Want to send sales quote out of your CRM software? Here’s the best way.
Just draft the proposal in Word, save it as a PDF, import it into your CRM solution, find your prospect’s contact info in your CRM, attach the quote to an email sent from that CRM, and just like that — five steps and 15 minutes later — you’ve done it. Probably.
Ok, so maybe that’s the 2nd best way… or the 10,002nd best. It takes a ton of time, requires too much manual labor and, in the end, while it lets you send a proposal, it gives you very little means of tracking it (easily one of the most important parts of the process).
But the best quoting software gives you all the tools you need:
Customizable templates to make each quote hit all the right notes
A pricing and product configuration engine that helps with bundling and keeps prices right
And a sales analytics and reporting interface that helps ensure each quote’s moving at the right pace
Best of all? @@With CPQ integrated fully with CRM, you keep all your business tools in the same toolbox.@@
Templates:
reduce mistakes, build the brand — what’s not to love?
Did you know that each quote you send is an opportunity to show off your brand? Forget proposals that look like resumes or spreadsheets. Use this valuable interaction to share more than pricing with your prospect. Because whether you’re quoting someone for software or lawn furniture, your proposal is the best time to strut your stuff.
Embed infographics that support your value proposition. Use color palettes and fonts that reflect your brand. Insert your logo, and imagery that captures the culture of the market you’re selling into.
And like the saying goes: reduce, reuse, recycle. Quotes you have sent before likely have all the info you need to close a sale now. Pick the best parts from your winning sales proposals — right from within your CRM solution — to build a quote for the ages.
Customer relationship management starts with pricing
Unless you make and sell art for a living, chances are you’re working in a market that has been somewhat — if not entirely — commoditized. That doesn’t always means the lowest price wins, but it certainly means the right price wins.
The right price can be driven by myriad factors: being attached to the right service/support plan, having a better upgrade path, or simply having a solid relationship with your customer (people don’t pay as much attention to price when they’re working with someone they like).
All this is why one of the best features in your quoting software is the ability to store winning product and pricing configurations, collected over time, across the enterprise, and from every winning proposal. Simply save a product/pricing configuration that worked once, and reps can use it again and again simply by pointing and clicking.
CPQ’s final trick? Track!
Whether you’re using Dynamics, Zoho, Salesforce, or any CRM, it likely does a great job of tracking customer relationships: from lead to prospect to customer to partner. Because that’s what CRM was designed to do! But it wasn’t designed to track quotes. Because that’s what CPQ was designed to do!
It’s never enough to know a quote was sent. You want to be able to track if it was received, replied to, revised, and returned signed or unsigned. The best quoting software on the market has tracking built in at this most basic level. Additionally, it should be able to track the progress being made by the reps sending quotes: Who’s sending the most? Who’s moving them the most quickly? Most importantly, who’s getting the most signed?
Use your CRM to manage your customer relationships from that first handshake to the final sale. But use your CPQ system to manage the process that makes them into a customer in the first place — the creation, delivery, and completion of each sales quote.
If you'd like to learn more about this topic or see IQX for yourself with a free demo, contact us.
