What makes a great deal room?

Whether you’re working as a sales representative, account executive, or sales leader, if you’re working in sales, your job is becoming increasingly complex, challenging, and collaborative. With multiple stakeholders involved both internally and externally, the number of tools and the complexity of processes required to manage the work has increased tremendously.

What does a typical sales job look like?

Let’s focus on the human side of things first. Although it looks like the sales job is more of an individual contributor role, in reality, your job requires excellent project and relationship management skills.

Every day, you’re required to juggle multiple balls such as keeping the client-side resources happy, feeding them with all the required information and high-quality materials in time, keeping the internal systems and people up-to-date, coordinating demos and meetings with all cross-functional stakeholders such as Product, Customer Success, Legal, and Finance.

With the sales cycle becoming more complex, the work is not just about “selling” anymore, you’re required to be involved even during customer onboarding and post-sales support for each client. On top of all of these, as teams are becoming more distributed and remote work becoming more common, you need to be super collaborative to be successful. 

On the tooling front, sales leaders aim to choose the best sales productivity tooling to enable effective collaboration and efficient sales workflows. In a modern sales org, this means at a minimum, having to use tools for;

• CRM
• Sales prospecting
• Outreach automation
• Sales analytics
• Sales enrichment
• Project management
• Note-taking
• Video calling
• Calendaring
• Call recording
• Internal ticketing

, and so on and so on.

Although these tools could be great for their intended purposes, having to switch between so many tools, and dealing with the fragmented information in so many different systems adds up to the complexities, reduces your productivity, and slows you down.

How can a digital deal room help?

A digital deal room is where sales teams collaborate with various stakeholders on a customer or deal. It’s where all the required people get together virtually, access and update information easily, and interact with each other faster. 

There is an increasing trend to use Slack for this purpose. Comms happen in Slack, people like to do their work in Slack, and especially with Slack Connect bringing external participants into a channel, it is natural to try Slack as the first deal room option. However, looking at the existing Slack-based deal room solutions, they are quite far from being ideal since they are all limited in some way or another. They either make it impossible to customize the sales workflow, or they miss the functionality of other significant apps that are crucial in deal room processes such as analytics, incentive compensation, or approval steps. 

This is exactly why we’ve built Actioner as a Slack-first app builder. If you want to work in Slack, Actioner funnels all of its and its integrated tools functionality into Slack, empowering it to be a real digital HQ. Slack-first deal rooms is one of these use cases where you can experience the limitless flexibility and customization of the modern, unified workspace.    

How to use Actioner-powered Slack as your deal room?

With Actioner deal rooms on Slack, here is what we imagined: 

• Shared Slack channels that work as a digital deal room for teams to collaborate on a customer or deal cycle.
• Ability to access and update CRM records and meeting information directly from Slack
• Inviting external partners, customers, and internal stakeholders to join the channel as needed for faster interactions.
• Swarming dedicated Slack channels to allow teams to collaborate on urgent and high-priority cases, bringing in the right contacts to achieve rapid resolution. Identifying the subject matter experts to add to a channel, based on suggestions and past interactions. 
• Personalized daily list of tasks, and meetings for Sales reps, briefed in Slack.
• All the context needed to make better decisions. Get all the info about the deal or customer in one click, including their support usage, bug reports, feature requests,  payment history and more. 
• Sharing critical data updates in beautiful and easily consumable visualizations, even when the data is scattered across various tools and systems like Tableau, HubSpot, Zendesk, and Jira.  
• Shared learnings from an account as a summary. Leverage the expertise and learnings for onboarding and training of new reps. 

There is much more you can add to your deal rooms through Actioner’s no-code builder! 

Learn how to create Slack-first deal rooms or explore what else you can do with Slack-first sales automation with HubSpot.

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Sales use cases          Slack-first sales with HubSpot          Deal rooms in Slack