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Social Media for B2B Companies

August 29th, 2010 by Brian Cors

I’ve been reading a lot lately about using social media applications such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter as tools for growing a business. Like our clients, we are a business-to-business (B2B) company; we aren’t celebrities or a professional sports team with a legion of fans (although I’d like to think that our clients ARE fans of us). But the more I read about it, the more I’m convinced that social media has a role to play in growing a business. Over the coming weeks and months, we will be implementing several social media tools at CorsPro, and I will be sharing with you our experiences along the way.

In today’s world, prospects (those who are not yet clients or customers) want to get to know you before they buy your product or engage your services. The old school approach of using “interruption” marketing to get a prospect’s attention is no longer effective, and in many cases is a big turnoff. Prospects not only want to check out what you have to say, but more importantly they want to check out what OTHERS have to say about you. I know that I spend lots of time checking out reviews of books and products before I commit to purchasing them.

Here at CorsPro, we are going to be starting with three popular social media tools, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. LinkedIn and Twitter make a lot of sense to me as tools that B2B companies can use, but I have my doubts about using Facebook, as it seems to be more of a tool for personal rather than professional interaction unless you are a company that sells to consumers.

I look forward to sharing with you our experiences with these tools.

Avaya, NEC, Toshiba Proposal Content Added to SalesDoc Architect

January 12th, 2010 by Brian Cors

We’ve just made it even easier for clients to implement and maintain the SalesDoc Architect document library by making proposal content for Avaya, NEC and Toshiba solutions available to our clients (see our news release). Rather than having clients manually add that proposal content to their document library – document section by document section – we are able to provide that content to them en masse, and maintain it for them on an ongoing basis.

The question that we’re asked most frequently by prospective clients is: how long does it take to implement SalesDoc Architect? My answer is: not very long, especially if you’re willing to start out with a good but less-than-perfect solution. It’s still a big improvement over what’s been done in the past, and the initial solution can be perfected and improved over time. Unlike other enterprise software solutions that require a huge project to “get everything right” for the initial implementation, with SalesDoc Architect you can start small and grow from there.

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Coordinating Calendars with AirSet

December 8th, 2009 by Brian Cors

Awhile back, I posted an article about AirSet, the free online calendar-sharing service. My wife and I have been using that service for a few years now and, with our busy lives (including a teenager and a pre-teen), I don’t know how we’d survive without it.

After having tried unsuccessfully to manage shared calendars for CorsPro within our CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software, we’ve recently switched to managing our calendars using AirSet. After just a few days, I’m here to tell you that it works great, and it provides an ideal blending of managing BOTH your personal calendar and your work calendar without feeling like you’re giving up the privacy of your personal life for all of your business associates to see.

Figure 1

The key to managing calendars in AirSet is the concept of being able to view multiple calendars and sub-calendars all at once, and to tag others as participants in events so that the events appear in their calendars. For example, my personal calendar for November 19th looked like Figure 1. The event descriptions are a bit cut off so that they can fit neatly into the calendar day’s square, but you can easily see the full details of each event simply by floating your mouse over the event.

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Unlimited DocTypes Increase Document Automation Capabilities

November 16th, 2009 by Brian Cors

Last month, with the renaming of our document automation software from PriceQuote to SalesDoc Architect (SDA), one of the great features that we added was the ability to create an unlimited number of document types (or “DocTypes”) that you can use to categorize document sections in the document library. When document outputs are generated, SDA uses the DocType you’ve selected for the particular output to filter the document sections that are included in the final output Word document.

Let’s say you want to generate a proposal. By choosing to output only doc sections with DocType = “Proposal”, SDA will filter the output to include only those doc sections in the final output document. This makes it very easy to create new types of outputs simply by creating a new DocType, then tagging the doc sections you want to include in the new output with the new DocType.

Unlimited DocTypes become even more helpful when they are used in combination with other means of configuring the document sections that will appear on the outputs. For example, let’s assume that you have associated part numbers with doc sections in the SalesDoc Architect database as follows… Read the rest of this entry »

QuickText for Blackberry Helps with Text-Messaging

November 13th, 2009 by Brian Cors

I love my Blackberry. It’s a great phone that synchronizes nicely with my Outlook (calendar and contacts in my case), enables me to call my contacts hands-free using my voice (e.g., “call Joe Smith mobile”) and – best of all – enables me to send and receive emails wherever I am. But as a text messaging platform, it’s not so good. It takes way too many keystrokes to send a simple SMS text message. I’d rather call someone instead of texting them.

But I have a 14-year old daughter. My response hit rate is much higher when I send a text message rather than calling her (it’s embarrassing to have dad call you on the cell phone when you’re with your friends), and there are other folks in my contacts list who respond more often and quickly to a text message.

Fortunately, after much searching, I’ve found a little $6 application called QuickText that makes it fast and easy to send a text message. From the main screen, I simply press the “Q” key, then the key that I’ve assigned to the person I’m texting. Now I can immediately starting typing my text message. Two keystrokes to get to the composition screen…not bad!

If my intended text message recipient does not have a key assigned to them, then after pressing the “Q” key, I can press the space bar to bring up my address book where I can select the recipient and immediately begin typing my text message. Fast and easy, like text messaging should be!

You can download QuickText, which is made by Cannon Software, from Blackberry’s App World or from one of several mobile software websites. I downloaded mine from www.MobiHand.com.

PriceQuote Renamed as SalesDoc Architect

October 20th, 2009 by Brian Cors

We have important news! We are proud to announce the renaming of our flagship product (PriceQuote) to SalesDoc Architect! We’ve also re-launched our website to enhance its value and usability for our clients and prospects.

Why the new name? Over the last several years, PriceQuote has evolved based on client feedback to become more than what PriceQuote had initially provided, which was a pricing and quotation solution. Today, our solution goes above and beyond that by enabling businesses to easily create winning sales proposals, statements of work and other sales documents with just a few mouse clicks, as well as to automatically configure and price complex solutions.

Why SalesDoc Architect? We believe this name better reflects the value that our software solution provides to our clients as sales document automation software. Pricing capabilities – although still important – are just a small part of the overall solution, so the name “PriceQuote” was just too limiting. More importantly, our software helps users to automatically configure complex solutions and build sales documents like proposals and statements of work.

Like an architect, our software enables our clients to put the blueprint in place so that they can generate professional, deal-winning sales documents (like proposals) that are each fully customized for their company, specifically-proposed solution and particular prospect. Unlike an architect, however, SalesDoc Architect configures the solution and builds the outputs within seconds!

Why the new website? In addition to the new product name, we have also re-launched our website at www.corspro.com to provide more value and create more community with our clients, prospects and colleagues. On our new website you can read more about SalesDoc Architect, view a video about the solution, check out what our clients are saying about us, and read several case studies that demonstrate how SalesDoc Architect can positively impact a company’s bottom line.

Please note that, to minimize confusion with new visitors, we’ve updated the old materials on our website to mention “SalesDoc Architect” rather than PriceQuote.

Please feel free to contact us if you would like to learn more about SalesDoc Architect or have any questions. And please, let us know how we can make SalesDoc Architect and our new website even more useful to you.

The Benefits of Offering Managed Services

September 25th, 2009 by Brian Cors

Below is an article on why it might make sense for resellers to implement managed services within their businesses. The article was written by GreatAmerica, one of our partners and a leader in developing and financing managed services programs for telecom and data resellers. We at CorsPro recognize the growing importance of managed services, which is why we are partnering with GreatAmerica to provide valuable, deal-winning managed services content for SalesDoc Architect that will help you win managed services deals. This content can be tailored specifically to your business and managed services program.

Managed Services is a great way to differentiate your company from the competition by locking in recurring revenue and enabling you to keep a better hold on your customer base. Together, CorsPro and GreatAmerica can help you do that!
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Managed Services: Is It Time to Make the Switch?
Written by GreatAmerica (http://www.greatamerica.com/)

The telecommunications and data industries are in the midst of transforming from product-oriented companies to service-based organizations. A lot of dealers have already begun to shift to a managed services approach. Managed services can mean different things, but in this case we are referring to communications equipment and services bundled into a communications solution for a single monthly recurring payment.

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Creating Opportunity in an Economic Downturn

September 12th, 2009 by Brian Cors

Relative to a year ago, business is slower for our clients, as many of their prospects are delaying purchase decisions or eliminating projects altogether due to the economic downturn.

Despite the downturn, however, many of our clients are not just surviving this downturn, they are taking advantage of the situation to advance their businesses ahead of the competition. They’ve continued to invest in sales, marketing and automation so that they can help their companies to 1) sell more relative to the competition, 2) do more with less through automation, and 3) position themselves to capture a lion’s share of business when the economy recovers (and we know that it eventually will recover).

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‘Schedule of Supported Parts’ Functionality Added

September 5th, 2009 by Brian Cors

SalesDoc Architect has always been a great tool for handling configuration, pricing and document generation for service and support solutions. Whether you base service and support pricing on the new solution equipment that you sell, or you create separate “support part numbers” for the items you support – which works especially great for sites with existing equipment – SalesDoc Architect handles it well.

For those who base service and support pricing on the list or sell price of the new equipment that you sell, SalesDoc Architect now offers the ability to automatically create a schedule of supported parts that shows your customer or prospect the precise list of parts that are covered under your support plan.

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Why SalesDoc Architect is a Great Complement to CRM

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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