Success | salesquoteblog.com

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 »

Effective Adoption of New Processes Drives Profits and Morale

Business Process, Kent No Responses »

Aug 232010

One aspect of our business here at Quosal that has been very gratifying is the high adoption rate of our solution. In this case “adoption rate” refers to the percentage of customers who implement, use, and receive the benefit of Quosal soon after they purchase it.

Having been in the enterprise software solution business for some time, I’ve certainly seen the opposite — companies that make a significant investment in software (and other infrastructure) that don’t actually implement the solution or are “turned back from the gates” of implementation. In some cases, writing the check for the software/services was the first, last and only action item taken toward implementation! In other cases, a sincere effort is made, but the company loses steam and the initiative falters.

The desire for change of business process is almost always sincere and founded in real need. How can a business “punch through the target” to ensure that ROI is received from such an investment?

Change is an act of management will. In a small business, management and ownership are generally synonymous. The mandate for change must always start at the top, just as the authorization for the investment usually does. Without this mandate and the driving desire for business process change, it often does not happen – especially if multiple departments are affected by the change.
Beyond this, there are practical “drivers” that will help ensure that change will occur in a beneficial, building manner.

Big Wins: The carrot of a significant win in the process can help pull change-averse staff and organizations through an implementation. Such wins come in many forms. I’ve seen what looks like surprisingly small “wins” from the outside drive huge changes.

Ease Their Pain: A corollary of the Big Win — reducing a pain point can help drive change.

Desire to Be the Best: Many organizations are motivated by the simple desire for improvement – taking another step toward excellence.

We Don’t Fail: The corollary to the above, a successful implementation is the obvious alternative to a failed implementation, which is an undesired black eye for many.

Many executives and owners feel that the simple mandate of “it’s your job” will win the day, but looking a little further into the heart of successful change management can smooth the road, and speed the path to ROI.

Quotes and Proposals Are Information about Information

Competitive Advantage, Proposals, Quotes No Responses »

Jul 192010

Seth Godin gives us another jumping off point to discuss quoting and proposal management.

It wasn’t the bags of chips that led Frito Lay to domination of the snack business, he says. It wasn’t the Slurpees that made 7-Eleven a success. And it wasn’t the clothes that Zara one of the best known brands in Europe (coming to an American mega-mall near you).

No, the competitive edge for those companies was their management of information about information.

At the time of its 1965 merger with PepsiCo, Frito Lay had 46 manufacturing plants and 150 distribution centers.
7-Eleven has more locations in Japan than anywhere else. Mastery of their supply chain is key.
Zara needs just two weeks to develop a new product and get it to stores, compared with a six-month industry average. It launches around 10,000 new designs each year.

These are plain-jane businesses. They make stuff to eat, to wear, and own stores where stuff is sold. But they’re backed with tight, tight management of their information.

For example, instead of adopting a strategy of branding and advertisement, like Abercrombie & Fitch, Zara focuses on radical product iteration. If a design doesn’t show sales traction within a week, it’s canceled, and no design lives longer than four weeks in stores, encouraging repeat business. Up until recently, Zara didn’t even advertise.

They pull down about $10 billion a year.

Why is an information management strategy so valuable? Seth Godin:

Because it compounds. A tiny head start in access to this information gives you a huge advantage … Think about how much needs to be sorted, compared, updated and presented to people who want to choose or learn or trade on it. The race to deliver this essential scalable asset isn’t over, it’s just beginning.

Quotes and proposals are information about information — what was the content, how was it presented, what options were available to the customer, how was it received, how was it tracked, how did it connect to everything else in your CRM and inventory systems?

How are you managing this flow of information about information?

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.

Cobbling is for Fairy Tales, Not Your Proposals

Kent, Managed Service Providers, Proposals, Quotes No Responses »

May 282010

A cobbler is defined as a person who mends shoes. In old, scary fairy tales, a cobbler might also be a clumsy worker. A cobbled street is one made up of uneven, unmatching pieces and parts.

Many proposals are clumsily “cobbled together” from unmatching pieces and parts by the proposal preparer — we encounter this frequently with prospective users of Quosal. This is often a result of different tools being used to create the different parts of the proposal – MS Word for the cover letter; statements of work and contract language; a quoting system or spreadsheets for bills of materials; tacked-on PDF brochures, etc.

A proposal that looks like it was created by an ogre looks as it sounds like it would look — the proposal equivalent to that clumsy cobbled street. It is not the way to put your best foot forward and make the right impression on the customer.

Your proposal document should be professional, smooth and top-notch to project the image you want to create with your customers. Your proposal should certainly be reflective of the scale of the business you’re trying to land with your customer. Each section of your proposal should be stylistically consistent.

Consistency is best achieved when the entire proposal can be created with one wave of your magic wand. Using the right wand for the purpose — like Quosal – helps create the right kind of proposal, and streamlines the process as well. Most MSPs should be able to create their proposals with a single command that does everything to produce the final document.

Do ye justice, fair knight, to the opportunity presented to you by yon customer — weave a magical spell guaranteed to make that customer fall in love with your craft.

Entrepreneurial Confessions: Bottlenecking Your Sales Effort

Entrepreneur, Kent, Proposals, Quotes, Sales No Responses »

May 262010

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.

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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