A new line of business is usually a major investment of time and money – time in training, certification, and business process engineering as your company prepares to implement and support customers and a new product or service.
While sales training is also a part of this investment, there’s a significant component of a new business line that is often overlooked or “under”-looked: the ability to easily and naturally quote the new products and services.
To be blunt, I’ve seen many new lines of business fail before they get started simply because the sales team can’t propose it to their customers.
It’s natural enough to try to quote a new business line using your existing spreadsheets or word templates, and such is often the case. This results in a manual, half-baked, ill-understood proposal process that is first and foremost difficult – and that spells disaster for your new business line.
Do yourself and your business a big favor: Don’t just do a good job of setting up your proposals for that new business line: HIT IT OUT OF THE PARK. Go overboard. Make absolutely sure that your sales team can quote those new products and services while falling out of bed.
A few of the things that you should attend to:
Continue reading »
Business Process, Competitive Advantage, IT, Kent, Knowledge Transfer, Managed Service Providers, Order Porter, Productivity, Proposals, Quotes, Sales, iPad
Sep 092011
Five Major Sales Leaks That Could Be Affecting Your Company
My wife Anne gets after me because I’m not always careful enough with my spare change and bills, and they often fall out of my pocket. This often occurs in her car, and many a shopping excursion has been thus funded. She says I “leak money” (and does her best to restrict my access to the same).
Some of our customers leak sales rather than money, and this was brought home to me when I recently had a conversation with a good customer who had started using our Quosal Order Porter Mobile for the iPad application. He said he was doing three times as many quotes as he previously had been. Naturally, I think that’s great – but I realized, as he did, that he’d been missing out on two thirds of his sales opportunities before – he was leaking sales by writing them down on yellow sticky notes, or business cards, or just trying to commit to memory a customer’s request for a new product, or his own on-site observations of a customer’s needs. Now, he takes out his iPad and delivers the quote on-the-spot.
There are many ways to leak sales, and all of us do, sometimes on a daily basis. It’s a very costly habit. Here are a few ways that I see sales dribbling away for businesses of all types, but particularly our information technology audience. Continue reading »
I’ve blogged in the past about the concept of “Sales as a Service” – in fact, one of the most important services that you provide to your new and existing customers. The concept applies to the overall sales process of course, but the quote and proposal aspect of the sales process is my focus.
Clearly, a properly, fully, and accurately configured solution is one of the most important services that the sales team can provide to the customer. In fact, it may be the most important service we ever provide – because a properly configured solution provides a smooth ride for the customer throughout the life of our relationship with them. A poorly configured, inaccurate solution will drive the need for far more services under less-than-optimal circumstances.
For those of us that provide services to our customers either as our primary business or in support of solutions we sell, it’s easy to draw the comparison between the “service of selling” to any other services we provide on a daily basis – and the customer’s reaction to those services is nearly the same. Continue reading »
Have you had the experience of believing the lyrics of a favorite old song go one way, but then finding out years (or decades) later that they go another? Most of us probably have. When this happens to me, I get a little flush of embarrassment and practically look around waiting for the lyrics police.
One of my favorite songs is “White Rabbit” by Jefferson Airplane. I was recently grieved to find that the lines
Remember what the dormouse said
Feed your head
Feed your head…
Are in reality
KEEP your head
KEEP your head
For any Lewis Carroll fans, this of course makes total sense in the context of the Alice in Wonderland tale, with the Red Queen after everyone’s head.
This revelation was a double-ding for me, because not only did I have it wrong but I thought that “Feed your Head” was brilliant. I interpreted it as what Steven Covey calls “Sharpening the Saw” – feed your head with new ideas, new skills, new training. Continue reading »
Quosal was formed on a foundation of beliefs that I had about the way business quotes are put together – a way that is sometimes not only not conducive to landing the deal, but can sometimes be counter to that purpose.
I believed then, and still believe today, that business quoting practices rarely put our best foot forward on a really basic professional level. Quotes and proposals are often shabbily prepared, not delivered on time, contain inaccuracies, are difficult to understand for the customer – you get the picture.
When we actively opened our offices and started Quosal rolling, I decided to use our own business startup as something of a research project. I set forth a few basic rules about our own procurement of anything bigger than a pen: that we would seek out at least 3 quotes for what we were purchasing, and that we’d track several “quote-based” metrics on each quote we were provided, such as:
- Was the quote provided on time (we sought a time commitment from each vendor)
- What was the format of the quote – hand-written? Verbal? Paper? PDF?
- Did the quote contain inaccuracies? Math errors? Grammatical errors?
- Did the quote accurately reflect what we’d asked for? Did it fill the need?
…and so on. Continue reading »
