Visualize the way to win with Lucidchart for sales

Shannon Williams

Reading time: about 8 min

Topics:

Sales

At Lucid, we are excited to offer opportunities for all sales professionals to work visually, from sales reps creating account maps that reveal the best path to closed-won to sales engineers building technical diagrams that clearly show their product’s ROI.

Take a look at how Lucidchart, which includes a powerful integration with Salesforce, can impact every role in your sales org. Visualize the way to win so you can close bigger deals faster.

What is Lucidchart for sales?

With Lucidchart, your sales org can leverage our visual productivity platform in order to:

Shorten your sales cycle and close more deals. Lucidchart helps sales reps find the right decision-makers and close deals faster through account-based selling.
Increase deal size. With a better understanding of an account, sales reps can identify additional buyers and opportunities to sell their product or service.
Increase visibility. Lucidchart helps all stakeholders understand a deal’s status at a glance, from leadership looking to predict pipeline to sales engineers trying to tailor demos and proposals.
Increase productivity. Thanks to our integration with Salesforce, Lucidchart keeps you from wasting time on non-sales activities by bringing all vital account information together in one tool.

Integrate with Salesforce

Based on a 2017 report, more than 150,000 organizations worldwide use Salesforce to record crucial account information and manage customer relationships. But as prevalent as this CRM is, Salesforce doesn’t always present information in an actionable way. It offers tons of useful data—but it doesn’t connect the dots or highlight the buyers you’ll need to convince. In short, sales reps can’t easily leverage this information to close more deals.

In Lucidchart, sales orgs can take powerful Salesforce data and visualize it (complete with an official Salesforce shape library) to easily identify the path forward. With our Salesforce integration, you can:

Give reps the ability to import Salesforce contacts, quickly build account maps, and find the best and fastest path to closed-won.
Avoid duplicate work. Thanks to bi-directional sync, any changes that reps make in Lucidchart, including new contacts, will be instantly reflected in Salesforce and vice versa, so reps will only need to enter data once.
Centralize vital account information. Account maps are centrally owned and managed in Salesforce, so anyone will access to the Salesforce account record or opportunity can review the deal at a glance.
Import Salesforce schema to automatically visualize every table and relationship in your CRM and quickly build ERDs. Unlike Schema Builder, Lucidchart helps you optimize your CRM and share proposed changes without having to immediately implement them.

Learn more about our integration with Salesforce.

How will this benefit my sales org?

Lucidchart will impact every sales professional throughout the sales cycle. See the breakdown of benefits that every role can expect once they work visually.

For sales leadership

With Lucidchart, sales leaders can set up their sales orgs for success by giving them the tools to strategically approach accounts and deals. Sales leaders can also benefit personally as they:

Track and monitor the health of all deals their sales reps are working.
Conduct more effective deal reviews.
Gain better visibility into pipeline to drive more accurate forecasting.
Ensure that account knowledge stays within the organization.
Determine which deals should receive executive sponsorship.

On top of all these benefits, sales teams can roll out Lucidchart overnight. Other solutions require you to adopt their sales methodology, which results in extensive training and a higher cost for your organization. Lucidchart can be adapted to support any methodology you currently use so your sales reps don’t miss a beat (or their quota).

Sales reps at Clarabridge, a customer experience solution, use Lucidchart to build account maps and present the current status of their deals to executives every quarter. Christopher Putnam, director of sales operations, explains how, in addition to highlighting key players in the deal, these account maps have helped leadership understand where and when to get involved:

“There’s a lot more conversation once everyone can see who the rep has talked to and what levels of authority those people have. By looking at these account maps, you can tell how much more we need to do to get a deal closed. These visuals help us because we can leverage our executives to find executive connections at prospects and customers alike."

For sales reps

Lucidchart helps sales reps navigate complex deals and hit quota faster—without taking time away from the phones and other selling activities. With our intuitive solution, sales reps can quickly:

Build account maps to identify key relationships and find the most efficient path to closing the deal.
Reference previously created account maps to understand accounts that they inherited.
Onboard faster with visuals that clearly explain sales processes and best practices.
Give leaders a better understanding of their deals to receive coaching and executive sponsorship.

Dean Weede, senior sales executive at Box, explains how account mapping has helped make him successful in his role:

“I go into my account map multiple times a day. It is the number-one place that I go to quickly get a status on where I am in the account, where I need to go, where I’m not at, and it helps me validate my strategy and keep everybody else on board with my activities… The ability to share and collaborate on that content is huge.”

For sales ops and enablement

It’s up to sales operations and enablement to nail and scale. Lucidchart helps these professionals plan out handoffs, rules of engagement, and other best practices and then share them across the org, bridging the gap between people and process.

Use Lucidchart to:

Find bottlenecks and inefficiencies in your current processes and optimize.
Make processes available and easy for the team to understand and implement.
Customize your CRM for maximum efficiency.
Manage account transitions and onboard new employees faster so they can start contributing to your sales goals.
Centralize sales documentation.

Clarabridge initially adopted Lucidchart after they saw one sales rep using Lucidchart to build account maps and wanted to see the same visuals for every account. But the added advantage of Lucidchart’s Salesforce integration has made the solution even more valuable. Christopher Putnam, director of sales operations, describes:

"One of the big opportunities in using Lucidchart is that everyone can see the account maps. Instead of having to share it with individuals, you can just click right into the account in Salesforce and view it…. The integration with Salesforce has been key. It has helped us tremendously in understanding our customers and prospects.”

Lucidchart diagram shared in Microsoft Word

For sales engineers

Sales engineers face a unique challenge in the sales org: They are largely outnumbered (often with five reps to every one SE), and because they are in such high demand, sales engineers are always trying to win back time.

Lucidchart not only helps sales engineers gauge whether an account is ready for their involvement, but it also helps them quickly create on-brand collateral through templates and automation.

Sales engineers can save hours of time when they use Lucidchart to:

Clearly demonstrate ROI through professional diagrams.
Review account maps to qualify prospects before joining a call and better understand how to tailor demos or proposals to customer needs.
Templatize frequently used documentation.
Create custom, branded templates and shape libraries to share best practices and knowledge with their team.
Automatically build technical diagrams, such as ERDs and AWS architecture diagrams.
Integrate with popular tools, such as Office 365 and G Suite, to deliver visuals the way their customers want them.

Dan Marma, senior services architect at Okta, uses Lucidchart to demonstrate the value of Okta’s services and close the deal. In fact, Okta has a whole library of branded templates for customer-facing presentations and solution implementation. Dan explains:

“The Lucidchart diagrams inspire confidence with the customer so they can say, ‘Hey, these guys have done this before. These diagrams look good. They make sense. They’re readable. What we’re doing is no longer this confusing thing.’ Remove that element of confusion, and people feel better about their decision."

For professional services and customer success

Even after a deal has closed, the sales cycle continues. Internal implementation teams, or professional services, have a tight deadline to get the solution up and running based on the customer’s needs and expectations. Then customer success teams work with customers to onboard their users and continually show value so the customers will want to renew or grow their accounts.

To keep customers satisfied, both of these teams need the same context that sales reps had while they worked the deal: These teams need to know what was sold to the customer and what the customer hopes to accomplish through this solution.

Lucidchart eliminates the handoff to implementation and customer success teams by keeping essential account information, such as account maps and technical documentation, up to date and in one location. These teams will not have to repeat discovery work—they will already understand the customer’s goals and expectations to provide a better buyer experience.

You’ve seen how other companies have used Lucidchart to accelerate the sales cycle. Now see how it can impact your sales org.

About the author

Shannon Williams graduated from BYU in English and then turned to the world of marketing. She works as a content marketing specialist at Lucid Software. Instead of writing her novel (like she should be), Shannon spends her free time running, reading, obsessing about Oscar season, and watching Gilmore Girls on loop.

About Lucidchart

Lucidchart, a cloud-based intelligent diagramming application, is a core component of Lucid Software's Visual Collaboration Suite. This intuitive, cloud-based solution empowers teams to collaborate in real-time to build flowcharts, mockups, UML diagrams, customer journey maps, and more. Lucidchart propels teams forward to build the future faster. Lucid is proud to serve top businesses around the world, including customers such as Google, GE, and NBC Universal, and 99% of the Fortune 500. Lucid partners with industry leaders, including Google, Atlassian, and Microsoft. Since its founding, Lucid has received numerous awards for its products, business, and workplace culture. For more information, visit lucidchart.com.

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