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:

Branding, Graphics, and Marketing

You’re rolling out a new product line, make sure it looks great and that all of your team will proudly present their proposals to your customers. A very modest investment in graphics design will yield a lot of enthusiasm – and sales results. This applies not only to your quote documents, but to your online presentation pages as well, such as Quosal’s Order Porter.

Pricing

Be sure that pricing is well understood and well presented. Your quoting process should make it easy to understand and hard to make a mistake with pricing – and should even encapsulate instructions related to pricing in the quote preparation process itself.

Configuration & Deployment

As with pricing, configuration should be clear and well documented, hopefully within the quote process itself. This can obviously be a complex area depending on the type of new business line you’re rolling out – but the more complex, the more important it is to ensure good understanding among the sales team.

Payment Options & Terms

More and more often, we’re able to offer our customers a variety of ways to pay for our products and services. It must be simple and easy to prepare and present these options to your customers, especially in a new business offering.

It’s really very simple: If only one or two of your team can quote on your new products – and only with difficulty – it’s not going to take off for you. If your entire team can easily and quickly quote on those products, you’ve dramatically increased your chances for success.

As with many high-leverage investments of management time and will, it will only take you a few hours to really hit this one out of the park – so just do it. This is one investment that will really pay off!

Want more tips on how to get the most out of your quoting solution? Register for the Quotation Nation Road Show, in Seattle on Jan. 26th!

Kent McNall
President and CEO
Quosal LLC

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.

Five Major Leaks:

1. Failing to provide a quote when directly asked by a client

This happens all the time, and it’s of course one of the highest priority leaks to plug – because it not only costs you a sale but also could ultimately cost you a customer that’s asking not only to buy something from you, but for the service of your expertise as a trusted advisor translated to a sales proposal. This is a bad habit that many of us have. Break that habit – fast. This is a leak that can sink the ship.

2. Failure to let the customer say “no” to a more expensive option

Many sales professionals do their customers the disservice of underselling and saying “no” for the customer. Your customer is a smart person – let THEM decide whether they’d like the Toyota, Cadillac, or Rolls Royce. A lot of people prefer quality over savings, and bells and whistles are called that for a reason. Are you quoting accessories, extended warranties, and especially additional services? Take the extra few minutes to do so. You’ll be surprised how often your customer will say “yes”.

3. Failure to ask for leads from your best source – your customers

Your good customers are as interested in your success as anyone, and if you ask them if they know others that might need your services, they’ll tell you if they know anyone. Referrals are the best source of new sales for many businesses. A proactive approach can yield great results. Ask your customers for a lead.

4. Standardized product margins, and failure to review them

We have a feature in Quosal that allows our customers to set a standardized margin or markup percentage. I’ve often thought of removing the feature or at least putting a disclaimer on it which says something along the lines of “Failure to make as much money as you can is not the responsibility of Quosal LLC, its employees, assigns, or heirs.” The reason for this is that many businesses will set such a standard margin much lower than it has to be, and their sales staff will simply default to that margin. During one training session with a new client, I showed them the feature, and they promptly set a standard gross margin of 8 points on server hardware. Feeling guilty, I asked them to try an experiment – set the gross margin to 12.5 points instead. They balked, hemmed, hawed, and shuffled – but grudgingly accepted my suggestion. I checked back after a few weeks and guess what – their salespeople had quoted the new margins as acceptingly as the original. Sales and margins were up. Let your business be as profitable as it can be, not what you limit it to be.

5. Failure to debrief your engineers when they return from a client site, and act on the information

Guess who knows the most about what your customers need, want, or could use? Is it possibly the people that spend the most time at a customer’s office, or on the phone with them? It most certainly could be. Here’s a broken paradigm that makes your sales leak like crazy: Engineer goes on site, learns of something the customer needs. Comes back to the office, tells the sales rep. A couple of weeks later, sales rep MAYBE gets a quote out – for the wrong thing, since it’s been two weeks. Does this sound familiar? Your engineers should be shaken down and despoiled of every sticky note and business card they’ve made random notes on, until you’re satisfied you know of every opportunity they discovered while with the customer. Then, your sales team should ACT on this information – with a prompt, professional, reliable quote that specifically cites comments from the engineer about those needs – the engineer is, after all, often the most trusted person from your company to the customer. (If you’re not an IT company, substitute the trusted service advisor that calls on your customer).

I’m going to add one bonus leak: The failure to really focus on the desires of our existing customers to do more business with us. We often are much more worried about signing new customers – but the simple reality is that our own existing customers are a tremendous source of business as well.

Are you looking to grow your business, increase top-line revenue, profit margins and profits? Plug those Sales Leaks!

Find out some great ways to stop those leaks and build your sales at Quosal’s Quotation Nation event.

The Hilton Bonnett Creek Orlando, Wednesday, November 9th, 8:00am-5:00pm. Register Now!

Kent McNall
President and CEO
Quosal LLC

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.

Prompt attention: When a customer is asking for a quote or proposal, they respond to prompt attention and a complete and accurate solution to their problem just as they respond to a prompt response on a service ticket. Customers don’t like waiting for needed services for weeks, and they don’t like waiting for quotes for weeks either.

Accuracy and Professionalism: When we’re providing services to our customers, we ask our team to be professional, precise, and to solve the problem completely the first time. Services provided by the sales team should deliver no less a result. Customers don’t expect you to drop the ball on service tickets; they don’t expect it from your sales team.

Response in proportion to the Problem: When a customer is urgently in need of services or has a critical issue, they want to know you’ll take care of them. Some sales opportunities fall into the same category.

There are other similarities and comparison points between your traditional services and Sales as a Service as well. For example, it’s even more important to provide our current customers with excellent “sales service” than potential customers. When businesses talk about one of their vendors being “hard to do business with”, they are often citing the difficulty of getting a quote or proposal for new goods and services as one of the major factors in this difficulty.

Many of our customers here at Quosal are service providers, in addition to their product and project sales. Thinking of sales as a service can get the wheels spinning along the right lines, and introduce new thinking around the sales process. For too many organizations, the selling processes and particularly the quote and proposal processes are too much a “black box”. Thinking of Sales as a Service can help de-mystify this business critical art and science.

Sales IS a service – treat it AS a service; the positive results will really surprise you in a very profitable way.

Kent McNall
President and CEO
Quosal LLC

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.

I’ve always espoused this as a business philosophy, and for many years have really encouraged those I work with to keep the saw sharp and not let skills erode and knowledge grow stale. We in the technology industries, of course, have more than ample opportunities to feed our heads – in fact; it’s very difficult to keep up.

…but it’s important to keep up, and for software developers, it’s critical. With our product, Quosal, there will never come a time when our application or platform is old, stale, discontinued – and part of the reason for this is that our core team is constantly sharpening the saw, applying new thinking, techniques, technology, and innovation to what we do.

This certainly applies to the tools and techniques that our customers use to run their businesses as well. How often do I hear from a ConnectWise or Salesforce user that they know they’re “only using 10%” of the system they’ve been using for years? The same can certainly be said of Quosal users. Even a modest investment of time to sharpen that saw yields big results when you’re working with the rich applications supporting your business processes today. We get comfortable, and don’t realize how much time savings, productivity, and what I call “Return on Information” is available to us if we’re just willing to spend a little time.

With all respect to the Dormouse, while it’s certainly important to KEEP your head, let me challenge you today….to FEED your head!

Kent McNall
President and CEO
Quosal LLC

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.

So, for everything from our phone systems to our computers, copiers, desks, chairs etc. we gathered up the quotes and the statistics. We were not disappointed in the results: They more than backed up our belief that business quoting in at least North America had some real progress it could make forward. Of the over 100 quotes that we received from various vendors on these products, some interesting stats:

• Over 50% of the quotes were not delivered on time.
• Over 60% contained an inaccuracy in math, spelling, or grammar
• Over 25% did not correctly reflect what had been discussed/requested or fill the need
• About 20% were hand-written or verbal
• Over 20% of the vendors of whom a quote was requested never provided one at all

Several years later, as we are expanding our business and once again obtaining quotes from suppliers, I am reminded of this early study that we did – because those practices remain pervasive. As a customer trying to make informed purchases of products and services for our business, we are constantly confronted with unattractive and unimpressive quotes and proposals that take forever to obtain (and, we’re told, to prepare), are byzantine in nature (especially office cubicle systems), contain errors and omissions – and simply do not reflect the “best foot forward”. In fact, I must be wary if a good-looking quote comes my way that I don’t simply accept it out of relief!

All of this is good news for us here at Quosal of course. It’s good to be needed; we have our work cut out for us.

Kent McNall
President and CEO
Quosal LLC

The other side of this coin is the pressure I would feel as a salesperson when I had a backlog of proposals to complete. I know that many business people and their sales team labor under this pressure today. Indeed, I feel this even more intensely now, in those rare times when, despite our own tools, technology, business practices and policies, I don’t get my quotes and proposals turned around immediately. I feel this pressure more acutely because my own experience, research and expertise in the field of quote and proposal automation tell me that the sooner you get that accurate, attractive quote in your prospective customer’s hands, the more likely you are to win the business.

There’s a great reason for sales professionals and the entrepreneur salesman to feel a major sense of accomplishment when completing and delivering a quote: Quotes and proposals are indeed the major deliverable of the sales team. I can hear you out there saying, “No, CLOSED quotes are the major deliverable,” and of course that follows. However, you can’t close (win) a quote that has never been created, and you WON’T close an inaccurate, half-baked, ugly quote most of the time.

So, why would sales professionals let anything get in the way of delivering an accurate quote in a timely fashion? Reasons range from the practical (e.g. quotes and proposals can be difficult to create, or you are dependent on others to create them) to the psychological (e.g. fear of success). The simplest explanation tends to be the correct one: If it were easier to create accurate quotes and proposals, sales professionals would deliver them faster.

The creation and delivery of the highest quality, most accurate quotes and proposals should be the first daily priority of the sales professional, without a close second. Not only does this activity move the sales ball down the field, but it’s a great service to deliver to new and prospective customers alike. Anything that can be done to facilitate this activity and achieve this goal should be done, both by the company and the individual sales professionals or administrators.

Are you sitting on a backlog of quotes and proposals to be delivered to your customers? Do something about it today. Becoming a user of Quosal is a great place to start.

Kent McNall
President and CEO
Quosal LLC

Our levels of engagement with this event are unique in my experience. We are a ConnectWise user, AND a sponsor of the event and community, AND ConnectWise is also our customer and a user of Quosal. We’re not unique in this; the community has many such ties within the ecosystem that ConnectWise represents. It is one of the reasons, I believe, for the intense levels of energy-times-energy that I have not experienced in other communities – ever.

The event leaves one so overflowing with its vibrancy that the energy must have an outlet — therefore I blog, plan, strategize, sell, discuss, compare, analyze. The energy well has been replenished.

Among the standout experiences was the number of our Quosal clients that attended, and the rather amazing number of them that found me in the halls or in our booth, and related some version of, “Thank you for creating this product. You don’t know how much you’ve helped our business.” The sincerity and intensity of our customers was really somewhat moving, and surprisingly frank. This didn’t happen just a couple of times – dozens of our clients had this message for me. It was really a powerful experience.

Keith McFarland, author of “Bounce” and “The Breakthrough Company” was a real energizer. You know you’re listening to a good speaker when you want to launch out of your chair and enact the ideas that are cascading through your head, put fear aside and make bold moves into the future. This, combined with a general feeling of confidence among the ConnectWise partners, makes me feel great about the future.

I’m heading to Australia in Q1 2011 – and now it’s in writing. This is a big item on my bucket list, and a lifelong dream. It was an Australian-themed event, in any case – we dined with the Australian contingent of HTG (as well as their UK brethren) and had many great conversations and interactions with our good friends from Down Under (who universally feel that we are extreme lightweights in the partying department. I’m afraid.).

We had a great experience with Order Porter on the iPad in our booth at the vendor solutions pavilion. We processed more than 80 quotes, delivering them right then and there on the show floor. ConnectWise (who also uses Quosal and Order Porter) was doing the very same thing for add-on sales in its own booth. It was a great sales experience to do this, and we were delivering a great customer experience as well. It’s always a fun moment to see the startled look on a prospective customer’s face, when their cell phone vibrates as they receive their quote and Order Porter link. The revelation that they can do this themselves, for their own customers, is an “a-ha” moment for them.

A customer related to me the workflow he’d built into his sales process between Quosal and ConnectWise: “We’ve got it down to a science. I tell my salespeople, ‘Just mark the opportunity as Won in Quosal, and walk away!’”

I do not fear the Cloud, and I don’t believe information technology providers need to fear it either. On a high level, “The more things change the more they stay the same.” On an even higher level, imagine how many iterations we’ll continually go through over the years. From mainframes and timeshare to the disconnected PC to the Cloud and back again. I can hardly wait until my grandkids tell me about this awesome new technology called Local Area Networks. Arnie Bellini had a good message for the IT Nation on this very topic.

You know you’re getting old when you’re standing in the lounge thinking, “Who let all these kids in here?”

There were some terrific speakers and presentations at both the ITN and HTG events. The former, I witnessed; the latter, I heard about, as I’m not actually an HTG member. I definitely get presenter envy, as my own skill set in this area stopped progressing in the last century. I’m amazed at how much information can be presented in an hour with the preparation and technology brought to bear by talented people.

It goes on and on, the buttery goodness of such a well-executed event with the energy of true community. It’s great to witness and to be a part of it. I think a lot of people feel the same way. Congratulations to all involved, to the hosts and attendees alike. Can’t wait until next year.

Kent McNall
President and CEO
Quosal LLC

Fast forward some 10+ years, and lately we’ve seen some noise around e-commerce (again) for the IT market, as if it were something new that the market has just now discovered.

In our quote-and-proposal-automation line of work, we have occasion to talk with many information technology providers who have e-commerce offerings through one of many current providers, such as ChannelOnline, VARStreet or any number of equivalent systems. Our conversation is often in the context of looking for alternatives to those systems for their core need of product quoting, but the inevitable question is, “Do you provide an electronic storefront?” In this context, I always query, “How many orders have you taken from your storefront in the past few months?” The inevitable answer: “Few to none.”

So, is traditional e-commerce something today’s IT provider and/or MSP really needs? In a word, the answer is “No.” In two words, the answer is “Hell no.”

But do those same companies need to offer the convenience of online shopping, option selection and order execution? The equally strident answer is “Absolutely yes!”

E-commerce is the opposite of what today’s IT provider is about, which is expertise, understanding of needs, and total care based on specific knowledge of the customer. Sending a customer to an online store throws a lot of that out the window. The message to the customer is, “You don’t need me, just go find it yourself!” Once you’ve given that message to your customer, they’re half a step away from a much larger, more powerful online provider.

To be at all personalized, an e-commerce site must be maintained and cultivated by someone who knows what they are doing. Many are the companies I’ve talked with who know they’ve spent more money in labor to maintain their site, catalog and customer-specific features than they’ve brought in via the site.

There are several essential disconnects between a traditional electronic storefront and today’s MSP.

Messaging. Today’s IT provider wants to be the customer’s trusted advisor, someone who is giving sound advice based on their expertise and knowledge of the customer’s specific needs and resources. The messaging of an e-commerce site is the opposite: “You don’t need me, just go shop online.” Or, “Just buy what you’ve bought before, because our e-commerce site shows you your history. No thought required, nothing ever changes.”

These are not the messages of a trusted advisor.

Another important message to your customer is your own image. This is often enhanced when you first set up an e-store and put a lot of thought and resources into the organization, selection and other aspects of the e-store. But inevitably, this effort falls off – because it is often too time-consuming for the return on time. The site degrades, and is no longer a positive reflection of your company. This is a highly common occurrence.

We’ll take care of everything. Except new equipment? Many MSPs are moving into managed contracts, HaaS, and other arrangements that basically give the customer the warm fuzzy blanket of “it’s all included, we’ll take care of everything.” Sending the customer to shop for themselves on your e-store is anything but.

The wrong battlefield. It’s virtually impossible for a small company to compete with the Dell/CDW/Newegg/Apples of the world. Read your Sun Tzu — you’re simply taking the battle to the enemy’s favorable ground. Once you’ve given your customer the blessing to shop online, they’re half a step away from better selection, pricing, marketing and site maintenance.

Today’s Relevant Solution

A much more relevant solution is offered by Quosal and our ground-breaking, market-leading online quote delivery and order execution solution, Order Porter. This is the middle ground, preserving the MSPs position as the trusted advisor, yet providing the convenience of online shopping, option presentation and selection, and order execution and payment.

We at Quosal have simple evidence that this is today’s topical, relevant online solution: We have hundreds of successful MSP and IT providers in the SMB space successfully using Order Porter to capture business every day – yet I have encountered barely a handful successfully employing e-storefront solutions. The simple, immediate and compelling level of success achieved by our customers, as illustrated in this case study, shines far brighter than any success story an IT provider has shared with me about its e-storefront.

Think twice before embarking on the long-term commitment that such a storefront truly represents. A much easier, less expensive, lower maintenance option that is consistent with your client messaging is readily at hand!

Kent McNall
President and CEO
Quosal LLC

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
President and CEO
Quosal LLC