Complex sales best practices: 5 Strategies for optimizing your sales cycle

The modern B2B sales cycle is anything but simple.

Complex sales can be intricate and lengthy, and because they involve many moving parts, they often call for multiple decision-makers and complex pricing structures.

With higher stakes, you need more precision, speed, and customization to make sure your sales process goes smoothly.

The good news?

With the right training, skills, and tools, sales teams can navigate longer sales cycles, build strong relationships, and close high-value deals that drive revenue and exceed business goals.

Before diving into complex sales best practices, let’s break down what complex sales is and the challenges that can arise in these high-stakes deals.

Understanding the complex sales process

What makes sales complex?

Here are some common components of complex sales:

• Long decision-making cycles – Whereas transactional sales can feel almost instant, complex deals can take weeks or even months to close. 
• Multiple stakeholders – With complex sales, you’re often aligning an entire team (or multiple teams) rather than simply convincing one person to take the deal. 
• Customization – Complex deals are unique in nature, as they typically require custom pricing, configurations, or terms. 
• High-value transactions – The more complex the deal, the higher the value involved. 

From discovery to the final signature, every step in the sales process carries a larger weight, and therefore leaves more room for error.

Key challenges in complex sales

While seemingly obvious, complex sales create more potential roadblocks for your sales team. Some of these include:

• Miscommunication – When working with multiple departments/teams, there are more opportunities for things to get lost in translation. 
• Inaccurate pricing – Pricing and quoting mistakes are a sure way to frustrate your customers and delay deals, which ultimately could cost you valuable business.
• Time-consuming customization – If you have a manual process for quotes, you’ll risk making errors and slowing down the entire sales cycle. This is where CPQ software can come in handy—more on this later! 

Best practices to optimize the complex sales process

Now that you know what complex sales is and the challenges it can cause, let’s dive into how you can make sure your sales process runs smoothly and efficiently.

Build efficient, repeatable workflows

Want to know one of the fastest ways you can improve your complex sales cycle?

Remove unnecessary friction.

This means you need to identify bottlenecks—where is the process getting held up? Also, automate repetitive tasks to avoid unnecessary manual labor, giving your team time back to focus on closing the deal.

When your workflow is reliable for your team, you set them up for success when it comes to your bottom line. Consistency means your team is happy and your customers have a smoother, more professional experience.

Use automation and tools like CPQ

It’s past time to move away from a manual configure, price, and quote (CPQ) model. CPQ software can help you with the heavy lifting by:

• Applying pricing rules automatically 
• Reducing time spent on admin work
• Minimizing human errors
• Speeding up turnaround time on quotes

CPQ software helps your team deliver accurate, timely, and professional quotes that will keep the sales process moving while impressing your prospects.

Focus on customer-centric selling

Your sales process needs to focus primarily on your customer’s needs. Here are a few ways you can make that happen:

• Make sure your team is asking the right questions during the discovery process 
• Have custom offers available to target specific pain points the customer is facing
• Always provide answers quickly and accurately at every stage of the sales process

Customer-centric selling is the best way you can build trust with your clients. Plus, the more complex the sale, the more trust your customer needs to have in you—they have a lot on the line, after all.

Remove silos and improve collaboration

Since complex sales can involve multiple departments, including sales, legal, finance, operations, marketing, customer success, and even product or engineering teams at times, efficient communication and shared visibility are key for every deal.

This means using tools that excel in collaboration in addition to task management.

CPQ tools are a great example; they give your team access to shared data and real-time updates. This can help to speed up approvals and eliminate unnecessary back-and-forth.

Accurate pricing and quoting is vital

If you don’t have the right price, the rest can fall apart at the seams. When your quotes are inaccurate, you could delay the deal while losing credibility—two things you want to avoid, since your complex sales buyers are likely weighing different options from competitors.

Manual pricing adds more risk and less reward, as these outdated processes are prone to mistakes and lead to miscommunication across teams.

Automation is the solution, and the right CPQ software can change the game for complex sales.

How CPQ software optimizes complex sales

Here’s how CPQ software can enhance your complex sales process so you can close the deal every time:

Automates pricing and delivering accuracy

As you know by now, CPQ software makes manual data entry a thing of the past. It applies pre-approved pricing rules, so you can trust that every quote you create is accurate and up to date. That means no more guesswork and no more errors.

Generates quotes fast to speed up your sales cycle

Instead of hours (or even days), you’ll be able to configure deals within minutes using CPQ software.

This means that your reps can build, price, and send quotes faster than competitors who still use a manual process.

“When creating enterprise contracts, I have sat down for upwards of 45 minutes just double-checking the math on the many line items,” Katie Drury, Head of Revenue Enablement at PandaDoc, says. “Then you need to make sure not only are the numbers correct, but also that it follows the rules of your organization. This means it needs to follow the discount policy, have the necessary approvals, and be compliant with what billing needs to invoice correctly. [Without CPQ] all of this documentation could live in many, many different places.”

Tailors offers to customer needs

With CPQ, every customer can get the right solution for them. This is because these tools have built-in logic and personalization capabilities that help customize the deal to exactly what the customer wants and needs, targeting specific pain points.

Plus, you can set it up so that all options stay within your company guidelines and margin goals, so you don’t have to worry about going off-book.

Enhance your complex sales process with PandaDoc CPQ

Tools like PandaDoc combine CPQ software with document management to help you create professional documents and contracts faster while streamlining the approval process.

Rather than starting from scratch, we offer 1,000+ professional templates to speed up the creation process. Plus, PandaDoc integrates with the other tools in your tech stack to help your team work smarter and faster without switching between multiple applications.

With the right tools to streamline the quote creation process, your representatives can focus on building relationships and selling.

“Previously, we used ancient software that just didn’t provide the user-friendliness and efficiencies we needed to better serve our customers. PandaDoc was the clear winner because it easily integrated into our existing systems and provided us with a way to sell our broad scope of services to customers and boost sales. Our customers’ experience is our top priority, and building trust with them is critical. PandaDoc helped us up-level that experience by simplifying our processes and enhancing how we communicate with our clients.”

– Marija Miše, Customer Success Manager at Avantio

The bottom line

Complex sales don’t have to be overly complicated. It’s all about working smarter, not harder.

Employing our best practices and investing in the right tools (like CPQ software) will help your sales team reduce errors and close deals faster.

Ready to see how PandaDoc CPQ can work for you? Request a demo today. 

Frequently asked questions

• What are complex sales?

  Complex sales require a different approach than traditional transactional sales. With longer sales cycles, multiple decision-makers, and higher stakes, these deals demand a strategic combination of deep buyer understanding, skilled communication, and the right technology to drive success.

  For a more in-depth review of complex sales, read this article.

• What does a complex sale cycle look like?

  A complex sales cycle will often include discovery phases, multiple demos or consults, and alignment with key stakeholders. They will also typically include customized proposals, reviews with legal teams, and sometimes multiple rounds of negotiation before finalizing the deal.

• Why is pricing accuracy crucial in complex sales?

  When you have a high-value deal on the table, trust is essential. When you make a single pricing mistake, it can cause detrimental delays, erode confidence, and even lead to losing the deal altogether.

  Being accurate from the get-go shows your customers that you’re a professional, which will ultimately build buyer confidence.

• How can you speed up a complex sales process?

  Leave the manual processes behind. You can have a faster complex sales process if you strategically employ automation and simplify what you’re doing.

  Using CPQ tools, for example, is a great way to generate fast, accurate quotes while providing clearer workflows and reducing bottlenecks in the approval process. Plus, it will encourage cross-functional collaboration throughout the entire sales cycle. 

• How can CPQ software help streamline complex sales?

  CPQ software is key to simplifying configuration, pricing, and quoting. It helps make sure your prices are accurate and automatically creates the quote for your prospects to review.

  Plus, sales reps can respond quickly when customizing deals to meet the customer’s needs. All of this will help accelerate the deal cycle and improve close rates.