How Repsly Turned HubSpot into a Modern, Scalable Deal Desk

When I first joined Repsly, we were managing everything in a Word document. Reps were able to put their own pricing together and sign their own quotes.

We were really just trying to get new logos in the door at the time. As we started to grow, we realized that we definitely needed some more controls.

So I went ahead and created a super cumbersome spreadsheet that had tons of V-lookups and macros in it that would pull from our pricing tables.

And then we put in a process, a pretty elaborate one. You had to share the quote with Finance and make sure that they reviewed it before going out to the customer.

Everybody that had to approve had to be CC'd on the email because we needed to make sure we had some historical trail of what was agreed upon in the sales agreements.

Then, when auditors came in, Finance needed something to show them - "this deal happened, and here are all of the approvals."

That worked well for a little bit. But, as we continued to grow and started ramping up our renewal process, a lot of things came up, like "Well, what happened to that deal?" or "What did we agree on?"

CS would want to see the quote, and they were all PDF files.

Those were some of the pain points that we really had when we started looking for a solution to help.

I had implemented a very cumbersome CPQ in the past, so I knew there was something better. But we're also a small and mighty team and wanted something scalable, flexible, and easy for us to use.

And that's where we found RevOps.

RevOps Deal Desk has been a great solution for us. It helps us get more visibility into what's happening with our deals, creates transparency across our organization, and makes Finance feel a lot more comfortable around what's going out to a customer because they have control.

We now have controls in place, and if anybody ever wants to go in and take a look at the deals that were shared, it all lives in HubSpot, which is great.

Here's our test company with our contacts and our deals within our HubSpot instance.

Our reps generally create opportunities based on when the demo happens and they set up a default amount when they're ready to share pricing with the customer.

They can do it either one of two ways:

But I always prefer doing it from RevOps just because it keeps everything in one place.

We have set up two different types of order forms: New business and renewals. and those for upselling, which is especially important because you have to pro-rate to give back credits.

It's really great that we can have different kinds of sales orders out there and they all live in one place. Before, we had to manage multiple versions of spreadsheets and had to make sure that reps had the latest and greatest spreadsheet and that they weren't using the last one.

What our reps really like is that it pulls in this information around the contact for them already.

Everything defaults to 12 months, but they can obviously play around with it. We do a lot of multi-year contracts and the flexibility and ease of the system - being able to automatically update the pricing without having to think about it - is awesome.

We have some custom fields set up, so reps put in their account ID, and the billing frequency, which they can select, so it's very easy for them.

We do offer annual and quarterly payments.

Then, they have the proposal expiration date -  which is great because it's something we had before, but never could really enforce because spreadsheets were just out there.

Once this passes the prospect or customer can't access this proposal anymore. If we really want to offer this great discount - which, sometimes we do - we can say you have to sign by the end of the quarter.

This proposal expiration date really comes in here.

The reps then go in here and type in their SKUs.

We have an "up to" amount, so this is really great.

This is how we manage it with the quantity of one and the price per unit.

They put a 10% discount; sometimes they don't want to share that, so the option to be able to do that is always awesome.

And then we have one-time fees.

You can see this includes "up to one day" with eight hours, so if I want it to sell more deals that automatically updates. So this functionality works really, really well for us. And it's really nice that we can split up our subscription versus our one-time fees pretty easily. And then be able to share that back with the customer.

We then submit this for approval.

All of our approvals go to our Finance team who is managing the deal desk. So our sales team knows that there is a 24-hour SLA because our deal desk reviews, every single quote that comes across their desk, they make sure that the subscription dates are where they need to be.

They make sure that the products are where they need to be. And then we assign approvals based on the type of products that we have added to the quote.

Our Finance team then goes in and reviews everything, making sure that all the T's are crossed and I's are dotted - that nothing looks funky and that they've added a proper account ID.

And then we go to the comments. We assign specific sections to our Revenue Leaders. So if this is a new sales quote, we assign it to our CSO. If it's a renewal quote, we assign it to our Chief Customer Officer.

Then we post that comment.

Everything that is a one-time fee goes to our professional services team. This is super big for us because it's a new feature and new kind of product that we have in a brand new team. So we want to make sure that what the sales team is sharing back with the customer is actually doable in our professional services.

We have a lot of instances where our professional services or CSO comes back and they type in "this is great," or "can you think about something else?" We go back and forth on this comments section and anybody that ever has any questions about what's happening, we tell them, please go into the comments.

We've really, really made this a point in our process that we do not want anything through email. We don't want anything through chat. And if there's anything that they need to have questions about or want approval on it all needs to be handled through RevOps.

Once those two folks have approved everything, our Deal Desk then goes back and does the ultimate approval. So they make sure that our professional services team, our revenue leaders, or if it has to be our leadership team because there's a large discount, that they've gone in and everybody has done their part before the rep can actually share this with the customer.

We have some workflows in place that then drive this back to HubSpot, so the moment that a quote is shared the stage automatically updates into "sale order pending," or if it's in negotiation, it updates back into the system.

And that just really helps us also make sure that our sales process is correct.

We struggled a lot knowing where things were, and RevOps has been able to automate that.

We're now able to see what has been sold because we have reporting dashboards that are in place that we share with our professional services team.

This is how much implementation they bought. This is how many hours they get.

And as a next step, which we're really excited about is we're going to create that integration with our new billing function. So we're really starting to build kind of that whole loop between our CRM, our quoting system in our billing solutions.

RevOps has really been a game-changer for us, and it's just automated a lot of what we're doing.