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:
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Throughout my career in sales, I’ve always felt a significant sense of accomplishment when completing and delivering a high-quality quote or proposal to a customer. This feeling continues through to this day, and is greatly augmented by our own product at Quosal.
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. Continue reading »
There is an evangelical bent to the philosophy that drove the creation of our sales quote and proposal platform, Quosal. We get on the stump frequently with our customers about the critical importance of the quote and proposal process.
One of the problems we strive to help our customers solve is that of the entrepreneurial sales bottleneck — the business owner that is also the salesperson (often the ONLY salesperson). Hand in hand with this phenomenon is the arcane, “Gordian knot” of a byzantine quote or proposal creation system that, like the entrepreneur himself, stops the growth of the business cold.
Now, I must step into the confessional and admit that in the 20 months or so since our product launch, the only person that has ever sold Quosal is your humble author. But wait! It’s not because I’m just another entrepreneur bottlenecking the growth of my business…!
Actually, there are 3 reasons that this is the case.
- Our software, Quosal, creates such an extraordinary level of productivity, that I’ve been able to drive an incredible amount of business myself.
- By plan and by strategy, I have controlled the quality of our installed base by very carefully controlling the presentation, representation and fit of our application for our customers — and the fit of our customers for our application. This has been extremely effective.
- I am an entrepreneur bottlenecking my own business. By plan perhaps, but even those of us who beat the best practice drums must move out to 30,000 feet sometimes.
One other reason I have not listed: We’ve carefully built up the infrastructure into which we can plug in salespeople to be successful selling our platform to businesses that will in turn be successful. This topic is at the top of my mind because, per our business plan, we’re now hiring a sales team to carry the banner forward.
Mr. Entrepreneur, if you’re bottlenecking the growth of your company in your sales effort or in other areas of your business, move on out to 30,000 feet. You’re smart enough to see the problem, and that’s the first step in finding a solution.
