Tag Archives: quote quickly

Automate for Accuracy: 3 Steps to Assess & Improve Your Sales Quote Process

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Do you have a sales quote process that depends heavily on the experience and knowledge of salespeople? Do they primarily rely on a manual process of consulting Excel spreadsheets or similar data sorting documents?

We’re not saying these types of processes aren’t ever workable, but they do have shortcomings that push some companies toward an automated sales quote process. Automation can be a boon for accuracy, efficiency, and revenue.

How do you know if automating quotes is right for your business? Here’s a concise, step-by-step guide to analyzing your current sales quote process and deciding if adding automation will improve your bottom line.

Step One: Understand What You Do Now

You likely can come up with an overview description of your current sales quote process. But have you ever dug deep and pinpointed specific bottlenecks and ways to address them? A closer look often reaps significant benefits.

First, ask these three questions:

  1. Conduct a detailed audit of your quotes. What percentage are 100% accurate? Do certain mistakes recur frequently? For example, do your salespeople properly calculate volume discounts every time?
  2. How much time do sales managers spend tracking down and reconciling errors?
  3. Is your sales staff consistently suggesting appropriate add-ons for up-sell and cross-sell opportunities? If you discover mistakes in this area, calculate how much revenue you’re missing.

The final part of your audit should focus on the time spent creating a sales quote. Do not overlook this. Every minute wasted on creating quotes is time away from selling. Interview your salespeople to determine how much time it takes to create a quote. This is also a great opportunity to listen for common challenges and discern patterns that demand solutions.

Step Two: Analyze Solutions

If you want to improve your sales quote process, your choices fall into one of two categories:

  1. Incremental change to existing methods, or
  2. An automated solution using better technology.

Incremental change could include an emphasis on better training or creating checklists. Certainly there is nothing wrong with these approaches. But without the support of automating technology, some companies have found real change to be difficult to implement.

An automated option can be the difference maker for effective change that sticks. Why? Because the hard work and calculation necessary for an accurate quote is done automatically, based on the rules you customize.

You are not relying on the tribal knowledge locked in the head of specific team members, or cumbersome spreadsheets. Instead your business rules are automated to ensure every sales quote is accurate.

The solution to automation is a Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ) tool. For example, you can:

  • Automatically enforce up-to-the-minute pricing rules and product bundling information
  • Easily compare sales for similar customers to identify opportunities for increased revenue
  • Increase collaboration and knowledge sharing


Step Three: Implement and Measure

Whatever changes you decide to implement, create a list of expected benefits. The more time-bound and measurable these benefits, the better.

If you choose to automate, here are a few ideas to get you started on a tangible benefits list:

  1. Optimize your margins.
  2. Save your team time. Track both sales staff and managers. How much less time does your team spend creating quotes? How much time do sales managers gain because they don’t have to follow-up on quoting errors?
  3. Standardize accountability. Automation serves as a built-in accountability function. Sloppy errors and complicated calculations are reduced or eliminated. Salespeople configure a quote and with a click of a button it is sent to ERP for processing.
  4. Increase add-on sales. When you automatically set business rules, it means appropriate add-ons are integrated into every quote. This is another area that makes for a simple before and after calculation.

Understand. Analyze. Implement and Measure. CPQ tools provide one of the simplest ways for a sales team to improve quickly and permanently. We offer our own CPQ solution – QuoteQuickly – which is built on the Salesforce CRM.

Read more about QuoteQuickly here.

Improve Sales Quotes, Forecasts and Effectiveness by Putting Products in Salesforce

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I bet you’d agree that the Salesforce CRM has revolutionized the way sales teams function. If only all our companies had expanded revenue by 38% last year! But even Salesforce has its shortcomings. Case in point—sales quotes, especially when it comes to product selection.

The basic Salesforce product selection functionality is a bit lacking in the user-friendliness department. Sales people constantly must retype prices, order quantities, and other information, which leaves tainted data in the system. This is dirty data is problematic in more ways than one.

Shortcuts Lead Nowhere Fast

Sales teams try to make up for product configuration deficiencies by copying and pasting data back and forth between the Salesforce application and programs like Excel. While this is certainly faster than the manual approach, this method is prone to errors – lots of them.

Excel, in particular, lacks features such as the ability to apply discounts. And then there’s the clunky interface that does not lend itself to importing high volumes of product data between two repositories.

More often than not, having your pricing information and rules scattered across multiple applications spells trouble. It makes sales teams more susceptible to submitting sales proposals with incorrect prices, inaccurate configurations, and even incompatible products. These data entry errors can be very costly.

Reps Want an Easy Ride

In terms of the sales cycle, reps are generally concerned about two things:

  1. Their commissions
  1. How easy their sales tools are to use

The less easy a task is to complete, the less likely salespeople are to do it well—or at all. When reps aren’t on the ball, it limits the visibility sales managers have into the pipeline. This not only makes it harder for them to see what is and what isn’t working in their team—it hinders their ability to coach reps to close sales and generate accurate forecasts.

(SOURCES: @stephantopher, @telnotes)

Under these conditions, creating sales quotes and orders with accuracy and efficiency is difficult at best. The lack of granular, up-to-date data in the CRM hurts everyone—reps, partners, customers, but especially the company.

(SOURCES: Neil Curran, Edson Maciel)

Solutions for the Complex Sales Cycle

Companies today have complex requirements when it comes to the product configuration, pricing, and opportunity management aspects of their sales processes. For these organizations, the standard tools in Salesforce aren’t enough. The more complex your sales cycle, the better suited your organization is for a configure price quote (CPQ) solution.

Advances in software technology are making the sales quoting process more reliable than ever. They are robust enough to deliver the out-of-box functionality sales teams require, and flexible enough to support existing systems and platforms.

Optimizing Administrative Tasks in Salesforce

Businesses who add CPQ applications to the Salesforce CRM are skyrocketing revenue in the following ways:

  • Streamlined Efficiency – The product configuration feature in a CPQ solution automatically populates data for sales quotes into opportunities in Salesforce. It also provides the ability to quickly and easily customize product bundles. This translates to the user-friendly environment reps need to work with fast, streamlined efficiency.
  • Improved Quality - Thanks to automated bundling suggestions, like that of QuoteQuickly’s Guided Selling functionality, reps can select the bundles they need from a list of relevant options. Now sales managers can ensure both quality and accuracy before sales quotes are sent.
  • Error-Free Accuracy - With no need to share information across multiple documents, sales teams can eliminate errors while dramatically reducing cancellations and returns. Fewer mistakes mean lower costs, and increased sale effectiveness.
  • Productivity Boost – Since reps are no longer doing twice the work between Salesforce and Excel, they can lighten their load substantially. This productivity boost helps sales teams close more deals.
  • Seamless Integration – The most common concern organizations have when considering a CPQ solution is whether it integrates with the Salesforce platform. QuoteQuickly was built on the Salesforce platform, so our users enjoy functionality that seamlessly streams all their data between the app and the Salesforce CRM.
  • Simplified Management – A fully managed offering means your sales team can be up and running quickly with minimal effort. QuoteQuickly is a browser-based solution just like the CRM platform. There is no hardware to set up and no software to manage.

Conclusion

Today’s business environment is fiercely competitive. If you can’t quickly respond to market demand, you’re out. Manual operations often result in a broken sales cycle—one that can’t ensure the savings, quality, and prompt delivery customers demand.

But when you use tools that quickly create quality sales quotes in minutes that are tailored to meet the unique needs of each customer, you’re ready to win. Has your company stepped up to demand utmost precision in your sales quoting operations?

New Guided Sales Feature: QuoteQuickly Update

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We’re continually enhancing and improving QuoteQuickly, and thanks to the Cloud, all of our customers immediately – and for free – have access to all of the new features. 

One of QuoteQuickly’s latest features is Guided Sales, which is a Wizard-like feature that asks user-defined questions to guide a sales rep through the quote development process.

Since QuoteQuickly pulls directly from price and product lists within SFDC, the rep does not have to “manually add” pricing to products, which reduces the potential margin for error.

Instead, Guided Sales leads the rep through set(s) of questions, allowing for better cross/up sell and fewer mistakes mismatching products.  Continue reading →

How MC+A creates sales quotes faster than their competition

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Right now we can create a quote in minutes, faster than our competitors and vendors. Doing so builds confidence with our clients. The QuoteQuickly system has paid for itself over time with efficiency.

—Michael Cizmar, Managing Partner of MC+A

MC+A works with leading companies to leverage their information assets. As the charter Google Enterprise Partner, they know how to implement Google technology solutions and improve business intelligence access and management.

But for years, MC+A couldn’t find a quoting solution that served their team’s needs.

“We jumped around on several CRM systems, and then back to salesforce.com,” said Michael Cizmar, Managing Partner of MC+A. The limitation was, MC+A couldn’t include their term sheet in salesforce.com. Any time they needed to make one small change, such as to the copyright date or logo, it took 15 to 30 minutes. Continue reading →

Love for Steel Brick’s QuoteQuickly customers

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They say you are the company you keep, so from Team Steel Brick to all of our QuoteQuickly customers:

Thanks for being such great company.

Averna has reduced their complex quoting from days to minutes.

Centrify’s sales process is much easier.

You can read more from our customers on the salesforce.com AppExchange.

Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone!

What’s your sales quoting solution ROI? 3 Questions to ask

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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 →

5 ways to optimize margins + win with CPQ sales quoting tools

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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 →

Help your channel partners cast a wider net – selling more by quoting quickly

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Are your channel sales partners selling as much as you’d like?

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 →

Sales quotes + proposals that create fantastic first impressions

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By Caitlin Roberson, CEO of Wordisseur

Proposal presentation is everything. It serves as your prospects’ first impression of who you are, who your company is, and what services it provides.

Sales quotes are either your launching point for a sustainable, productive customer experience, or the instrument that creates distrust and devalues your brand.

Here are the top three components of proposals that deliver high-quality customer engagement: Continue reading →