suffers.  Dealmaker Coach Me helps the sales person and the sales manager solve this problem.

If you’re a sales person looking for what to do next on the deal, or maybe preparing for a deal review you’re your manager, you want to be sure that you’ve thought through as many of the issues on this deal before their call.

Coach Me has seen lots of situations like this, and when you click on the Coach Me link in Dealmaker, you’re presented with some specific coaching advice about how you should approach this particular situation.

If you’re a manager, you know that this deal is a competitive scenario, and the relationships are very important. Maybe you want to focus in on the competitive strategy that the sales person has selected, as Dealmaker Coach Me has highlighted some exposure.

Also, looking at the customer’s organization, you can use Coach Me to uncover areas where there is risk. Coach Me helps the sales person self-coach up to the point where they needs coaching input.  Managers can now spend time with sales people on the areas where they can really add value.

Dealmaker Coach Me provides real-time, deal-specific coaching, enabling sales professionals to sell smarter, and managers to coach smarter. Coach Me enables you to benefit from intelligent and specific coaching on your opportunities.  As you can see, it’s available on every Opportunity Management screen of every opportunity.

Forecast Analysis

Click on the Forecast Analysis tab at the top of the screen.

In Dealmaker you can forecast across 2 axes, or views, and also across a range of filters.  The role view is a vertical view of the hierarchy of the sales organization, through the roll-up.  The Account view is a horizontal view across accounts.  The forecast screen provides both a summary and detailed view of your forecast. In the top area of the screen, Dealmaker provides a summary view of the forecast for each sales user and sales team.  The wide range of filtering options makes this a very powerful analytical tool.

Looking at the summary area, we can see that for the selected time period the owner, their quota, what’s been closed and what the pipeline is. Based on the rules that you have determined, Dealmaker also calculates the projected revenue number. Dealmaker looks at each of the opportunities in the pipeline and picks out those individual opportunities that Dealmaker thinks can be closed in this forecast period. The projected revenue number is the full value of all of those selected opportunities – you’re not going to get 33% of every deal, for example, rather you’ll get 100% of some and 0% of others.

The next thing that Dealmaker displays is the distribution of opportunity value across the stages of your pipeline. The graphical representation shows the value in each stage. As you move closer to quarter or year end, you want to see more and more of your opportunity value moving towards the closing stages, switching the balance to the final stages of the pipeline.

As a sales manager, the next thing you’re concerned about is the mix of deals in the forecast.  A green tick-mark represents a good balance of deals. A red ball, means there are a small number of large deals, or rocks, in a forecast that represents a large proportion of the forecast number. Working on too many small deals means you get a yellow pyramid of pebbles. As a sales manager, you want to know when there is a risk to the forecast, either because of one abnormally large deal which could make or break your forecast, or because your sales people won’t have sufficient time to close a sufficient number of the small deals that they have in their pipeline to reach their forecast.

While you’re supporting my sales team, you want to ensure that you focus immediately on those opportunities where they need your help. In both the summary and detail view, you can see that a number of opportunities have been flagged for attention. Also, in the detailed view, you can see when a plan was last updated, an important indicator that someone is on top of things.  You can see what stage opportunities have progressed to, and you can drill straight through to the opportunity screen to determine what the sales person needs to do to get this deal over the line, and where you can help the process.

Dealmaker provides a very powerful forecasting tool, both for the sales manager and the sales executive. For sales management, and indeed for the CEO/CFO, the value of accurate forecasting is considerable.  Also, many of our customers have pointed out that when Dealmaker is used, sales management need to spend less time chasing and more time coaching.  Dealmaker takes a lot of the management burden away.