Dumb businesses spend money — smart businesses make investments.
So before you buy any business technology, be it customer relationship management (CRM) software, or an enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform, or a solution to automate the sales proposal process (price quote software), ensure you’re looking both at what it gives and what it returns.
Here are just a few of the benefits quoting software gives a business:
Reduce manual labor
Improve appearance and accuracy
Enhance collaboration and speed approvals
Getting a break from the routine
Taking it out of a rep’s actual hands
Every business is always seeking ways to reduce manual labor. Automating the sales proposal process means keeping their hands busy making calls and customer contacts instead of manually building quotes.
The only thing a business will never be able to automate is relationship building, which is why you want your reps making calls — leave making quotes to your price quote software.
Better looking, better sounding…
and a better bet
“Time is money, so get those quotes out quickly!” But the faster you ask people to work, the more likely they are to make errors, and the less likely the finished product will look as polished as possible.
An automated sales proposal solution not only helps reduce errors in each quote a rep makes, but if you take the time during implementation to customize with professional quote templates (most quote-to-cash software has them embedded), you send a proposal that looks as good as it “sounds.”
Go team!
There’s a reason most companies call the people in any given department a team: they’re expected to work together on a shared business objective and give the company a “win.”
Business solutions like price quote software should enable easy collaboration where it’s needed (e.g., if your product team needs to update info within the product and pricing configurator).
And if a sales manager needs to review and/or approve quotes before they leave the door, the system should also be able to automatically route through the entire approval process, and then on to the customer.
A break in the routine…
A boost for the business
No matter what you do for a living, there are likely routine tasks that can be a drag. For many companies, the creation, delivery, and approval of quotes is exactly that — routine.
By using price quote software to automate most quotes (there are always exceptions, of course) from start to finish, you let reps and other staff stuck in that routine come up for air. That’s a win. And imagine all the other jobs you can set them to work on if you reduce the time spent on routine tasks! That’s another win.
Don’t spend: INVEST
Every benefit outlined above can and should deliver a quantifiable return to your business. When you consider making the move to using price quote software as part of your sales process, the question isn’t how much will it cost you to use it. The question is how much does it already cost you to not be using it.
