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!
