The role of CPQ in supply chain and inventory management strategies

Configure, price, quote (CPQ) software originally began – and is still often thought of – as simply a sales proposal solution, an application populated with proposal templates, product and pricing configurations, workflows, reports, contacts, and accounts.

But that has changed in recent years, and in a very big way. Because, for many companies, the meaning of CPQ is now enmeshed with their supply chains as the product and pricing configurations being “moved” (figuratively moved, as in “sold”) in every sale are:

1. A clear sign of what’s needed next in the supply chain (what needs to be restocked).
   

2. An indication of where the overall supply chain might be headed. I.e., are customers looking for add-ons to existing products, or buying new ones? Depending on what you’re selling, a trend in these choices could mean customers have serious concerns about supply.
   

3. An opportunity to improve inventory management as administrators can present products/services they need sold, and quickly, to the sales front-line while waiting for the supply chain to open up on the backend.
   

New supply chain crises, new inventory management techniques

SMB clients of ours that have leaned into our CPQ application for the past 10 years or so have recognized its potential as far more than simply a sales quote generator, though that is, and always will be, the core of its functionality.

They have, in many cases, been using their CPQ solutions as “mini CRMs” where they track the most crucial component of their customer relationships: sales (as well as using CPQ to store contacts and accounts, sales performance data, and more).

But now many of them are also using CPQ’s product and pricing configuration engine as a de facto front-line inventory management system. To be clear, however, it requires some data integration as CPQ is typically not natively connected to standard inventory management systems.

What it IS connected to are the sales people moving that inventory. The product and pricing configurations are, in most cases, determined by an administrator who knows what needs selling, and in what geographies, and to what market segments, etc.

Coordinating with backend inventory management systems gives a sales admin the insights required to populate sales people’s CPQ interface only with products for which there is a steady supply of foundational materials. In hardgoods markets, for example, this can help ensure fewer supply chain management issues on the manufacturing side.

Solving supply chain issues starts with sales data

When it comes to fixing the supply chain crisis and better managing overall inventory, every data set matters. And if there’s a more important set of data than what’s currently selling/not selling at the very end of your supply chain (where your goods and services meet actual end-users and consumers), we’d like to know what it is.

The role of CPQ in your supply chain and inventory management processes can not be understated. As we move forward fixing global market issues, knowing what is in demand and selling in our own markets will be more and more critical. And the source of that knowledge can be found in almost every signed sales proposal.

B2B sales (proposal) trends in 2022: time to get technical!

It’s that time of year again. The experts are weighing in on what the big sales, CRM, and business technology trends will be in 2022. And we’re getting in on it and making some predictions of our own!

Typically, people turn to iQuoteXpress for learning more about configure, price, quote “stuff” (what CPQ means, how it’s best put to use, how much it costs, etc.) or for more technical sales tips — we usually focus on how to best use the feature sets built into CPQ and CRM solutions to automate most of the closing process.

But it’s time for us to expand our vision, to see past CPQ alone, and take a hard look at the future and predict what’s coming next in business tech in 2022…

Sales Automation on Steroids

We’re about to move past automated workflows and contact management into a brave new world of automated prospecting and lead qualification. Automated nurture campaigns, automated audience segmentation, and automated form capture are fairly self-evident. And the data they provide helps any rep create a more targeted proposal more quickly.

But the real future is RPA: robotic process automation. Technical sales tools now exist that enable a rep to build lists using data from 3rd party websites — even from behind logins and within intranets! This is not old-school, gray-hat scraping: this is simply doing what an API does (getting two apps to communicate: e.g., your marketing automation platform, their website), but without an API.

Want to kick your list-building efforts into overdrive? Here’s a tip: RPA.

Value-based selling: value is more than a number

In far too many sales proposals, value is confused with “cost.” But in 2022, every sales quote you send has to deliver more than just a dollar amount — it has to deliver real, lasting value to your prospect. The value isn’t always in additional services and add-ons (though those help); it’s in providing a solution that does more than solve a problem, and creating a partnership that can help your clients feel connected, feel valued.

Case in point: we had a prospect that needed a sales quoting tool to help it close more deals more quickly (naturally). The prospect’s market was modular housing.

Rather than simply commoditize what we do and what they do, we discussed current industry issues with a professional association in the space — the Modular Home Builders Association — so that we could better understand the prospect’s context and deliver a solution that provided greater value than just a faster way to close sales.

When we connected with the prospect, we had a value-based proposal for them, one that showed we understood not just their needs, but their customers’ needs as well. I.e., by taking a value-based selling approach, we demonstrated that we cared about more than just our prospect’s challenge: we cared about the value they deliver to their clients. A done deal, and in the best way.

Self service in B2B

B2B sales are most often about relationships. It’s the rare +six-figure deal that closes without the sales rep getting to know the client, and well. HOWEVER… ecommerce tools and technologies are becoming ever more prevalent in the B2B world.

Currently, we have clients using our technology in two ways: they’re using standard CPQ functionality to quickly generate, populate, and disseminate professional sales proposals, thereby getting a compelling quote to a given prospect in record-time.

But they’re also using the product pricing configuration engine — which we’ve often called the beating heart of CPQ — to create self-service portals and similar tools that empower their customers to restock/replenish certain products.

For example, after they land a new customer (with a sales proposal made in IQX, of course) a manufacturing client of ours uses the product and pricing configuration engine, in conjunction with an ecommerce platform, to let its customers reorder hardware and lighting products. While the manufacturing client required a sales rep to close an initial deal with Client A, all following purchases made by Client A were made via a portal, with no manual labor.

It’s this merging of B2B sales tools and tactics with B2C/ecommerce technologies and methodologies that we think will be the biggest trend to look out for in 2022. (Learn more about ecommerce for B2B.) What do you think? Let us know.

Making a quote in Quickbooks

How do you make a sales quote (also called an “estimate”) in Quickbooks? It’s a relatively simple process. Problem is that it also delivers a relatively simple result, and in today’s ultra-competitive market, a simplistic sales quote rarely lands a new customer. But we digress…

There are four steps:

1. Navigate to Estimate (under the New tab, Customers column)

2. Create your estimate, adding a Customer Name, Estimate Date, Expiration Date, Products/Services, Quantities

3. Preview Estimate

4. Send Estimate

Easy, right? You know where to find the lists of products and services, right? And you’re 100% certain it’s the most recent list, right? You know where to select a proposal template for your estimate, yes? How to set pricing and/or add discounts, right?!? And you also know to track a sales quote after you send it and ensure it was received, RIGHT?!?!?

What we’re saying — in no uncertain terms — is that, for most sales people, it is NOT actually easy to create a sales quote in Quickbooks.

And no matter who you are, it is generally impossible to create a sales quote in Quickbooks that will stand out in a crowd, an RFP response that POPS louder than the competition’s.

But you know what is easy and makes creating professional looking sales proposals — with centrally managed and optimal product and pricing configurations — into a “drag and drop” task done in a few minutes? Adding configure, price, quote (CPQ) to Quickbooks.

Play to your strengths: Quickbooks at the backend, CPQ at the front

Quickbooks is one of the easiest to use bookkeeping solutions on the market, but let’s be honest: it’s not really a sales or marketing tool. You wouldn’t use it as your CRM or as your ESP, so why attempt to use it as your CPQ? There’s a maxim that applies, “if every task were a nail, the only tool we’d need is a hammer.” But accounting and bookkeeping are radically different tasks from selling and closing, which means we require radically different solutions for the back-end (accounting) and front (selling).

Take the simple task of creating an estimate/quote. In Quickbooks, you have essentially one path: using the interface. It’s not a proposal template, per se, and you must manually add most every product or service.

With a CPQ solution (which, by the way, can be integrated with Quickbooks), you can have multiple, industry-specific sales proposal templates. Perhaps more importantly, as mentioned above, with a CPQ solution, product and pricing configurations (as well as discounting structures) are centrally managed, which means every representative is working off the same “script.” 

Additionally, a CPQ system can be prepopulated with product images and bundles, ensuring that every quote you send is leveraging the fact that “a picture is worth a thousand words.” (Images must be individually and manually added with Quickbooks.)

Finally (for now, anyway… we believe there’s a lot more to say on this topic, but we’ll save it for future articles), a CPQ solution enables granular tracking of every proposal sent. You can track every task, every customer contact, every quote revision, every step. Closing a sale is perhaps the most important phase in every customer relationship, and every step you take getting there should be duly noted, and learned from.

We love Quickbooks, and use it regularly for almost every accounting need. But for driving the sales that keep your accounting plate full…? We’ll use the right tool every time, CPQ.

The meaning of CPQ in plain English

We’re going to keep it simple: the meaning of CPQ is about its benefits, not its functionality. We have gone over the functions many times and in many more ways in this blog, the most extensive configure-price-quote-centric blog the internet has ever seen.

But people don't choose “functionality.” They choose benefits, a solution to their problems. That said… here’s its functionality as a sales proposal automation solution:

• Sales proposal template building

• Product and pricing configuration

• Contact storage and management

• Discount management

• Sales quote reporting and analytics

• Ecommerce (a new thing for CPQ and B2B selling)

Think of those as the ingredients. But think of ingredients: no one (most no one) would sit and eat 2 cups of flour, 2 eggs, a cup of sugar, etc. on their own. But you mix those ingredients together… hey, EVERYONE likes cake!

So we’re going to define CPQ not by its ingredients (its functionality) but by its outcomes, its deliverable, its benefits. And in plain, direct terms.

1: Faster, more professional sales proposals

This is why most people add CPQ to CRM and ERP systems. They quickly learn that it takes a dedicated app to empower their sales team to quickly create professional, accurate sales quotes.

Usually, when you want the benefit of speed you sacrifice accuracy, but not with a CPQ system. The fact that the templates are preconfigured and the processes are locked-in leaves next-to-no-room for error.

You’ll go from sending spreadsheets and Word docs to sending polished professional proposals, and in ⅓ the time, too.

2: More revenue, happier customers

This is a win-win benefit largely derived from the core of every CPQ system, the product and pricing configuration engine, which — described as a functionality — empowers a rep to point-and-click and add products and pricing to a proposal.

The “more revenue, happier customers” benefit stems from how this particular feature works and improves over time. As your team continues to build proposals, winning configurations rise to the top (easily identifiable with the analytics tools in every CPQ solution).

These winning combinations are winning as they consistently address customer needs, so win #1 for the customers. The other half of the win-win is you can centrally administer and test pricing of these configurations, find that sweet spot where revenue peaks and customer satisfaction stays high as well. 

Imagine trying to derive this benefit from a process where every rep uses his/her own way of doing things, stores proposals locally, etc. It is, from our point of view, indeed unimaginable.

3: More insight on closing, more oversight on sales reps

BI and analytics. Everyone today is always talking BI & analytics. And that’s a great thing, as data drives just about everything in sales today.

The thing is, most enterprise-level business applications don’t currently have analytics tools digging into the data around the most critical step in the sales process: that time between when a quote is sent and when it is signed.

CPQ does, though. With CPQ integrated into your business systems and processes, you’ll be able to spot bottlenecks, reactivate stalled deals, and get into the granular data that drives sales.

Additionally, you can see what — or who — is causing those bottlenecks. Which reps are sometimes gumming up the system and which are leading the charge? Your standard CRM-type funnels only reveal so much. A rep can look REAL busy — lots of leads, lots of opportunities, lots of noise. But you need to look at which reps are moving proposals from sent to signed most often, you need to get the data that really drives more revenue.

E.g., Joe has 200 leads and a lead to opportunity rate of 15%, but an opportunity to closed-won rate of only30%. Whereas Bob has only 100 leads, but his closed-won rate is 50%. Time to move 100 leads (or more) into Bob’s funnel.

The meaning of CPQ? Benefits, benefits, benefits

You don’t get a CPQ system because you’re lacking a product and pricing configuration functionality. You get it because you need more compelling products and pricing that help close more sales.

You don’t get it because you need another BI tool. You get it because you need to smooth the closing process and optimize your human resources.

Considering CPQ? Contact us and let’s talk about the benefits you’re after. That’s always the best place to start.

The art — and science — of sales proposal follow-up

You’ve nurtured the prospect into an opportunity.

You’ve had a few meetings, come to terms, and written and sent a sales proposal.

Now all you have to do is sit back and wait.

And wait.

And wait.

And wait.

Sadly, sales quotes rarely sign themselves. A ping, at the very least, is almost always part of the process. Usually, a ping, another ping, a call or two or three, sometimes even a paid vacation to Maui…

Creating the perfect proposal follow-up is both an art and a science, and here we’re going to show you how to execute on both sides of that equation and encourage a prospect to sign and become a customer.

First, everybody's favorite subject, SCIENCE.

The science of the perfect follow-up

Sales is NOT like dating. The whole, “wait two days before calling” thing goes right out the window if you’re serious about closing a deal.

There’s a process to follow in most cases, which also differs on a case-to-case basis (we’ll explain). But the first part of the process in ALL cases is confirmation. Don’t just send the quote: confirm the send went as planned. Treat it like registered mail and confirm it was delivered and do so within 24 hours of sending.

And don’t forget you have every right to do this — in fact, you’re practically required to do this, so don’t pussyfoot. No, “I’m just checking… if you have a moment… sorry to bother you…” There’s a critical component of the close hanging in the balance. Reach out within a business day, confirm receipt, and be direct: “Ensuring you received the quote we discussed. Please let me know it’s in your hands. Thank you.”

The next step in every case is replying to that confirmation, but with a “soft ask” on when it will be signed. They just received it. It’ll likely have to be viewed/approved by others. Don’t increase the pressure… yet.

And here is where the process deviates depending on the industry, size of the deal, nature of the customer, and other variables.

If you’re in enterprise sales sending 6 and 7 figure quotes, it’ll make sense to give your prospect 3 - 5 business days before the next ping. You’re not demanding a sign just yet. But you are confirming that it has been read and all details are in place (you’re doing customer service more than sales at this juncture). No reply? Same message 2 days later.

If you’re in SMB sales sending 5 and 4 figure quotes, you can be a little more aggressive. Yes, check that all details are in place 3 - 5 business days after confirmation the quote was signed, but nudge for that signature. It’s a fact that product and service pricing changes all the time, and a quote signed today preserves the pricing therein tomorrow. A quote unsigned for weeks… well… things, as stated, can change.

Generally, the cadence for the perfect follow-up after you’ve sent a proposal is at least one check-in a week, alternate with emails and calls. And if you can’t get a date from them on when they’ll sign, get a date on when you can and should reach back.

If you want to automate that cadence, a configure, price, quote system can support you by helping to map workflows (and providing communications templates) for follow-up. And when you automate a process, you can more easily optimize it, too, ensuring that every sales rep in your department is following up in the same, effective way. (Remember: the thing about anything scientific is that it’s demonstrably repeatable.)

The art of the perfect follow-up

This part is simple. The art of the perfect follow-up to any sales proposal is all in this whitepaper.

When CPQ met CRM: “You complete me…”

“What is CPQ CRM integration?” is, actually, the wrong question to ask. What is strategic CPQ CRM integration is the right one.

Because you can add a button to your CRM system (Dynamics, Salesforce, Zoho, HubSpot, whatever) and CALL it integration, but that’s only scratching the surface.

In a strategic CPQ/CRM integration, the systems have a bi-directional data feed, a shared (or similar) UI/UX, and a single sign-on integration, for starters.

The strength of each system is complemented by the other with one goal: closing more sales. Example 1: CPQ leverages the robust customer information stored in CRM, allowing reps to more precisely target in the proposals they send. Example 2: CRM system benefits from the more detailed reporting on the closing process, the most critical element of the “R” in CRM.

Here is what to look for in a truly strategic CPQ CRM integration.

Contact alignment

Your CRM should be your single source of truth for customer contact and account information. That said… it’s not always on the front lines.

The proposals you build and send in your CPQ solution absolutely must have the latest and greatest contacts at any given company, and these contacts are confirmed during the proposal process as your rep nurtures the sale.

That information may not always match what’s in your CRM because — sad truth, common curse, frustration shared by ALL CRM admins — the contact info in CRM is not always up-to-date. In far too many companies, “not always” is more like “rarely.”

Take advantage of every signed quote in CPQ to cross-check and update contact information in CRM. And if you automate the process? Perfection.

Complementary analytics

An undeniable strength of CRM systems is the funnel and how it fuels sales forecasting. For any stretch of time (a month, a quarter, a year), a sales manager can look at what’s where in the funnel — leads driven, opportunities created, quotes sent — and have the data needed for an accurate forecast of sales revenue and rep performance.

But most CRM systems have what can best be called an Achilles’ heel. And it’s in the most critical part of the sales process: closing.

The closing process typically begins when a quote is sent, but what do most CRM systems reveal about what happens between sent and won/lost? Next to nothing. CPQ systems, on the other hand, micro-track each step between sent and signed. Additionally, CPQ systems can help shed light on what types of proposals (content, template) close the most sales.

Adding CPQ closing data to your CRM sales forecasting data takes the Achilles’ heel out of the equation.

Single sign-on

This one is kind of a no-brainer: would you leave your car to listen to your car stereo? No. (IQX is big on the single sign-on, having developed integrations for CPQ in Zoho and CPQ in Dynamics, with more on the way for HubSpot, PipeDrive, and others.)

Anything NOT single sign-on in your CRM system feels like an app or an add-on and is routinely ignored by sales reps. No matter how integrated your systems may be, if the user experience is one where you must “leave” CRM to create and send a sales quote, it slows down the process.

Ease of use

A requirement for a truly strategic integration of CPQ and CRM. If one system is harder to use than the other, if the user experience feels like going from drag and drop to a plain-old drag, productivity slows. 

Much like single sign-on, it’s less about a seamless integration than a seamless user experience. With any business application, ease-of-use should take front and center.

While CPQ systems like IQX put a friendly user experience first (drag and drop proposal building: it’s just that simple), it seems like it’s only in recent years that the big dogs in the CRM space seem to recognize that a friendly UI means happier customers.

For years, the complaints about systems like Salesforce and Dynamics were all about UI: complaints about the functionality were rare. It’s no coincidence that most of the recent updates to CRM systems have been focused on a better user experience, as it’s happy users that become effective users.

With CRM and CPQ providing equally friendly and effective user experiences, sharing data, and in single sign-on mode, integration moves from the back-end to the whole package.

Ecommerce and customer management: where B2B and B2C finally merge?

Over the course of its 25+ year existence, some aspects of ecommerce have changed dramatically: available products (remember when Amazon only sold books?), modes of payment, modes of shopping, inventory management, shipping practices and more.

But one aspect of ecommerce has remained remarkably the same over its existence. The “relationship” between seller and buyer. Why the quotation marks? Because while sellers and buyers know more about each other now (order histories, web behaviors, etc.), there’s still not what you could call a relationship in the way, say, a B2B sales rep has relationships with his accounts.

That’s about to change, though. With more B2B tools filtering into the ecommerce world (product configuration applications, self-service portals, automated customer journeys, and more), ecommerce retailers are moving into actual customer relationship management, and the benefits that come with.

The good news for ecommerce companies is that the customer management tools they need have already been “road tested” by B2B companies. And while some of the features in, say, an enterprise-level CRM system or a configure, price, quote solution may not be perfect fits for ecommerce, so many others are. Here are just a few.

Account creation

Most ecommerce sites require users to create an account, but that account is rarely more than a mailing address, a billing address, and a credit card number. By leveraging the account creation and management tools baked into a CPQ or CRM system, an ecommerce company can create a far more robust profile of each and every customer.

Creating a multi-step registration process can also help reduce fraud by giving ecommerce companies the opportunity to more carefully review accounts being created, and can also enable them to collect more actionable data for sending customer communications that drive more revenue.

Customer journeys

B2B marketing solutions also create the opportunity for an ecommerce concern to create more personalized customer experiences, and more effective customer journeys, leveraging traditional B2B tactics such as multi-stream nurture campaigns.

In the bricks and mortar world, a sales representative has the ability to draw out information from each prospect and ensure the proper steps are being taken to transform them from a lead to a customer. By creating customer journeys based on specific customer profiles and account data, an ecommerce company can, in effect, automate a sales rep’s work at a very granular level.

You might think, “Well, why don’t B2B companies automate the journey, too?” It typically boils down to dollar figures. In the enterprise sales world of six-, seven-, and even eight-figure deals, automation will help at the outset, but an experienced rep is almost always required to close the deal.

Segmented customer data

Segmentation of the audience has always been huge in ecommerce as it helps determine which buyers see which offers (e.g., you wouldn’t try and sell bungee-jumping supplies to 80-year-olds). And most ecommerce companies segment well, putting frequent buyers into a different category, for example, creating rewards clubs and other incentives.

B2B customer management tools empower ecommerce businesses with a few more arrows in the quiver, however, enabling them to tag customers for tiered pricing, allowing access to restricted web pages and files, and more.

The objective is two-fold: 1) empower customers with self-service mechanisms that put them in the driver’s seat, and 2) reduce impact on your own human resources and support teams, as those that are given the freedom to help themselves very often do just that. And drive more revenue in the process (so, ok, the objective is actually three-fold.)

The lines between B2C selling and B2B selling are getting blurrier by the day, but one thing is clear: it means improved ecommerce shopping experiences and increased ecommerce revenue.

Product configuration for ecommerce: a new meaning for CPQ… maybe even a new life.

If you’re an ecommerce expert, you understand the importance of matching your products and services to the wants and needs of your customers.

You sell flowers and heart-shaped boxes of candy around February 14th, shaving kits to men (mostly), everything under the sun to everyone on Earth from Black Friday through Christmas Eve. You configure your online offerings as best you can to meet the ever-changing buying behaviors of your customers.

To be honest, though… there’s still a fair amount of guesswork involved. Yes, you can usually segment your audience based on interests they drag along in cookies, past buying behaviors, demographic data, geography, and the other standard metrics, and then present more targeted offers and increase conversion rates by 0.5% (2% if you’re lucky).

But, in the end, you’re often still presenting the equivalent of a fixed-price full-meal to a customer who more often would be happier (and spend even more) if they could offer a la carte. With a product configurator for ecommerce like IQX eCOM, they can.

What’s the difference between a product configurator and a CPQ solution?

That’s a great question, and we’re glad we asked it. Snarky self-congrats aside, the difference is, let’s say, in the bells and whistles more than the nuts and bolts. CPQ is, as most folks know (and as EVERYONE who’s read this blog before knows), an acronym for Configure, Price, Quote. And it’s that first word where most of the similar nuts and bolts reside: configuration… of products, services, and more.

Many CPQ companies grew out of (or are still entirely in) the B2B space, offering the tool as a solution for sales proposal automation, which it absolutely is: drag-and-drop proposal templates, quote tracking, sales rep management tools, and more. It empowers any sales rep to make a professional sales quote in just a couple of minutes. But those features just listed are, for an ecommerce company, more bells and whistles than nuts and bolts.

However, some CPQ companies have recognized the value of the “C” for ecommerce, and stripped out some of the B2B-centric pieces to create an interactive product configuration tool for ecommerce sites, allowing customers to configure (the “C” in CPQ) the products they need in the way they need them. (NOTE: it’s highly doubtful any ecommerce sites are extending that level of customer-facing flexibility to the “P” part of CPQ.)

The difference between a full-featured CPQ solution and a product configurator for ecommerce is, essentially, that it moves from being a sales proposal generator used by a sales rep (with a custom quote, for a specific customer, with specific product configurations and pricing) to a “product generator” for the customer themselves. They use it to create the a la carte products their hearts truly desire. A win-win in the truest sense.

A new trend? From B2B to B2E?

A phrase bopping around the tech space a few years ago was “the consumerization of IT.” As tech consumers grew more sophisticated outside the office — becoming experts in getting, using, and customizing apps, for example — that sophistication rolled into the office, too, with more self-service mechanisms, less reliance on the help desk, etc.

With product configuration for ecommerce, however, we see a move in the other direction. 

Rather than B2B watching what consumers and ecommerce sites are doing and following suit, we have ecommerce companies looking at B2B companies, and the CPQ tools they’re using. By empowering their customers with CPQ-like product configuration, ecommerce companies are reducing the need for customer service by providing better customer self-service… and driving more revenue in the process. 

The best news? The configurator is only one way in which CPQ tools are helping change the face of ecommerce. Stay tuned to our blog to see what’s coming next.

Quoting software: How to be a great salesman (not just a good one)

Ask any salesperson and they’ll tell you: “It’s all about relationships.” We agree. But it’s not just a sales rep’s relationships with contacts, accounts, and prospects. It’s about a relationship to systems, best practices, and tools like quoting software.

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The basics of being a good salesperson

Frankly, there are too many to detail in a single blog and you’ll find wildly different opinions on just about every website and in every book. There are some agreed-upon basics, though:

You have to know your products and believe in them: it’s not enough to just know pricing and features. You have to understand and be able to speak to, the benefits your customers will enjoy.

You need people skills: active listening, geniality, personalization of every customer contact (this goes all the way back to Dale Carnegie).

You have to have an ego. According to The Harvard Business Review, “a good salesman [has] a particular kind of ego drive that makes him want and need to make the sale in a personal or ego way, not merely for the money to be gained.” I.e., you take closing as a victory, not just a paycheck.

The preceding basics of being a good salesman are, for the most part, all about personality (psychology, even). But workflow management and technology also play a role, and that’s in creating repeatable processes that help you build on success.

And here’s where we pivot to what we do here at IQX, which is providing a sales quoting software that enables and fuels repeatability. That applies to repeating your successes and learning from — but absolutely NOT repeating — failures.

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A repeatable sales process (with a focus on closing)

We’re simply going to assume you’re tracking what you do in some way, that when leads arrive they don’t simply go into a safe (like the Glengarry leads), and that progress isn’t being tracked on Post-Its or a whiteboard. I.e., we’re assuming you’re using a CRM or at least a spreadsheet to keep track of where any given sale is in the process.

In most cases, the sales process is funnel-shaped, with a shotgun approach at the top (email blasts, cold calls, names without job titles, etc.) refined into a sniper shot at the bottom (qualified leads, pain points understood, demos given, etc.). In ALL cases, it’s toward the end of this funnel when we create and send a sales quote and thereby kick-off the closing process.

There are opportunities to create repeatable processes throughout the funnel, of course. Consistent, repeatable follow-up steps after a demo; consistent, repeatable product/service presentation and configuration; consistent, repeatable calling methods (e.g., scripts). But it’s in closing a sale — once you send a quote — where repeatability is perhaps easiest to create, track, and profit from.

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Quoting software: a pre-configured, cloud-based, repeatable closing process

Sometimes, people refer to a repeatable process as a template. In quoting software, that’s literal. When you kick off the closing process, you do so with a sales quote built on a template. This can be as basic as one included with a quoting system, or (ideally) one customized to suit your brand and your market. In EVERY case, it shouldn't be something you’re building from scratch each time.

The steps to building a quote in most sales proposal software solutions are repeatable: choose a template, customize it for your prospect (hopefully with a little more than just adding a name, title, and company), adding your product and pricing configurations, sending it, doing your follow-up, and getting it signed. And if you’re using the right software, these steps are mostly automated. More importantly, they’re captured and reported on.

Because it’s only through reporting where we can access the data we need to improve our repeatable process: analyzing which quotes (and reps) are closing and which aren’t, where bottlenecks occur, which products and pricing are working most often to drive business.

With a tool like iQuoteXpress, every step you take after a customer says “send me a quote” is trackable, repeatable, and therefore improvable. And no matter how good (or not good) your salespeople may be at the top of the funnel, quoting software helps them all be great closers.