Fast Start for Managing Deals

Hello, everyone.

Thank you so much for joining today's Fast Start for Managing deals. My name is Mimi Noto. I'm the product education specialist here at SalesLoft, and I'm a part of our customer education team.

And our customer education team is who, puts on all of the different fast start trainings that are available to our customers. So, today we're gonna focus on the basics of using SalesLoft to manage your pipeline close deals.

Now, there are a couple of different faster options, and it can sometimes be difficult knowing which one should attend.

So this particular FastStar is best suited for users who are primarily working and closing deals in their day to day. Ways. So this could look like a variety of job roles or titles, like, account executive, account manager really the list goes on. Now if you are a full cycle rep, so you are prospecting your own opportunities as well, We recommend attending our fast start for managing your pipeline with cadences that training in addition to this one to learn how fully utilize the Cadence platform.

Now, one thing I'd like to explicitly state before we dive is that if you do not use the SalesLoft deals product, then you will not find as much value in this webinar. But will be speaking to the close focus zone and, really just, managing and completing actions in sales opt. So, I will let you make that decision for yourself and, whether or not you want to continue the training once we really dive in. Okay?

Alright. So, we're gonna cover a variety of topics today. And in lieu of an agenda, we like to present the learning of activs for each training that we host. Okay? So, you know, instead of just knowing what topics we're gonna cover, we wanna make sure that you understand what you're gonna learn as well as what you should be able to do after finishing this training.

And so, after today, you should be able to complete your daily tasks from something called your focus zones.

You should be able to manage your deals from your pipeline dashboard and your deal view. And you should be able to prepare your go forward plan by digging into details from conversations.

Now, before we get into the platform, I wanna make sure that we are all speaking the same language.

So we are actually gonna kick things off with a little bit of a vocabulary lesson. And we're gonna start with a big one. And that is just better understanding what exactly is rhythm.

And the reason why I say this is kind of a big one is because rhythm is really the main hub of sales It is where you are going to be managing the majority of your day to day. Now it's important to understand what rhythm is and how it functions so that you can make the most of it. The way we explain what rhythm is is by, really defining it as a signal to action workflow.

And its sole purpose is to orchestrate your most effective day.

That just means that it prioritizes what you should do next based on signals from all across sales soft. And then it gives you the context and the ability to take action directly in that workflow.

Now, rhythm is powered by a machine learning model called conductor AI.

Conductor AI is what prioritizes your actions based on the likelihood to convert for your specific revenue goals.

Now it's constantly evolving to identify what lead to your revenue outcomes.

And it's going to continuously update throughout your day as well as improve over time.

Now when we say signals, we're really also talking about engagement.

And so the engagement that comes into SalesLoft through your integrated system such as your email, your calendar, or other third party tools.

That engagement will also be prioritized in your workflow.

This really helps solve for the fragmented experience that many sellers face today. I may have made rhythm sound pretty fancy, and I, by no means, want to undersell it. It really is an awesome product that is quite sophisticated.

But really it was also designed for it to be easy to use.

So that you as a seller can be more effective and efficient than ever. We rolled out rhythm to our customers in the summer of twenty twenty three. So it's been a little less than a year at this point.

And, if I haven't, you know, sold you on rhythm quite yet, I really, really want you to be excited about using it.

And the way I'm going to do that is by telling you kind of what we've learned since rolling out rhythm to our customers. Right? So we had a goal of rhythm helping sellers become more effective and efficient. And so since we rolled it out, we've been collecting data to really better understand whether or not, you know, rhythm's working the way we intended.

And I'm happy to say that we're seeing really great results, and I wanna share some of those stats with So sellers who have been using rhythm have on average. They're seeing a twenty percent reduction in average deal length.

They're seeing a twenty five percent increase in close rates. And they're also seeing a two times increase in their average contract value. I mean, that all sounds pretty great to me. Right? Your workflows are gonna be contained into something called your focus zones.

Each focus zone will list all of the possible actions that you could take in a day. And there are three separate zones separated by like, the types of task or, areas to focus on.

And so first, you have the rhythm tab. Which is gonna list all actions that have been deemed the highest priority by conductor AI.

Alright. So within this workflow, you are going to see actions that are the highest priority cadence step.

One of actions that you have created and assigned to yourself, as well as actions that have been assigned to you by play keys. Next up, you're gonna see your cadence focus zone. This is going to list all of your active cadences. So you can really hone in on your prospecting activities and stay on top of your pipeline. And then the third and final focus zone is gonna be your close.

This is going to list actions that are associated with your highest value open opportunities.

Right? So if you are a seller managing and closing opportunities, your close focus zone is gonna provide a space for you to really hone in and focus when you need to stay on task, you know, whether it's the end of the month, or, you're really just trying to hit your quota and need to focus on a specific type of task. Now, the intention hind focus zones is to allow you to reduce something called context switching so that you can zero in what is most important to you at each moment.

Alright. So, next up is, another pretty part of SalesLoft, which is referring to a cadence, and you'll notice that one of your focus zones was named after this feature. Okay?

So a cadence is a pre configured series of touch points, like email or phone.

And they're set over a certain period of time. Cadence is allowed for more targeted, efficient, and personalized engagement with your potential buyer.

I want you to think of a cadence like a sales playbook or even a blueprint of your process.

And it serves as the main engine behind your day to day responsibilities.

Cadences will even help you stay more organized and informed in the process.

Now, there are tons of different use cases for cadences.

Most folks honestly consider a pipeline generation tool, but I want you to also keep in mind that cadences can be used for a lot more. Including nurturing prospects, you know, setting up a series of event invitations meeting confirmations or even, really standardizing your meeting follow-up process.

I think it's safe to assume that we probably have a wide swath of different ten years on this call. We probably have some sellers who are brand new to their roles, or maybe some folks have been doing this for years.

So I am not here to completely reinvent the wheel when it comes to your process. You likely have a process that works for you or maybe your company has business specific processes that you need to adhere to. Now what I am here to do is to teach you some key components of a workflow that I hope you can incorporate into your existing processes.

To make yourself that much more productive and effective.

Throughout the next, like, forty minutes or so, I will be sharing tidbits on how our own loft leverage our platform as well as just general or broader industry best practices.

We are going to organize our conversation around these key learning objectives that we talked through just a few minutes ago. Now, encourage you to follow along the best that you can.

We like to follow this theory called the cone of experience.

And really, this just suggests that you only retain about fifty percent of what you see and hear, but ninety percent of what you do or simulate.

So the reason I'm sharing this is because, you are totally welcome to follow along with me as I go through, the app in just a few minutes.

You know, it's important to build up that muscle memory.

So however you best like to learn, you know, whether you want to follow along with me or you wanna repeat these steps later on, it's completely up to you. I just like to open up that opportunity for folks. Now, it's important to start your day by getting a lay of the land. Right? Need to understand how much bandwidth we have, how we should be spending our time today.

The answer to these questions will really influence how we manage our time each day. Our sellers here at SalesLoft like to time block their calendars where possible so that they are not contact switching and therefore losing productivity.

Now another theory that, we really base this specific training around, refers to that context switching.

Concept.

And so each extra task or context that you switch between will eat up up to eighty percent of your overall productivity.

Whereas if you allow yourself to focus on one task at a time, you're able to use a hundred percent of your productive time available.

So leveraging strategies like time blocking and focus zones allow you to reduce that contact switching so that you can again zero in on what is most important to you at the moment.

And so where you can get this lay of the land from is actually gonna be your home dashboard and salesloft. So that is where we're gonna get started first. If you are following along, this is a really good time to join in. If you have logged into SalesLoft before.

Alright. So I'm logged in to SalesLoft and I see my home dashboard, which is gonna be our first stop on our tour. We are going to really kick this off by tackling our first learning objective, which is understanding how to complete our daily tasks through our focus zones.

Understanding and leveraging your focus zones will really help maximize your time. To access your focus zones, you will just need to log in to SalesLoft and look at your dashboard.

Now, if you are truly brand new to SalesLoft off, you are instead of this dashboard or I guess an overlay, you're gonna see a checklist of items to complete. It's gonna say like getting started checklist or something. Please prioritize these steps because they are what make sales off functional. And hiding behind it, is your dashboard.

Now this dashboard is your go to hub to managing your day. I recommend stopping here each morning to see what all is on your plate for the day, especially in this first focus zone which is rhythm.

Now, right now, this page is likely like pretty sparse or maybe even blank, especially if you're truly brand new to SalesLoft.

But this page will begin populate with actions as you begin owning deals and adding people to cadences.

Now, there are three focus zones to choose from. And we encourage full cycle and closing sellers to leverage a rhythm as their default workflow.

To ensure that they are focusing on the highest priority actions first. This focus zone is where you can get the most bang for your buck. If you are in between meetings and you only have a few minutes to complete some actions. This is the best place to focus your attention.

When you go to complete a rhythm action, you can quickly determine what type of task it is and then hover over the task to get more We call this panel explainability.

We wanna be transparent about why one action is prioritized over another. So that you can understand the why that's happening behind the scenes. So you'll need to hover over the currency sign or the fire flames depending on the action to see more of why this action has been prioritized the way that it has.

Rhythm is going to automatically take in data to accurately prioritize what you should do next throughout your Now you may be wondering, like, what exactly is it looking at? What data is considered in the prioritization?

And so some examples of what it's gonna look like is at or what it's going to look at is gonna be a task's due date.

It's also going to take a look at the importance of a person or a deal based on their readiness to convert how engaged that person has been or even the value of an opportunity.

And then, there's also some time bound plays.

For example, a meeting follow-up action is likely going to become due twenty four hours after a meeting was scheduled. Now this workflow, the intention here is to take the guesswork out of what do I do next? And the more that you use rhythm, the more accurate the workflow will become.

If a is related to a signal from an integration. It is going to include the logo of that vendor and the task. So we could see DocuSign, that is where this signal generated G two is where this signal generated and so on. At the top, we can see all of our actions that are related to an open opportunity, and these are pulling from our deals pipeline.

Now if you use our deals product, you are going to see, you know, pretty standard opportunity information displayed, but most importantly, a, score that is going to be taken heavily into review by conductor AI will be the deal engaged score. And so we'll talk about this again a little bit later, but that is what this, kind of numerical value here is representing.

And it's essentially a health score that helps your manager and you identify which deals need attention.

It's a zero to one hundred score that's based on over thirty stakeholder engagement and deal progression factor.

Now, we'll talk about those factors when we dig in deeper a little bit later.

But first, I want to just pop over to the Cadence Focus zone. While that's loading, when you have a time block or you wanna reduce the amount of context switch, You can really zero in on either the cadence or the closed focus zone.

In the cadence focus if you're a full cycle seller, when you need to fill your pipeline, we encourage you to double down on your prospecting cadences within this focus zone.

Now for everyone else, this is really a great place to just filter out the other noise and maybe focus on specific types of tasks.

You're able to kind of group and sort your active cadence steps to really focus even more, and allow yourself to have more context for the tasks that you're completing. And then in our close focus zone, as I mentioned earlier, it's going to populate with the actions related to your open opportunities.

And so it's important to note that if you do not use our deals product and your CRM is not syncing opportunity data to SalesLoft, you are not going to see actions here. But, if we do have your opportunity data, the closed focus zone will be a really great place to spend your time when, again, it's like nearing the end of the month and you need to focus on the actions that matter the most, which will be the opportunities most likely to close. So that you can hit your quota.

And again, these are gonna only populate with open opportunity data. Alright. So to run any tasks, all you do need to do is simply just click to run an action.

And so we are talk through now our next learning objective because it really ties in when you run an action, you're able to then go forward to understand how to manage your deals from both your pipeline dashboard and your deal view.

So let's say that I am working through my rhythm tasks and I see an action for an opportunity.

Before I send an email to my stakeholder, I really wanna dig into the deal a little bit more.

So, when we run an action, The cool thing is is that it's going to take me to the place that I is going to provide me with the most helpful information.

And since I use the sales off deals product and this action is related to an open opportunity, I am going to jump right into the deal view to see the details of this deal. When I run an action from any of my workflows, I am gonna see a couple of things pop up. First and foremost, I'm gonna see my sidebar. Since I ran an action from rhythm. I'm gonna see that sidebar, but I can filter through from here. And essentially, I'm just seeing my entire rhythm workflow.

This is a call step and I use the SalesLoft in app dialer. So I see the dialer pop up. And then here I have my call, notes log.

So when I get on the phone or you know, when I make this dial to my prospect, Kyle, I am going to see a space to log any notes, and I'm gonna be able to log additional fields like the disposition of the call and the sentiment, and as soon as I'm finished logging this activity, I can click and move on to the next, action.

It's pretty straightforward from there. And so what I wanna do is just kinda close that out, and I'm gonna make more space to really dig into the deal view. I can always bring that action back up. No problem.

But when I dig into a deal, I'm really gonna see a lot of information that I honestly expect to see. I can see like the amount of the contract, how many days it's been the close date, things like that.

But there are also other details that can really help prepare me for any few your conversations about this deal. So I'm gonna teach you how to kind of use this to efficiently review a deal when you are ready to engage.

The first place that I wanna direct your attention is under this overview tab, which is gonna be my deal summary.

This is essentially a, you know, inline editing panel that can be customized by your SalesLoft admin to, really, prop up the fields or the field data that you need to see and edit in order to keep a deal up to date.

So inline editing is supported to help save myself time with my normal workflow.

But the absolute coolest part of this is that when I update fields here, is going to sync back to my CRM so that I am not updating this information twice.

And it is going to update immediately. So as soon as I update a field or, you know, make any edits, it's gonna push back to my CRM. So I can continue sort of moving and grooving in SalesLoft and move on with my day. So this section here is going to likely just be relevant to whatever your sales process is. And so I'm gonna pop down over here to this deal engagement score panel.

I see this as being your score insights. Okay?

So each deal will have a deal engagement score. It's that health score that I mentioned.

And this panel is going to give me insight into the finer details of the y behind the score. It is a quick way to triage what to do to progress this deal and increase the score if I need to.

So as an account executive, I can look at this and see what is lacking, which will then give me and next steps playbook. Beneath the score, we are gonna see the lifeblood of any deal, which are our stakeholders.

They are the people that we are partnering with to progress our deal forward. And we have to be able to address any and all concerns that they may have to move on. So I could see all the stakeholders that have been linked to this deal. And beneath it, I may see, a list of suggested stakeholders.

Salesoff will suggest people who may be involved with the deal based on certain criteria.

This helps you easily apply best practices like multi threading your deals, which ultimately will lead to bigger, safer deals.

The amount of stakeholders that you have on a deal could look different based on, you know, or variety of things, but We encourage you to have anywhere from two to ten stakeholders per deal that you are working. So the minimum is two, because you need to have two to at least generate a deal engagement score. And then, the max or sort of the higher end of where we recommend will be up to ten because around that number really accurately represents the diversity of the decision making process.

Average buying groups today are between six to ten people. So focusing on ensuring that you have every stakeholder listed will help ensure deal engagement score accurately, and will also give you more control over the deal by pulling in more related information via stakeholder involvement.

We have done a little bit of research into really measuring the impact of, adding stakeholders.

And we found that deals with at least one stake are listed on the deal summary has an increased win rate of about thirty nine percent.

That crazy? It's not even the minimum number that we recommend.

Now, from here, I could see who they are, what their role is, and what their role is in the deal.

I can add new stakeholders or add from my suggested list. And over here, I can see there their total engagement and when we last engaged with them. I can take individual one off actions with each stakeholder.

I can do that in two places. First, I can hover over. I can add someone to a cadence, if that makes sense, or I could run some quick actions, like booking a meeting with them, giving them a call, sending an email, or even leveraging SMS.

The quick actions that I have available here are gonna completely depend on what details I have on file for each person.

Now if you're wondering how did these stakeholders? How did I find all these people? Or where did they come from? So there's tons of places that you can at least get started if they're not coming to you. So you could search for stakeholders on LinkedIn.

You could leverage a third party application like Zoom info or maybe even six cents if your company uses those tools.

And also you would be surprised. Sometimes you can find some stakeholders within your CRM.

It's possible that your, you know, your company may be engaged with this person in the past or maybe even their, their company. The other place where I can, you know, connect with my stakeholders is through these quick action buttons up here. If I wanna give someone a call, I can click that and click to run that call. As we continue to make updates on a deal, we are able to keep track of any and all activity within our timeline.

Now here we're gonna see pretty much all time history of editing on a deal to give us context to our conversations.

Context is really key in sort of any stakeholder interaction, especially if you're working like a bunch of opportunities or accounts. You know, it's really hard to keep all of that in your in your head. And so the details here are what makes, really armed you with the resources need.

And this is your one stop shop to see your entire deal history. We can dig into further details by selecting one either our timeline items or even hovering over, a date on the calendar.

Now while Dick into an individual deal absolutely has its perks, you might also find that you wanna take a more holistic look at your pipeline. Maybe you have upcoming one to one with a leader or you just wanna use this as like a weekly admin task.

I can either click to sort of pull this out from up here, or, you know, I can x out from that deal view below, but I wanna look at my pipeline view at least two times a week. If not every day, so that I can ensure that I'm staying on top of my pipeline. This helps me stay ahead of any risks so that I can accelerate the deal cycle and also try and hit my number even faster.

It also equips me the right information to have higher quality conversations with my stakeholders, and it's important to take a proactive approach to pipeline management so I can get the most out of my pipeline. Now much like with the deal view, the pipeline view is in line and it also has adjustable columns that I can either resize or even rearrange.

Because I wanna be able to adjust what I'm looking at to include what is most relevant to me.

Now, I can manage my columns from this button here.

I recommend adding columns of fields that you most frequently update since you can then easily edit from the pipeline view and mass. Over here, we're gonna have some SalesLoft feature fields, which are specific to SalesLoft.

Then I also have fields that have pulled over from my CRM.

There are two fields that we recommend always including to really maximize your effectiveness. And those are two specific or sales off specific feature fields. Of course, It's gonna be the deal engagement score that I mentioned, but another one is called deal gaps.

Our deal gaps are they're unique to SalesLoft and are a quick way to triage your deal health from an admin perspective.

The deal gaps will flag any gaps or misses on your deal so that you can fix them quickly. You can hover over a deal gap count to see the gaps that have been flagged for this deal, and we can actually filter by our deal gaps as well to prioritize the deals that need the most attention.

But please note that context is, it's gonna be key here as well. Deal that are earlier on in a sales cycle will likely have more deal gaps than deals that are later on in the sales cycle. Just because naturally you don't have all the information you need. Now when you're ready to make contact with stakeholders on deals, you likely wanna reference back any key points in previous conversations.

And so we're gonna talk about, the third and learning objectives where we are going to dig into the details of a deal with conversations.

We wanna be aware of any pitfalls that could potentially risk our deal or anything that we can speak to in order to address the needs of the prospect.

Now that deal timeline is one way to do that, but one of the ways that we can dig into more details is by viewing associated conversations.

And so I'm gonna go ahead and visit my conversations library so that I can take a look at any previous phone call recordings or meeting recordings so that I can be aware of any and all conversations that have happened.

Now SalesLoft will do its best to automatically associate conversations with the appropriate deal which would then appear in my deal activity timeline, just by the way.

But I can also navigate to conversations from my main navigator.

And, this is my entire library that I have access to. I can apply filters to kind of hone in. I could search through below or even search for a conversation.

But, I wanna just go ahead and dig into a meeting that I have right here which I can click through to see the name. Once I am in this recording details view, The goal here is to be as efficient as possible because I do not have time nor do I really want to listen or relisten to an entire call.

I wanna be again aware of any pitfalls or anything that I can speak to. So that is gonna be focus when I'm looking into the details that I have here. Now I'm gonna go in a kind of random order, but so stay with me. But I really wanna just point you in the direction or I guess the order that I would recommend, to quickly dig in.

Beneath the media player, you're gonna see a tab called recap.

The recap is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. So if I was not on this call, if I wanna review what the call was about, SalesLoft is going to generate a recap of the call so I can review what the purpose of the call was. With a summary here.

And then I can also see any action items that were shared. Okay. So this will pick up from the transcript.

And to know any action items that I am responsible for or the, you know, prospect is. And then while I'm listening back to this call, I can use the comments or the notes section to include or identify any important details for myself or even tag internal stakeholders.

One of my favorite ways to leverage this feature is keeping any questions or conversations surrounding this conversation in one place.

So let's say that I'm preparing for, you know, this was a proposal review and we have an upcoming meeting that I included my RVP on, right? And so maybe I want to tag them in a specific point in the conversation to say, you know, this is a good summary the topic that I wanted to address today.

And so I would go ahead and tag them.

Add my comment and as soon as I click enter, the note is gonna be added below.

It's actually gonna order in the, like, timeline of the conversation.

And the person that I tagged is gonna get an email, notifying them of the mention, they can jump in here. And they can actually reply or even just take note. And, the good thing is is that any notes or questions that I'm taking and sharing with other a, it's gonna be visible to everyone who has access to this call. So if you are part of, like, a team selling motion or you know, your manager needs to see it. They'll be able to identify any notes that have been taken. But you're also not having to dig through all of your different, you know, apps that you communicate with your team through, like Slack, teams, Zoom, email, you name it, the list probably goes on.

And so I really would just wanna continue maintaining momentum with this prospect. So it's also important to understand kind of what key details we have available.

All of this is gonna pull from your your conversation platform like Zoom or Microsoft Teams.

So the time stamp and the actual recording of the call And then once it's synced into SalesLoft, you will have the option to release other records to it. So I mentioned earlier that SalesLoft is gonna do best to automatically associate people, accounts and opportunities to your conversations.

But it's also good that you have that option to manually associate with, specific records.

And so you wanna make sure that whatever is possible to relate to do so, as soon as possible.

So, the account that you're working do have an open opportunity, and then the sort of primary contact, so that we can easily access and have a holistic view of this account's journey with you. On the right, we have a rolling transcript that is gonna play along with the media.

But, I could also kind of dig in and search for any keywords or phrases within the transcript to see if there's something worth doing.

So let's see budget.

If I could type, that'd be nice.

Alright. So at this point in a conversation, the word budget was mentioned. And so it's gonna highlight here and I can click and it'll pull up on the screen.

And so I can easily kinda find and jump to that point in the call, which allows me to listen back to just the portion that's worthwhile to me. I can also download the transcript if I need to.

And then over on the left, we have a very similar feature, but this one's a little more admin controlled.

And they're called trackers.

I love the name because I think it's extremely clear about what it is. It's trackers will flag key words that were mentioned during the call.

And so you can set up tracker groups or your admin can to sort of group together keywords that you are gonna wanna look out for. So if I was interested in a point in a conversation about budget, budget, and pricing. It's gonna capture the amount of times that any of those words were mentioned.

So instead of me having to kind of think about what I wanna search for, this is gonna do some of that thinking work for me and pull out those key points in a conversation.

So it's really good for quick review of a meeting, but it's also really helpful for management or leadership to, provide you with some coaching. So if they wanna you know, they wanna review how all of their sellers are, you know, completing the new sales pitch. They can see how you guys are doing live but they're also looking for things like filler words is another really common example. You know, maybe you like me have a problem, subbing in filler words. And so every time you mention a filler word, it's gonna capture in the conversation.

It's not the most fun example, but it is a common example. Well, after reviewing this pretty much fully, can determine when I have what I need on this account so that I can align my messaging and progress this deal forward.

And I have the option to navigate back to my home dashboard and proceed with all of my other due actions.

And so throughout your day, you're gonna notice that all roads tend to lead you back to your home dashboard where, again, rhythm is gonna serve as your central hub for executing your daily tasks.