August 23rd, 2009 by Brian Cors
Quite often, folks who are not very familiar with SalesDoc Architect tell us that their CRM (customer relationship management) software solution can generate proposals. If by “proposals” you mean the ability to generate a pricing schedule (perhaps with a fancy header) based on a list of products and services that you manually select then yes, many CRM solutions can “generate” proposals.
But if you are looking to auto-configure solutions (rather than picking products and services manually, one-by-one), or auto-generate descriptive, illustrative proposals that win more deals, or even create statements of work that set customer expectations and prevent “scope creep”, then CRM alone is not the answer.
As our clients can attest, SalesDoc Architect is a great complement to CRM. Both solutions are required for companies seeking best-in-class performance. That’s why we’ve created integrations between SalesDoc Architect and CRM solutions (especially Tigerpaw’s CRM+ solution, the leading end-to-end CRM solution for the telephony and IT reseller markets) to make it easier for both solutions to work together.
Why is SalesDoc Architect such a great complement to CRM solutions? Because it provides capabilities not available in CRM, owing mostly to three distinguishing features of SalesDoc Architect:
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August 10th, 2009 by Brian Cors
One of the misconceptions about SalesDoc Architect is that it takes hours and hours to implement it to the point of actually being able to use the software to configure solutions and generate proposals, statements of work and other output documents. A few months ago, a newer client (while they were still considering SalesDoc Architect) asked us: “Won’t it take hundreds of hours to implement what you’re showing me today?”
We’re happy to report that it took a small fraction of that time to get the client up and running. Typically, it takes 5-15 hours to get a new client to the point where they can productively generate differentiated proposals and statements of work and immediately start saving time because of automation. For most of our projects, SalesDoc Architect saves the time expended on initially setting it up within the first month of use.
The thing that scares people most about proceeding ahead with new enterprise-wide software – even more than the cost of the software itself – is the time and associated disruption to implement it. That’s why over the past several years we have continuously introduced new features and functions that make it easier and easier to set up and maintain SalesDoc Architect.
First, we make it easy to “start small” (and quickly), then grow your level of automation and functionality over time. Relative to other software solutions where you have to fully map out the work flows to make sure that you are fundamentally implementing the solution the right way, with SalesDoc Architect you can start by automating solution configuration and proposal generation, then overlay other processes, outputs and features over time.
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