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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:

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 »

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 »

Business Quoting Still Has a Long Way to Go

Competitive Advantage, Productivity, Proposals, Quotes No Responses »

Jun 132011

Quosal was formed on a foundation of beliefs that I had about the way business quotes are put together – a way that is sometimes not only not conducive to landing the deal, but can sometimes be counter to that purpose.

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. Continue reading »

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.

It's Funny, Except When It's Not

Knowledge Transfer No Responses »

Jul 082010

We talk a lot about Knowledge Transfer at Quosal, about how business owners can pave the way for their sales staff and unlock growth within their company.

Which brings me to comedy. I’m a huge fan of the funny. In college, I worked at the Improv, and my best friend was a member of the L.A. comedy group The Groundlings.

One of the best sketches I recall from those Sunday shows at the Groundlings centered on a pair of restaurant servers working for a major chain franchise. On a busy night, the pair were swapping secrets on how to use the restaurant’s kludgy, overly complex ordering and inventory system.

“The customer wants extra cheese. What do I do?”

“Just relax, OK? All you have to do is insert your key, open a table modifier and do Upcharge 301, Open Food, then do a Manual Hold and Save Settings, and pull your key to create the ticket modifier.”

“Wow. You’re totally smarter than Chili’s.”

Which brings me back to Knowledge Transfer. Your business processes, of which quote and proposal automation is a key component, need to be simple to use. That’s obvious. Certainly simpler than a seven-step process to order extra cheese.

More importantly, though, your processes need to facilitate the transfer of knowledge from, you, the business owner, to all of your people. They are, after all, the ones that are actually taking orders and serving customers.

Be smarter than Chili’s. Don’t get stuck in a situation where your customer experience hinges on tips and tricks passed from salesman to salesman.

The Apple iPad -- 10 Weeks Later

Apple, Kent, Productivity, iPad No Responses »

Jun 212010

From the moment I held an Apple iPad and told the missus it was the sexiest thing I’d ever held (she nodded with a solemn understanding), I felt it was a game-changer. Two weeks later, I demonstrated the iPad with our Order Porter software on ConnectWise TV with Arnie Bellini.

So 10 weeks later, it’s time for an iPad checkup. Has the game changed? I examine this question only in the limited context of our own company, not the wide world at large.

First, I’ve followed through on getting all of our employees an iPad here at Quosal (with the exception of the interns, who shoot me the evil eye each time they hear me say this). We’ll be doing enough with the iPad that everyone here needs to wrap themselves in the gestalt of the device and platform. So does everyone use it yet? No – but most everyone does. Our power user is Sam, who bring his iPad to every meeting and executes his action items on it as they are decided, running ConnectWise and other apps via RDP.

My own usage is more along the lines of a good blog by Chris Day (http://www.fullymanaged.com/blog/apple-ipad-thoughts-and-5-fantastic.html) – email, browser, RDP.

Another use we’ve all found for the iPad is GoToMeeting, a tool we use constantly. GTM has a great client for the iPad.

Of course, we all use the iPad with our own software. On April 20, I showed the first-cut examples, and our first customers are going into production/use with the iPad just this week. We’re really excited about the platform and are doing a lot around it.

So, is it indeed a game changer, so far, after 3 months? For us, internally, I’m going to be honest and say, “Not yet, but soon.” I’m very confident it has been a game-changer already for other companies with other uses — it definitely makes me wish I was in the medical systems field — and we can certainly vouch for the game-changing that we at Quosal will be doing for many MSPs and their sales professionals with the iPad!

Redundant Data Entry is a Sign You Can Use Better Quote and Proposal Processes

Kent, Productivity, Proposals, Quotes No Responses »

Jun 072010

As I’m talking to new customers or demonstrating our product for prospective customers, the subject of redundant data entry — entering the same information multiple times into multiple systems — almost always comes up.

It’s very common to find companies entering the same data they put on their quotes at least two or three times into different systems. I joke with them that three or four re-entries is common, but that the world record is six re-entries into different systems. But this is not joke — in fact, I’ve encountered at least three companies that are tied for this dubious distinction.

Here’s a typical but not specific breakdown of these re-entries:

1) On the quote itself (spreadsheet or quoting system)

2) Into their opportunity management/sales tracking/CRM system

Then after the “win” is posted:

3) Into their Sales Order System

4) Into their Purchase Order System

5) Into their vendor’s on-line purchase order system

6) Into a separate commission tracking system

True, six different times into six different systems is extreme, but customers often get silent for a moment as I enumerate the above list, because they realize just how many times they really are re-entering the same data into different systems, and what a black hole of productivity and accuracy this really is.

If you’re double or triple-entering your quote and proposal data, improvements to your process can have a very positive impact on your profitability and your processes. If you’re re-entering that data four or more times, then you have a serious leak that needs attention.

A new approach to quote and proposal automation can certainly be a big part of the solution. Another important part of solving the problem can be the expertise of a business process consultant, a service that we provide at Quosal in the areas related to your quote and proposal processes, and the quote-to-order processes.

Eliminate the redundancy, and you’ll be very pleasantly surprised at the bottom line results.

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