SalesChain is keenly aware of the importance of substantive, branded documentation when doing business. A well-established brand can set your company apart and accelerate the number of deals you close. The more familiar your clients are with your brand, the more comfortable they will become doing business with you. This applies to all aspects of the selling process. in this blog we would like to focus on the proposal document tools that SalesChain provides to our customers. From a marketing perspective, there are many benefits to having a unified proposal which all your prospective clients will see and that all your salespeople can use.

To summarize, your sales proposal document should make it clear what your business does and more specifically, how you can help the client. A terrific proposal means you should STAY ON BRAND! From the color palettes to the company logo, everything found in the proposal should reflect the corporate brand, resulting in a clean, consistent proposal. Highlight what sets you apart from your competitors and why your solution is the best proposition for the client. To capture a prospective client’s attention, you must identify their pain points and provide them with the right solution to alleviate their frustrations.

In the digital age, it is virtually impossible to find a situation where employees are not required to have at least some basic level of computer knowledge and internet savvy to perform their jobs. Like all technology, business computing has evolved at lightning speed. What was “state of the art” last year, is outmoded this year. With each update and advance, users are required to learn new skills to effectively use the software offerings and be the most efficient and effective workers.

The current range of computer experience and knowledge among workers is at an all-time high. The millennial generation has never been without devices as an integral part of their lives. They learn coding skills in grade school. The oldest baby boomers may never have had formal computer classes in school, or at best, have had high school or college training with rudimentary and outdated computing programs and machines. (Note: This dinosaur started out in high school learning Fortran and worked on one of the first room-size mainframe computers at Yale University with the help of keypunch cards!)  Somewhere in the middle are employees with education in both more advanced computer languages (such as HTML and CAD) and coding skills.

The term “user-friendly” can mean different things to different employees and is linked to their experience and comfort levels with computing. A user-friendly system to a millennial may be streamlined and highly graphic, reflecting their familiarity with computers and their prior knowledge of navigation of internet resources and software products. A user-friendly system for a baby boomer requires more detailed protocols of the basic background functions for them to successfully work through the intricacies of the software.

To learn a software system from the ground up, documentation within the system is of primary importance. Components should be separated into tabs. These tabs need to be chunked in a logical manner, so that users can learn the system basics and then easily navigate beyond what they already know, using their basic knowledge as the foundation for adding new functionality skills.

However, basic skill requirements are different for different learners.  Here is where the importance of addenda comes in.  In other words, basic training information required by the least experienced workers could be referenced in addenda, that millennials can ignore, and baby boomers can use as needed.  This addresses both the broad spectrum of basic background knowledge in general computing, as well as how quickly an individual learner can pick up on the specific details of the system they are learning.  If they need a refresher, there are two ways to go back and find basic, “walk you through it” kind of instructions, without complicating the menu fields in the program.  Perhaps these addenda could even be comprised of links to written or video tutorials outside of the system.

The expectation is simple: When you invest in an enterprise software product, you want it to work. We are not talking about the website simply resolving when you open the page, or the program launching successfully on your computer, we mean you expect it to really work.

You expect your employee base to adopt the use of it easily and you expect that it will function well for everyone. You expect that the workflow is going to work within the bounds of the way you do business. And most of all, you expect to get your money’s worth by making some processes more efficient or by filling an essential need.

To meet this expectation, enterprise software companies must rise to the task of configuring the software product to your specifications. At SalesChain, this is something we do every day – and with a CRM and Proposal Pricing system like ours, this configuration can take a few weeks.

For the average business, importing a database, setting up pricing levels, and ticking on and off several options is enough to make the system work well within their expectations. But this is not all it takes for some organizations that have multiple locations, complicated processes, or additional software products they would like to integrate into the new system. This is where customization of our software comes in.

Whether it is the fact that these two words are similar in structure or that they have similar meanings, we find that our customers often mistake Customization for Configuration and vice versa, leading to some confusion.

Because of this confusion, we wanted to outline the differences here. In this article, we will compare the configuration of software in the modern implementation of a CRM system with customization of CRM software, which usually entails custom software development. We will use the preview of CRM software since it serves as a good example, but also because it is our area of expertise. This concept can apply to most any type of enterprise-grade software.

During the configuration process, it feels a whole lot like the system is being customized for your business exclusively. The software vendor implements changes to user fields that are specific to your company, such as email templates, company-branded documents, security settings, page layouts, and workflow notifications.

Although these fields look customized, they are all part of the proverbial “options” that get configured as part of the standard system setup.

For a CRM solution specifically, configuration could include things like building dashboards, setting team roles from a hierarchical employee roster, uploading client information from other database sources, and setting deal pricing and commission reconciliation parameters.

Commission-based sales models have been standard business practice for many decades, but do they still make sense in a post-pandemic world?  Are they still functional and practical when the company has adapted to changing sales patterns, problems with supply chains, and more and more employees working part or even full time from home?

Historically, there are many advantages to commission-based sales models.  They can be a motivator for salespeople since they are based on the value of sales achieved and can form all or part of a pay package.

When used judiciously, this tool can benefit not only high-achieving salespeople but the company as well.  Payroll cost is related to the value of business achieved rather than just the amount of product made. It helps a business to control costs during peaks and troughs since payroll will be reduced or increased according to patterns in market trends.  An attractive commission package also helps companies retain top sales talent.

It’s no secret: the office technology industry is among those hit hard by the present supply chain issues. Dealers who have primarily relied on hardware-based commissions are simply going to need to rethink their strategy if they want to keep their top reps.

One way to approach this crisis is to focus on renewing business, like servicing existing machinery rather than selling additional hardware.

We saw similar challenges during the pandemic where the work from home movement caused a shift to sales of A3 or otherwise smaller format printers and copiers. Always keep in mind during a crisis that businesses are meant to adapt and grow with the times. Don’t get stuck in a rut and lose your profits in the mix.

There has been a sweeping shift in business towards being data driven, an idea that has been met with surprising opposition from salespeople across the board.

Because of advances in software technologies, tracking a salesperson’s activities and generating data sets related to the sales process has been a popular method of employing this mindset. In concept, salespeople should be amongst the demographics that benefit most from this data set. Used properly, they can reference their interactions to build better client relationships, reference trends to detect what approaches they should take, and more.

However, we recently viewed this video from Brian G Burns on LinkedIn that confirms salespeople’s frustrations. From their perspective, entering activities and logging every myopic detail of an interaction with a client takes more time than it is worth.

Why do it then?  Managers and analysts who want to look at the company performance from a “big picture” point of view, more readily see the value of being data driven than their sales force. From their perspective, an incomplete data set means that the reporting is inherently incomplete, making it useless for forecasting and decision-making purposes.  They rely on the “boots on the ground,” their salespeople, to generate quality data sets.

The opinion we observed in the LinkedIn video encouraged stepping back from the data driven mindset and instead focusing on being revenue driven, allocating time to the activities that bring more money into the company rather than those that generate the most data.

As a software provider, we at SalesChain were provoked to ask: Just because technology has made data-generating tools available, should they be mandated, or are they wasting valuable employee time? In thinking about this, we determined that the shift towards being data driven is only problematic when attention is taken away from the tools and actions that put money on the table.  Time SHOULD be spent on building data that is relevant to generating revenue. 

No trick answers here. If the best revenue-driven data is coming from the proposal and order process, the way to generate more useful data is to price more proposals. Getting more proposals in front of customers gives management a larger dataset to reference and has the added benefit of winning more deals.

With this in mind, the salespeople make a valid point that tracking CRM minutia is not the most important way they can spend their time. The activity tracking component of your CRM software is secondary and can easily be used on a case-by-case basis to supplement the revenue-driver – the proposal pricing tool.

Once you begin to look at the data related to proposals priced to understand the trends and use that information to adapt your sales towards the trends that work, you are successfully doing data driven work with a revenue driven purview.