Scenario 1: Your house is on fire. You do nothing. And you lose everything. Worse, one year earlier, you KNEW your house would catch fire and could have gotten fire insurance, but you did nothing. What were you (not) thinking?
Doing nothing almost always comes at a high cost. This is overwhelmingly true in business where companies that stick with a “this is how we’ve always done things” approach almost always lose ground to those that try new approaches—especially new technology.
So if you’re still using a spreadsheet to catalog products and services, using email to “track” quotes and proposals, and using anecdotes to analyze and report on quotes and proposals, it’s time you did something like use quote generation software from iQuoteXpress (IQX).
Want to be more competitive? Fix the big problems first.
Scenario 2: You’re in a lifeboat… it has a broken oar, mismatched life jackets, and a tear in its side where air is rapidly escaping: which problem do you fix first? (If you’re currently thinking of matching colors for life jackets, say hello to Davey Jones for us…)
Regarding your business and becoming more competitive: Some businesses think the solution is more leads, more opportunities, a widening of the funnel. So they’ll direct budget to advertising, trade shows, new reps, etc. On one hand, they’re absolutely right—actions like these can lead to new opportunities. On the other, they’re entirely wrong.
Because if you’re using manual systems and processes to track your opportunities and sales, widening the funnel will only further highlight downstream issues; new opportunities will suffer the same old problems.
Step #1 is cleaning up your house before inviting anyone else into it, and that means automating the most business-critical element: sales proposals. Quote generating software ensures more consistent creation, delivery, and tracking of quotes and proposals. And it enables you to process more quotes more quickly. With a solution like IQX in place, you can @@widen your funnel and rest assured that there are no leaks in your pipeline.@@
Don’t take our word for it. Use our ROI calculator here (bottom of our homepage).
Status quo? Status NO.
Put simply, the status quo has got to go. The way you captured revenue in the 1990s and 2000s is antiquated. Every competitive business has automated from top to bottom.
We know that $100k ERP systems and $30k CRM systems can be daunting, and have a value that’s hard to quantify, but quote generating software comes at a considerably lower cost and quantifiable ROI is quickly evident. And with benefits like contact management, cloud cataloging, analytics, and more, a sales proposal automation tool like IQX mirrors much of the functionality you find in enterprise-level CRM systems anyway.
We know that sticking with what you’ve done in past sounds comfortable, but think about it: every success—business, sports, ANYTHING—usually means making a change. And if you’re still using manual process to track your quotes and proposals, it is absolutely time for a change. Contact us and we’ll help you get started.
