No matter how good your product or service is, you can't get by exclusively on its awesomeness. Any good vendor must also sell each prospect on one additional thing: your sales quote.
When a prospect holds your quote in hand, they will be asking themselves two things. First, “Does this product/service meet our business needs?” And second, “Is this a company we want to do business with?”
That's where quote management software (like IQX) comes in. Our job is to make sure that no prospect looks at your proposal and doubts you. Fortunately, @@the right CPQ solution makes it easy for you to send sales quotes that inspire confidence@@, leaving you free to develop the more interesting sides of effective sales strategies. Here's how the software helps sell the prospect on you.
1: Get it right once, get it right every time
When you're trying to perfect a process, it takes a lot of trial and error to figure out what works, what’s holding you back, and what’s irrelevant. The same is true of your sales process. Did you manage to convert this prospect because you perfectly targeted the product and pricing information in your proposal, or did you convert for a reason that seems unrelated?
Once you do figure out what works, however, you want to make sure you incorporate your insight into your sales strategies. Quote management software makes incorporation automatic: if you find that, say, leading with a statement of your prospect's needs is a good idea (it is), you can build that insight into your template, et voila! Every proposal you send out from then on will start with a statement of your prospect's needs at the beginning.
CPQ software is therefore the perfect tool to make sure your business only has to learn every lesson once: and that is the key to a good sales process.
2: Get your sales team on the same page
Since your proposal represents you, it's important to make sure that each proposal you send out is an extension of your brand. The look and feel that best represent your line of business should be embedded in every sales quote. That's just good strategy.
And that means you don't want each member of your sales team sending out proposals of their own design. There’s a time and place for a salesperson’s personal creativity and aesthetic tastes, but that place is not in your sales quotes.
Fortunately, most sales people would rather make money than make art, and with CPQ software, each member of your sales team can quickly generate quotes using a company-wide, brand-consistent template, turning a group of diverse sales reps into a truly unified team.
And, best of all, the less each sales rep worries about making a good-looking proposal, the more time they can spend doing all the other parts of sales that only they can do—building relationships, following leads, whatever requires the human touch. @@And what better business strategy could there be than letting each person do what they do best?@@
If you'd like to learn more about this topic or see IQX for yourself with a free demo, contact us.
