Do you wish you could make sure each of your sales quotes and proposals always included all relevant materials—and only those PDFs? You can make this happen with our new Dynamic Proposals capability.
Here’s how it works:
Click here to learn more about the Dynamic Proposals feature on QuoteQuickly.
For companies considering Configure / Price / Quote (CPQ) sales quoting tools, the question comes down ROI.
There’s a simple way to calculate the potential cost savings of quoting quickly.
STEP ONE—Answer these questions: Continue reading
Though often easier said than done, optimizing your margins is at the core of how you drive your business. The challenge is doing it efficiently without wasting too much time—especially with today’s increased economic considerations, when commoditization threatens even products that we used to assume were impervious to it.
Quoting technology offers a lot of potential for margin optimization. But these Configure / Price / Quote (CPQ) tools will can only work when all the pieces are in place.
Here are 5 critical areas to nail down before you automate: Continue reading
Companies rely on resellers and other external partners more and more in their sales process. There’s a lot of potential, but it can be hard to operate at peak productivity with so many parties involved.
At the same time, buyer-seller conversations have transformed as decision makers increasingly create their own brand preference with online research and social networking. In fact, Gartner predicts customers will transact 85% of their business without interacting with a person by 2020. Does your sales cycle accommodate these trends?
On average, online buyers require 7 online touches before purchase. (Source: StratusG Consulting)
Your best response is to empower your prospects in their research and your external sales partners to sell more. Continue reading
We started on our new year’s resolutions a bit early here at Team Steel Brick. Two months ago, we shifted most of our day-to-day communication to Salesforce Chatter.
Email is great, but it’s more great to make more information available to more of our team more of the time.
No more mass emails. No more emails that need to be forwarded. No more checking on the status of a project. It’s all right there in Chatter. We’re big fans.
Today, sales teams succeed when their tools and strategies make collaboration easy.
Consider this industry research and news from Todd McCormick: Continue reading
Want the Sparknotes version of Dreamforce 2011 San Francisco? Get the highlights at Dreamforce to You – Seattle.
Who: Peter Coffee, other Seattle-based Salesforce.com customers, and you!
What: Dreamforce to You
When: January 12, 2012—9:00am – 1:00pm PST
Where: Four Seasons Hotel
Why: We’ll be there! Plus, it’s complimentary. We’ll all learn how to improve collaboration, user adoption and grow revenue.
Register now! Space is limited.
Sponsors: Steel Brick, FinancialForce.com, IBM/CastIron, and DocuSign.
We’re about to take a few week “blog break” for the holidays, but want to send some quick holiday cheer before we do.
It’s been a big year for Team Steel Brick, and we couldn’t have done it without you.
Here’s what happened in 2011… Continue reading
Are your channel sales partners selling as much as you’d like?
Companies rely on resellers and other external channel sales partners more and more in their sales process. There’s a lot of potential, but it can be hard to operate at peak productivity with so many parties involved.
This week, Steel Brick partnered with The Aberdeen Group to launch a research survey designed to help companies learn how to manage their partner relationships better in 2012. Continue reading
By Caitlin Roberson, CEO of Wordisseur
Intuitively, we all know the shorter your sales cycle, the better. Sales reps need to be out pounding the pavement to win new business and expand existing accounts. But these stats really drive that intuition home:
We’re all familiar with the 80-20 rule. More likely than not, 20% of your customers generate about 80% of your revenue. What are you doing to win more business with your most profitable customers?
Brent Holloway put it this way:
If 80% of your revenue last year came from existing customers, and the other 20% from new customers, then a 10% increase in sales from existing customers would have the same impact on revenue as a 40% increase in sales to new customers (8% company growth from either scenario).
Source: Sales 2.0 Blog
In a word, your current customer base houses your biggest potential payoff with the least additional effort and cost. Customer renewal, not customer acquisition, is the key to growth in today’s subscription-model marketplace.
The right tools will help your team spot and leverage these kinds of opportunities.
Make sure the sales 2.0 technology you select includes these features:
When customer contracts are up for renewal, your proposals need to be accurate and competitive—while making the most of your margins.
For more information, check out our buying guide here.
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Posted by Lise’ McCarthy, Director of Sales Operations at Steel Brick.
