Technology | salesquoteblog.com

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:

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 »

Why Do Business with the Innovator?

Apple, Innovation, Kent, Technology No Responses »

Oct 082010

I make no bones about the fact that I’m a fan of Apple. They’ve recently become the technology market leader in key financial aspects, but in my mind they’ve been the market leader in almost every important way for a long time, especially in vision and innovation.

For example, while I know that there are dozens, or hundreds, of iPhone knock-offs that are much less expensive than the original created by the innovators at Apple, I’ll keep buying the iPhone. Why do I do business with the innovators rather than the “me too” followers?

First, I like to support innovation, and I can most directly do that by voting with my dollars. While the product may cost more, to me that’s the price of originality and the risk of putting something new on the market and in the world – and it’s worth supporting.

Second, I know that the innovator of an idea or product brought that new thing forward by plan and purpose after baking it just right – not as a reaction to what someone else did. There’s a longer-term vision and roadmap, while the “copycats” that come after have to wait and see what the innovator does next.

Third, there’s almost always a quality drop-off in the imitator’s products. This is a function of the rapid product development cycle in an effort to respond to the new idea; the fact that the new innovation may be very outside the inherent design of existing products; and the simple fact that the innovation may not be fully understood and may be difficult to “shoehorn” into an existing product family, architecture or design.

Finally, I’m not one to be years behind – and in many areas, you can’t afford to be years behind in a competitive market. This is truer today than ever, because some innovations change things so rapidly.

We’ve all seen dozens of iPhone-alikes come and go, making barely a blip in the overall scheme of things – an inherent risk in purchasing the cheaper clone. Yet the iPhone marches on. This discussion is not just about cell phones — it applies to all innovative products and the ensuing innovation-imitation-iteration cycle that drives creative competition. We at Quosal strive to innovate and will continue to do so. Those who come after are doing just that — coming after.

Go Apple!

Kent McNall

Kent McNall
President and CEO
Quosal LLC

What does "seamless" mean to you?

Productivity, Proposals, Quotes, Technology No Responses »

Sep 032010

What does it mean to be “seamless?” In business software, we talk about a seamless integration, a seamless experience or a seamless workflow.

At Quosal, we’re constantly striving for seamless. We’re always looking for ways to remove the interruptions. It’s at the core of our experience. Quosal can turn quotes into ConnectWise service tickets. Quosal for ACT! can work independently of ACT! — you don’t need to remember to start one and then the other. Quosal saves everything in the background — there are no save buttons or error prompts asking you “do you want to save your changes?”

Let’s put some more stakes in the ground.

You should go from point A to point B without noticeable obstructions. There is no “point A-point-five.”

You shouldn’t have to start over when you move from one channel to the next. Everything contiguous.

The user should be thinking about the problem and not the tool. Carpenters drive nails — swinging a hammer is beside the point.

The system should have multiple component parts and interact with multiple systems — and the user should neither notice nor care.

Finally, here’s what seamless isn’t.

Seamless doesn’t mean I change my process to match your software. Don’t ask me to change to avoid your interruption of service. Providing a seamless experience doesn’t mean you force everyone to wear togas.

No More Web Site Envy – For Now

Kent, Technology, Web No Responses »

Aug 062010

I’m sure I’m not the only business owner in the world that suffers from “Web site envy.”

Like other forms of covetousness, such as cell phone envy and tech-generation envy (you have the iPhone 4, while I’m still stick on the 3GS), it always seems that the next guy’s Web site has a little better graphics, content and technology.

We’ve just released our third iteration of the Quosal Web site, and at least for today I’m suspending all Web site envy. Our team has worked hard on it, and our summer interns have made terrific contributions across the board.

When one considers all of the factors that make up today’s Web presence for a business, and all of the traditional business elements affected by that presence, it is easy to understand why your Web site needs constant attention. Marketing, sales, operations, support service and public relations are all impacted. The technology, content and attractiveness/gestalt of your site all create an impression on potential customers and existing customers.

Our own product, Quosal, has become an even more important part of our own Web site with this new revision, as we are using Order Porter’s capability to actually process sales transactions for our new product, Quosal for ACT! Our customers can build their own quote (shopping cart) online, and complete the purchase and digital distribution automatically. More and more, all of the software products we use, and our Cloud-based applications and data, must be able to interact with our Web presence.

It’s nice to give “Web site envy” a break at least for a day. I’m sure I’ll be back to the envy salt mines next week.

Revisiting Your Decisions Can Bring Affirmation and Evolution

Kent, Technology No Responses »

Jul 232010

When we set out almost five years ago to create the best quote and proposal software on the market, we did so with a few fundamental, philosophical choices and directions — one of which was to revisit those choices and not be dogmatic in our approach. Changing times and technologies call for flexibility in approach, and any business must adapt to customer and market needs.

One decision we had made was to do a new release every quarter – meaning, on average, four new releases per year, one per calendar quarter — to be released when ready as opposed to a fixed date. We’ve recently revisited this decision and practice, both to evaluate how it has worked and see if changes are merited.

Overall, we’ve been very happy with this practice in many ways:

• It has allowed us to move forward at an aggressive, but not maniacal, rate on our roadmap.
• It has allowed us to be responsive to changes in partner integrations.
• It has allowed us to respond to customer requests and provided needed fixes on a reasonable schedule

It has not created an onerous “release cycle overhead,” which can be a killer for software developers. If you spend half of your time just in preparing for product release, you have a big problem! This has certainly been helped by our automated development and updating systems.

Another thing we’ve been very happy about is the acceptance of our customers. We’ve never received a complaint either way about the frequency of our product releases. We had an early concern that throwing changes at customers every three months could be challenging for our customers, but the automated update process, combined with the fact that we’ve made the majority of our changes optional and transparent, have minimized this issue.

Overall, we (and our customers) are happy with our quarterly release cycle and we’ll be sticking with it – until the next time we revisit the decision.

It’s Time for a New User Interface for Windows Applications

Kent, Technology No Responses »

Jun 282010

Our quote-and-proposal application, Quosal, has a great user interface — attractive, functional and fresh. In fact, it’s so good that some prospective users assume that the user interface is Quosal’s best feature — but the application works even better than it looks. Some of our competitors even use our great-looking interface as a negative (e.g. “it only looks good,” etc).

Quosal is written with Microsoft’s Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), the next-generation user interface technology and the successor to the long-in-the-tooth Winforms user interface. WPF has been a part of the .NET framework and development environment for many years, and is integral to Microsoft’s Silverlight offering.

I can share two perspectives with you: One as a developer, and another as a user of the WPF interface.

As a developer, we’ve loved every minute of working with this platform. It is, in fact, one of the most solid and reliable that our team has used in a combined 40+ years of development on Microsoft environments. When we initially made the decision to go with WPF, we thought we might pay a price — but quite the opposite has occurred. We’ve been able to create a beautiful, functional, connected application, with all the strengths of .NET and all the UI capability of WPF. As developers, we couldn’t be happier.

As users of our own application and other tools we’ve created with WPF, the story is the same — the user experience is exactly what we hoped it would be. WPF brings a new dimension to engaging usability, visual enhancement of the tasks at hand, and a clearly different experience than other Windows applications.

WPF is more demanding of your PC than older-generation applications, and if you have a fleet of 5+ year old, single-processor PCs, a WPF app like Quosal won’t be quite as happy as apps created in the 20^th century. But then again, neither will modern operating systems and other current applications. Even so, WPF maintains solid backward compatibility.

We’ve all seen futuristic user interfaces on television and in movies — Minority Report, Star Trek, and other shows have teased us with adaptive graphical interfaces featuring hand and voice controls, holographic displays and more. We’re not going to get there overnight, and we’re not going to get there all at once. Developers and users must take the steps forward to embrace a new generation of UI technology.

User interfaces have in some ways taken a step backward with web applications. Nobody denies the appeal of a web app’s deployability, but can we all admit that the UI — slow, clunky, and considerably less attractive — is several notches below our PC and Mac applications?

The great news is that the next generation of development tools allows developers to fuse web technology with the UI and power of desktop applications, as we have with Quosal. Users get the best of both worlds, and that’s a win/win.

When Competitors Become Partners: Building a Market

Kent, Partners, Proposals, Quotes, Technology No Responses »

May 242010

As a quote and proposal management application, we live in a very interesting market space. Allow me to illustrate.

Most of the business that’s transacted in the world is done in one of three ways. Retail sales account for some 40% of transactions. Professional business — doctors, attorneys, etc. — accounts for about 20%. The balance — roughly 40% — is business that is transacted via some form of quote, proposal, RFP, government contract, etc.

Any economist would rightly call the above a gross oversimplification, but for the purposes of this blog, I’ll risk the barbs of those less statistically challenged.

I spent some 16 years in the Retail Point of Sale market, and I can attest to the fact that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of retail point of sale, merchandising, and associated software systems in a market worth billions of dollars. True, there’s a large hardware component to the retail business, but it’s all driven by software. Hundreds of companies provide primary and ancillary solutions to service that 40% of the world’s trade.

The same holds true for professional services — hundreds of systems dedicated to legal, medical, and other professional software packages. Dozens of names roll off the tongue.

Now, how about quote and proposal automation?

A pin drop would make a deafening roar in the market.

This is particularly strange, because preparing quotes and proposals manually, with tools like Excel and Word, is such a royal pain. We’ve conquered every other business process you can name, from inventory control to fax automation, with hundreds of software systems. But not QPA.

One thing that this means is that the market needs to be built up by those few companies within it. In effect, Quosal and its competitors are partners in creating a market, in a space that very much needs good solutions. In many ways, the advancement of quote and proposal automation halted in its tracks when the spreadsheet was created (and a couple of competitors I could name), but it needs to move forward again. Where today there is only a handful of standalone or industry-agnostic quote and proposal systems, there should be dozens. The validation of competition will help illuminate the importance of the business processes.

So let’s sally forth, oh fellow quoting specialists, and let’s build a market solution that today’s business needs!

Moore's Law vs. The Cloud

Cloud, Kent, Moore's Law, Proposals, Quotes, Technology No Responses »

May 132010

Having been around the technology biz for a few decades — — I’ve observed with great interest the reality of Moore’s Law. In (very) short, Mr. Moore made a prediction back in 1965 that essentially stated our computing power would double every 18 months or so. This has held remarkably true, the result being that we all have very fast computers for our personal and business use.

Ironically, now that we have all of this computing power (and operating systems that begin to harness it), we’re moving many of our applications OFF of our incredibly fast computers and into the Cloud — where our incredible computing power is being shared with X number of other users. We’re now pointing all of the power of our personal computers at our web browsers, remote desktop utilities and Internet access.

Naturally, there are other forces at work on our current migration to the Cloud, but if Moore’s Law continues to hold true, it seems to me that we’ll see a long-term “vacillation” of the market between Cloud applications and local applications that take better advantage of the incredible personal computer power that we’ll all have. Other forces will drive this as well … such as the revenue produced for the information technology industry by change itself. In other words, once we get good and settled in the Cloud, we’ll find some very compelling reason to migrate back to The Desktop.

As we migrate our own applications and internal infrastructure into the cloud, we find ourselves adopting a mixed strategy to take advantage of the benefits of cloud computing, yet retain those of rich local applications. Our own sales quoting software, Quosal, is a great example of an application that represents the best of both worlds — the richness of a desktop application, yet one that can be hosted in the Cloud and is continually accessing Cloud-based resources.

I will continue to watch with interest the dance between Moore’s Law and The Cloud. In the long run, I think we’ll all win.

Long Term Technology Vision: Knowledge Navigator to the iPad

Apple, Kent, Technology, iPad No Responses »

May 102010

Stepping back to as much perspective as one’s lifespan allows, and seeing how the future is shaped by technology visionaries, is an interesting study, especially those that you’ve had a chance to observe with your own eyes.

One such case in point for me is Apple’s Knowledge Navigator. I happened to be at Unix World in 1987 when Apple’s John Scully debuted the Knowledge Navigator video (why they would choose Unix World to do so is and was a mystery). You can find the Knowledge Navigator video here.

When I saw the iPad (I’m admittedly a big fan), in my mind’s eye I saw the Knowledge Navigator and thought, “Wow, they really hit that vision.” I had to go back to watch the video again to realize we’re not quite there yet — but what a lot of people chuckled at in 1987 does not seem far off now.

The iPad also reminds me of another technology visionary, Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek. We’ve been chasing around a few of his visions as well. Remember the yeoman handing Kirk a pad with a blinking light for his signature? Our modern cell phones are very reminiscent of “communicators,” and the first time I saw a 3.5″ floppy (a technology that’s come AND gone) was on Star Trek.

Jules Verne set out technology visions that took many decades to realize. We’re seeing goals set out by our modern visionaries that are achieved in a fraction of that time — in some cases, before our eyes.

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
« Jan
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30	31