The Importance of a Quoting Tool
Optimizing all steps of the sales cycle is essential to generating as much revenue as possible for your business. Sales proposals require accurate quotes; however, these often are a bottleneck in the process of presenting a package to a potential client. Inefficient business processes mean that salespeople are bogged down in the monotonous tasks related to creating a quote that meets potential customers’ expectations. Investing in automation can help prevent the loss of sales due to this inefficiency. Is your company ready for this software?
Here are five signs that you need a quoting tool:
01) You/your salespeople spend hours every week putting quotes together.
Wouldn’t it be great to generate quotes with the click of a button? (Bonus points for saving time by tying basic information into the quotes with integration into your CRM.) Collating and including information such as product/service descriptions and pricing, automated pricing updates and special deals from an updated database, and automatically formatting and emailing the proposal can all save substantial amounts of salespeople’s time. Because of this expediency, they can spend more time personally following up with clients, building valuable relationships, suffering fewer communication breakdowns caused by manual errors, and spending way less time on paperwork.
02) Your quotes look slightly different every time.
Consistency is the key to professional branding. Both the content of your quote and how you present it are important. A professional look reflects well on your company brand and overall image. Visually pleasing, and easy-to-read templates as well as personalized business logos are programmed into a quoting tool and can be used to help maintain consistency. Quoting tools also help to standardize content, giving the salespeople the ability to pre-program useful values like taxes, post-processing costs, delivery fees etc. while having the flexibility to manipulate the monetary terms of a sale as needed for individual cases.
03) Your pricing is inconsistent between different proposals.
Automation is one of the core functions of the best quoting software. Quoting tools link to pricing databases that can be standardized and vetted to prevent inconsistencies. Salespeople no longer must enter data into complex spreadsheets from catalogs each time they want to generate a new proposal. Quoting tool software can also be integrated with real-time inventory management databases, to prevent proposal rewrites due to product substitution. Automated software can keep track of other pricing factors, such as current taxes, and changes in shipping rates.
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04) You lose track of the quotes you send out.
Without having your quotes online in a central location, it can be hard to keep track of your different files or versions. Worse yet – you could end up sending your customer an incomplete, old or inaccurate version. Often, multiple colleagues contribute to and need to access a quoting document during the sales cycle. The use of a shared quoting tool with multiple permissions keeps everyone on task and editing an accurate working proposal document. In addition, many quoting tools feature workflow software components that send alerts and reminders, so that everyone completes their jobs promptly and the customers are kept in the loop via electronic communication.
05) You’re losing sales for one or more of the above reasons.
When considering a change to the way your company generates proposals, the key factors to optimize are speed, consistency, and accuracy. If you are missing out on business for any of these reasons, an electronic quoting tool can expedite the process and be the deciding factor in winning a sale with a time-conscious buyer. Automating workflow reduces time spent manually entering data and improves communication between departments and clients. Cloud-based software means documents can be accessed easily, are free from manual entry errors, make the presentation of multiple custom quotes simpler, and have the option of being electronically signed and mailed to all parties.
Quoting tools for Imaging Dealers and MSP’s
SalesChain’s deal pricing software integrates a robust quoting tool into a complete business automation system, streamlining all aspects of your company’s sales cycle – from lead discovery to fulfillment. We service dealers of both imaging systems and MSP’s. Schedule a discovery call today!