Deal Revival®: The Zombies You Actually Want to See
Happy Almost Halloween. Let’s discuss the kind of Zombie that matters most to revenue leaders: bringing a deal back from the dead. This happened to me in real life the other day, and it was hair-raising (but not at all frightening).
I was scanning the Vivun Salesforce instance, and saw that a whole army of opportunities had been put into the weekly pipeline report:
These were old deals newly marked with the word “Revival.” I assumed that our incredible SDR team had run a manual campaign to reach out to these old opportunities and reignite their interest in using Vivun. It was great to see: our weekly pipeline number shot up like fireworks.
But it wasn’t true. These zombie opportunities had staggered back into the pipeline on their own.
How? Because at Vivun, we use our own platform — and that means we capture opportunity gaps that prevent deals from being won. We also capture when those gaps have been closed, enabling the sales team to go back in and proactively sell into dormant opportunities with the news that we can now meet their technical requirements.
That’s not scary at all. Here’s how Deal Revival® works. The Presales person handling each opportunity can use the Vivun platform to indicate when product challenges are jeopardizing a deal, and when those challenges are actually deal breakers:
When Presales enters in a gap that they’ve identified, they can use our AI-clustering ability to see if anyone else has identified that gap in the past, and they can select it.
This is incredibly powerful because when every Presales person on the team is doing this, product and revenue leadership gets a complete view of the technical blockers and opportunity gaps that are affecting revenue — and they can drive the product roadmap in the direction of closing those gaps and recovering that revenue.
But in the meantime? The individual Presales person can keep up-to-date on the product gap that they care about:
We’re able to communicate this kind of critical information to the Presales team because we integrate with the tools in which the product and engineering teams live: Jira, Azure DevOps, and GitHub. So we keep track of how close products and features are to being released, and we let Presales know when it’s about to happen.
And, of course, we fire an alert when the gap has actually been closed:
In my case, we had configured Vivun to pipe those deal revivals directly into the weekly Salesforce report so sales and marketing wouldn’t miss them.
And the reality is, we would have missed them. Vivun isn’t a huge company, but we are busy, and we would have forgotten that we had closed technical gaps that enabled us to go back into those deals, sell them, and recover lost revenue. Our own platform guided us in the direction of finding more money.
Deals back from the dead? When you live or die based on pipeline generation, there’s nothing more likely to make you scream. But not with terror.
Take a demo of Vivun and we’ll show you more ways to scare up additional revenue.