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:
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
