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

 

TargetA 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:

Continue reading »

Posted by quosal at 12:42 pm Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Are you leaking sales?

Business Process, Competitive Advantage, IT, Kent, Knowledge Transfer, Managed Service Providers, Order Porter, Productivity, Proposals, Quotes, Sales, iPad No Responses »
Sep 092011

 

Five Major Sales Leaks That Could Be Affecting Your Company

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. Continue reading »

Posted by quosal at 11:07 am Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sales as a Service – A Perspective for Success

Business Process, Competitive Advantage, Proposals, Quotes, Sales No Responses »
Jul 082011

 

I’ve blogged in the past about the concept of “Sales as a Service” – in fact, one of the most important services that you provide to your new and existing customers. The concept applies to the overall sales process of course, but the quote and proposal aspect of the sales process is my focus.

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. Continue reading »

Posted by quosal at 8:42 am Tagged with: , , , , , ,

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 »

Posted by quosal at 12:47 pm Tagged with: , , , , , , ,

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!

Posted by Kent at 7:56 pm Tagged with: , , , , ,

Quotes / proposals at the "nexus point" of growth

Kent, Proposals, Quotes No Responses »
May 102010

 

Your business doesn’t grow as big and as successful as it can be. It grows as big as you let it be.

After many years of being in business as an entrepreneur, this is one of the conclusions I’ve reached about small businesses, especially those that are entrepreneur-led. One of the greatest limiters on the size and success level of a business is — us. Ourselves.

While the solutions we provide to our customers span across business enterprises of all sizes, we are often working with the SMB market, and companies struggling to grow their sales. One of our challenges is to educate our customers, to help them understand the critical nature and importance of the quote and proposal processes.

Every investment of time and money by a small business in new process and infrastructure is critical – potentially impacting the business for years. Decisions like moving to new space, selecting an accounting system or a law firm all have potentially substantial impact. Many of those decisions are driven by the often subconscious factor of how big and successful we choose to let our business be. In my own experience, I have rarely regretted a decision that lets my company grow — that takes a risk and makes a bet that we can be bigger and more successful.

We consider the decision that small businesses are making when they’re choosing a new quote and proposal solution to be such a “nexus” point. It’s a decision that will affect the success and growth of a company for years to come. The customers who decide to go with Quosal often spend more money than they have to — but they’re making a decision to let their companies be bigger and more successful, opening the door to growth.

At this time more than any other, I believe small businesses are going to lead the charge back to economic health and stability. Let your company grow and be successful.

Posted by Kent at 9:25 pm Tagged with: , , , , ,
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