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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 »

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 »

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 »

The real investment needed in your proposal processes

Business Process, Kent, Proposals, Quotes No Responses »

Sep 022010

Do you feel that you have a good understanding of the value of your quote and proposal processes to your company? Is it something you’ve really thought about?

I’m going to challenge those who might answer “yes.” The first challenge: You probably haven’t thought about it that much. The second challenge: You’ve probably dramatically underestimated that value.

The value of these processes is direct, daily and in some cases, virtually inestimable, as they enable and unblock the growth of an organization. They relate directly to the image of your organization — the customer perception of professionalism and quality. The accuracy of quotes and proposals leads to good, win/win business. Overall organizational productivity can be dramatically and positively improved.

All of this can be worth tens or hundreds of thousands to a company, yet some are unwilling to invest as little as the price of a laptop and a few hours of time, while others may purchase the lowest-priced solution to save a few hundred dollars.

What is the right investment?

There are three investments you should consider when improving the infrastructure of your organization in the area of quote and proposal automation.

1. The investment in your quoting platform and tools.
2. The investment of *your time* in full and proper implementation of that platform.
3. The investment in professional services that gets you all the way there, cost effectively. Being cost-effective also means an appropriate and effective use of your own time.

We work with many companies that really need (and would greatly benefit from) investment in all three areas, but invest in only one, or perhaps two. This will not lead to maximum ROI, and may not even lead to basic success.

Under-investment in your quote and proposal automation can negatively impact your business for years to come, since most of us tend to live with mistakes far longer than we should.

Revisiting Your Decisions Can Bring Affirmation and Evolution

Kent, Technology No Responses »

Jul 232010

When we set out almost five years ago to create the best quote and proposal software on the market, we did so with a few fundamental, philosophical choices and directions — one of which was to revisit those choices and not be dogmatic in our approach. Changing times and technologies call for flexibility in approach, and any business must adapt to customer and market needs.

One decision we had made was to do a new release every quarter – meaning, on average, four new releases per year, one per calendar quarter — to be released when ready as opposed to a fixed date. We’ve recently revisited this decision and practice, both to evaluate how it has worked and see if changes are merited.

Overall, we’ve been very happy with this practice in many ways:

• It has allowed us to move forward at an aggressive, but not maniacal, rate on our roadmap.
• It has allowed us to be responsive to changes in partner integrations.
• It has allowed us to respond to customer requests and provided needed fixes on a reasonable schedule

It has not created an onerous “release cycle overhead,” which can be a killer for software developers. If you spend half of your time just in preparing for product release, you have a big problem! This has certainly been helped by our automated development and updating systems.

Another thing we’ve been very happy about is the acceptance of our customers. We’ve never received a complaint either way about the frequency of our product releases. We had an early concern that throwing changes at customers every three months could be challenging for our customers, but the automated update process, combined with the fact that we’ve made the majority of our changes optional and transparent, have minimized this issue.

Overall, we (and our customers) are happy with our quarterly release cycle and we’ll be sticking with it – until the next time we revisit the decision.

Small adjustments in our thinking can make a huge change in business profitability

IT, Kent No Responses »

Jun 242010

I had a great conversation with a business owner this week that reminded me how quickly a small shift in thinking can positively change your business.

Both this fine gentleman and his industry shall remain unnamed. He related that he’s been in his industry for over 30 years, and has seen many changes, in good times and bad. One thing that has always been a difficulty, he said, was the lack of good software to automate the business processes for product- and service-providers like himself — including quoting, which is how he found us.

“I realized something,” he said. “We’re not an information technology company, but for all practical purposes, we are. We provide the same kinds of products, the same kinds of installation and maintenance services, and have the same kind of service dispatch.

“I’ve been focused on trying to find software specific to my industry,” he said, “But I’ve just realized the software for the IT industry is a perfect fit for us.”

In coming to this realization, his outlook on a previously stressful topic — automating his business process — has completely turned around. What’s more, he’s eager and excited at the possibility that the paradigms of another industry are so like his own, that the systems created over the years for that industry will be a great fit, too. His enthusiasm was infectious.

There are many business problems large and small that can be resolved with that shift in thinking, that triangulation and a fresh approach. There’s no guarantee that there won’t be a “gotcha” in this gentleman’s plan and his business, but I hope it works out perfectly for him.

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.

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