Introduction
Are you still using Word and Excel to configure, price, and quote tasks within your company? Then, it’s time to shift your attention from these applications to appropriate sales quoting applications.
According to Supperoffice, companies that use quoting and proposal software tend to acquire 49 percent higher proposal volume. It plays a crucial role in simplifying sales processes and shortening sales cycles.
Using this software enables you to differentiate your business from that of your competitors, thereby securing a competitive advantage and acquiring profitable sales. Also, customers prefer to purchase products from a company that provides enough information to help them in making an informed decision immediately. The speed and the quality of response help you to differentiate your business further.
However, how will you stand out from the crowd when every business is tweaking the same solution?
In this blog, we are going to discuss the ways you can use to change your sales approach and implement sales quote management software to achieve and maintain real competitive advantages.
Why Do You Need A Sales Quoting Solution?
Today, buyers no longer rely upon sales reps to make their purchasing decisions. They look for businesses that provide them with readily available quality information as it helps them to gather information independently.
Particularly, in the early stage, you can increasingly begin and flourish your customer relationships with little or new human interaction. By this, we mean having less access and fewer opportunities to influence their decisions while shortlisting the products.
In 2020, McKinsey estimated that 85 percent of your relationship with the customer happens without any interaction with humans. It is all because of technology. It is driving and facilitating a massive shift in the way customers purchase products.
Moreover, if you are starting up an enterprise, you can easily disrupt the market using a sales quoting solution. It means when you implement this solution into your eCommerce platform, you tend to pull out the product information directly from the catalog, thereby making the process quicker. This way, people may also find it less complicated to find your company and make a purchase.
You should always keep in mind that the buyers usually expect those processes that focus on them and not on selling, react faster to market conditions, and remove unnecessary costs.
How Sales Quoting Solution Provides Competitive Advantage?
If your sales team takes weeks to respond to your customers, you won’t be able to compete in the market. Here are the six possible ways you can implement and maintain automated quoting software to acquire competitive advantages.
Polishes Quotes
A quote is something that makes or breaks your impression in front of the customer. When a customer asks you for a quote, it is your responsibility to deliver them the accurate professional document immediately. This showcases you as someone with whom they can comfortably make their purchase. But, you may find all these tasks overwhelming.
However, with quoting applications, you will be able to treat your quote with the care that they deserve. Each of your customers represents a significant relationship in your business. Hence, the quote to offer them should play a vital role in nurturing and developing these relationships.
This application polishes your quote, which signals your customers that you value your relationship and have done your due diligence to ensure that everything is appropriate between both parties.
Provides You First-Mover Advantage
When you are the first one to deliver the quote to the customer, you tend to obtain the first-mover advantage of negotiations. Also, with the help of quoting and proposal software, the entire quoting process changes. It takes you through the contract execution phase, thereby making the process more intuitive and immediate.
While creating and executing contracts, the software automatically populates significant fields with updated data available from all the connected systems. The sales department feels the phase of contract negotiations is more painful than nurturing the leads. During this phase, they mostly lose contracts because of oversight or a mistake. And when you have the appropriate software, the chance of error and long timeline reduce significantly.
Streamlines the Configuration Of Complex, Customizable Products
You should always listen to the buyer’s demand for customization. However, when you offer numerous custom options, the sales become more complex. Sales reps find manual configuration processes arduous and usually ignore the mistakes and technically viable configurations.
By streamlining the configuration process, you can expand your offering by introducing new customizable products. The sales team also uses a product configurator that aids them in narrowing larger product catalogs into an optimized customer-centric one. This way, they can easily and immediately meet the customer’s expectations.
Enables Dynamic Pricing To Boost Conversion Rates And Eliminate Inaccuracy
B2B sales are always performed with some kind of special offers. Businesses rarely sell products at complex prices. When there are several sales channels with their unique pricing workflows, the overall pricing becomes challenging.
Although excel addresses these pricing problems, it is inadequate and has become outdated. With the help of automated quoting software, you can calculate the prices in real-time by adjusting configurations in product configurators. This also ensures that every price is accurate and attractive.
It makes price calculation effortless and even provides advanced pricing strategies with the help of which, you can maximize margins in a rapidly changing environment. It also enables your sales reps to set flexible prices for products according to the recent market demands and product pricing scenarios. As a result, pricing becomes responsive, thereby enabling the team to increase revenue and profit target in every challenging condition. Moreover, the software provides you the freedom to deliver custom prices and discounts in more controllable ways.
Generates Sales Documentation
Using sales quote management software, you can generate sales quotes instantly. However, sometimes, you need to provide your customer with more than just a straightforward PDF document to deal over the line. If you are selling complex products, you might also need to offer product renderings and technical drawings with quotes for buyers to get purchase approvals. But, with this software, you can send more proposals to more customers instantly.
Speeds Up Sales Cycles
B2B sales cycles are long and time-consuming. In a highly competitive and rapidly evolving market, it is essential to be the first one to respond with your quote to the customer. Otherwise, you can lose your customers to competitors.
When you have a sales quoting solution, you can accelerate sales by:
- Allowing users to configure complicated products swiftly.
- Capturing all the necessary information and eliminating the back and forth process between the customers, sales, and engineers.
- Sending and signing off custom approval requests.
- Strengthening the confidence of the buyers to make informed purchasing decisions through visual product configurator.
- Streamlining the sales process by influencing fabrication, increasing customer satisfaction, retention, and referrals.
Key Takeaways
Using cloud-based sales quoting software, you can become more effective and competitive. You can not only foster a more collaborative customer buying experience but also accelerate and simplify complex sales cycles. You can also help distributors codify and share knowledge effectively so that you can deliver a wider range of innovative services. In a nutshell, it is helping you to achieve better business outcomes while changing the roles of salespeople as consultative professionals that will add value to every engagement.
