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Quoting is The First Order of a New Line of Business

Business Process, Competitive Advantage, Entrepreneur, Productivity, Proposals, Quotes, Sales, Technology No Responses »

Jan 032012

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:

Are you leaking sales?

Business Process, Competitive Advantage, IT, Kent, Knowledge Transfer, Managed Service Providers, Order Porter, Productivity, Proposals, Quotes, Sales, iPad No Responses »

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 »

Sales as a Service – A Perspective for Success

Business Process, Competitive Advantage, Proposals, Quotes, Sales No Responses »

Jul 082011

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 »

Feed Your Head

Competitive Advantage, ConnectWise, IT, Innovation, Knowledge Transfer, Productivity, Technology, Uncategorized No Responses »

Jun 232011

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 »

Business Quoting Still Has a Long Way to Go

Competitive Advantage, Productivity, Proposals, Quotes No Responses »

Jun 132011

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 »

The Craziest PowerPoint Slide Ever

Business Process, Competitive Advantage, Productivity, Proposals, Quotes, Sales No Responses »

Sep 202010

Look at that chart.

Just look at it!

That, according to Wired magazine’s Danger Room blog, is the Pentagon’s craziest PowerPoint slide.

It’s the The “Integrated Acquisitions Technology and Logistics Life Cycle Management” diagram, which purportedly describes the Pentagon’s process for developing, testing and acquiring new gear.

Stare long enough, and you’ll start to see why it takes a decade for the Defense Department to buy a tanker plane, or why Marines are still reading Web pages with Internet Explorer 6.

I recall a previous project of mine that involved seven different companies, each with its own agenda. I sat down and committed the project’s approval process to a PowerPoint slide, which I humorously titled “How a Bill Becomes a Law.” At the time, it was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen, with flow-chart lines going everywhere. But of course it was nothing compared to that Pentagon slide.

Does anything in your business resemble it?

We talk a lot about “personal productivity” and “lifehacking,” but we don’t spend enough time on company productivity, measured by the time it takes to turn a quote into an order, and how many steps are involved. And think about the steps it takes for a customer who wants to buy your product to get back to you. Print the quote. Sign the quote. Scan the quote. Get the scan into an email. Write the email. Send the email. Every step representing a moment where the customer can reconsider their decision.

Quosal and Quosal for ACT! will help you streamline this process, making it easy for your sales staff to get your approval, and Order Porter will make it even easier for your customers to say “Yes.”

But it’s all going to come down to you. How many flow chart lines can you delete from your process?

Fitting Right into the 101 Ways to Make More Sales

Competitive Advantage, Knowledge Transfer, Proposals, Quotes, Sales No Responses »

Aug 032010

Former journalists, like me, gravitate toward Copyblogger, a fantastic blog about all things words, and specifically, copywriting tips for marketing success. Quotes and proposals are by definition things with words, so there’s a lot that can be gleaned from Copyblogger.

Former journalists, like me, are also suckers for lists. Say “top 10” anything, and we’ll read it. You can see why Copyblogger’s “101 Ways to Make More Sales Online,” caught my eye. In fact, “put a number in the headline” is one of the 101 Ways.

But what really made me sit up and take notice was how Quosal fit into those 101 suggestions.

Let prospects know they’re buying from a human being.

Honestly, this is the very reason behind Order Porter’s personal video feature. People tend to buy things from people. You are not a vending machine, so your quote or proposal document should not act like one. Adding a personal video to your quote – even just to say “thanks” — and delivering it through Order Porter is a great way to make one more memorable impression on your customer.

Tell a story about how you solved this problem for yourself before you started selling the solution to others.

Quosal CEO Kent McNall loves telling the story about how Quosal got started when, in one of Kent’s past businesses, a lack of a good quoting tool led directly to a salesman’s six-figure mistake. Knowledge Transfer is a key problem Quosal solves.

Make sure you’ve described your product or service in enough detail. If it’s physical, give the dimensions and some great photos. … Don’t assume your prospects already know any details — spell everything out.

Include a photograph of what you’re selling, if you can.

It’s for this very reason that Quosal works with Etilize, allowing you to smoothly include product details and product photographs into your quotes and proposals. Quosal + Etilize is a powerful, powerful combination.

Put your photo on your sales page. Human beings are hard-wired to connect to faces. If prospects can see you, it’s easier for them to trust you.

Not only does Quosal recognize this as a fundamental truth, we built this feature right into the application – an optional space for a personal photo is built right in, ready to go.

Does the prospect know everything he needs to know in order to make this purchase? What questions might still be on his mind? How can you educate him to make him more confident about his decision to buy?

You probably already have product brochures, descriptions of your services and various sales sheets. Quosal’s PDF Merge Manager feature makes it easy to include these materials with your quote and proposal documents. No more cobbling together documents – they can be merged into one, smooth-looking professional package.

Can you provide a demonstration of the product or service?

As a matter of fact, we can.

Quotes and Proposals Are Information about Information

Competitive Advantage, Proposals, Quotes No Responses »

Jul 192010

Seth Godin gives us another jumping off point to discuss quoting and proposal management.

It wasn’t the bags of chips that led Frito Lay to domination of the snack business, he says. It wasn’t the Slurpees that made 7-Eleven a success. And it wasn’t the clothes that Zara one of the best known brands in Europe (coming to an American mega-mall near you).

No, the competitive edge for those companies was their management of information about information.

At the time of its 1965 merger with PepsiCo, Frito Lay had 46 manufacturing plants and 150 distribution centers.
7-Eleven has more locations in Japan than anywhere else. Mastery of their supply chain is key.
Zara needs just two weeks to develop a new product and get it to stores, compared with a six-month industry average. It launches around 10,000 new designs each year.

These are plain-jane businesses. They make stuff to eat, to wear, and own stores where stuff is sold. But they’re backed with tight, tight management of their information.

For example, instead of adopting a strategy of branding and advertisement, like Abercrombie & Fitch, Zara focuses on radical product iteration. If a design doesn’t show sales traction within a week, it’s canceled, and no design lives longer than four weeks in stores, encouraging repeat business. Up until recently, Zara didn’t even advertise.

They pull down about $10 billion a year.

Why is an information management strategy so valuable? Seth Godin:

Because it compounds. A tiny head start in access to this information gives you a huge advantage … Think about how much needs to be sorted, compared, updated and presented to people who want to choose or learn or trade on it. The race to deliver this essential scalable asset isn’t over, it’s just beginning.

Quotes and proposals are information about information — what was the content, how was it presented, what options were available to the customer, how was it received, how was it tracked, how did it connect to everything else in your CRM and inventory systems?

How are you managing this flow of information about information?

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