There are five substantial areas of return on investment for businesses — especially IT providers and MSPs — that implement Quote and Proposal Automation (QPA).
- Quote/Proposal Creation Productivity
- Quote to Order Productivity
- Quality
- Competitive Advantage
- Knowledge Transfer
In ROI terms, each can be very substantial, and determining which area has the most potential will vary from company to company. But more often than not, the ROI area with the highest potential may surprise you — Knowledge Transfer, most easily translated as “the ability to get a new salesperson up to speed and quoting for new business.”
Here’s a mini-drama played out time and again among small IT/MSP businesses: The business has a few productive sales people, most often the entrepreneur who started the business, and perhaps another veteran that handles a specialty area like government sales. They’ve each developed their own system of getting quotes out the door, often involving a combination of Word, Excel or Ye Olde Quoting Tool they purchased or developed themselves back in Aught-’02.
The entrepreneur wants to get out of sales, but can’t. Every once in a while, he gets fed up and hires a young fireball to expand the sales department, and the intrepid stripling gets off to a great start, has a big handful of prospects ready to sign in no time … but he needs to do a quote or proposal for them, and the party’s over. The current systems are so arcane that the only way he can learn how to use them is to have some tribal knowledge passed down, either by the impatient, overloaded entrepreneur information-hoarder, or Mr. Grizzled Government Sales Specialist, who has absolutely no incentive or motivation to teach the new rep anything.
After a few months, the new kid wanders off to more successful hunting grounds.
This vignette happens constantly, and is the reason that the knowledge transfer possible through a standardized approach to QPA is possibly the highest ROI area for this business – because it can unblock growth and let the genie out of the bottle. If a business’ growth is stymied, and has been for years, how do you measure the ROI on a strategic move that allows them to get to the next level?
The ROI on Knowledge Transfer is facilitated by a QPA solution like Quosal by:
- Standardized processes for creating and maintaining quotes and proposals.
- Eliminating the manual steps and tools that lead to common errors and omissions.
- Creating easy processes that allow the company’s experts to review and approve quotes and proposals.
- Providing a way for standardized quote content to be centrally created and managed, rather than “inherited” from other quotes and proposals.
When these factors are in place, that new sales representative has a great chance to be successful without the roadblocks, “tribal challenges” and old, chaotic processes.
Quote and Proposal Automation generates tremendous ROI – and Knowledge Transfer can be the “sleeper” ROI, and the highest of them all.
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.
