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Have You Checked Your Sales Process Lately?

May 17th, 2012 by Hazel Lychak

If you’re thinking about implementing a sales enablement system or productivity tool to increase efficiency in your sales process as your solution portfolio evolves, the first step is to make sure you’ve got a solid process foundation to build on and enhance with technology. In his article ‘Five Conditions Your Sales Process Must Satisfy’, Dave Brock, a leading sales blogger, outlines several conditions that are integral to creating and maintaining an effective sales process.

Before you think about adding new technologies, survey your current sales process in terms of how it is working (including outlining the pitfalls that impede your sales efforts) and then determine how you want to sell (the end goals- specifics for exceeding customer expectations, delivering quality solutions, maintaining healthy margins, empowering sales and sales engineering, etc). Once you have the process fine-tuned, you can consider which sales tools can help you achieve your goals.

UCStrategies Announces a New Channel Study

April 25th, 2012 by Hazel Lychak

UCStrategies, an online resource for information on unified communications has announced its plan to conduct a new study (a follow-up to an IN-Fusion Group study in 2000) that is intended to focus on some of the challenges facing the unified communications and collaboration channel, and what each of the channel partners need to be more successful. UCStrategies is encouraging interested VARs/SIs to participate in the study via completion of an online and telephony survey. Read the full article: UCStrategies and the Channel – From the UC Summit to a New Channel Study

Plugged-in, Always-on, and LESS Productive?

April 19th, 2012 by Hazel Lychak

If you can’t seem to put your smartphone down – answering business calls and responding to emails at any hour – you may want to consider making room for some down time to avoid a drop in business productivity and customer satisfaction. The CBSnews.com article Why smartphone culture reduces productivity provides insight on the findings from a recent study conducted by Harvard Business School Professor Leslie Perlow, which indicate that an always-on company culture may be counterproductive to employees and clients.

How Companies Can Thrive in 2012

April 13th, 2012 by Hazel Lychak

A headline from this week’s ChannelProSMB.com articles caught our attention – “How Companies Can Thrive in 2012,” in which the author describes what companies must do to be successful in the ‘new economy’. Take a look for ideas you can implement in your business.

Improving Productivity with RSS Feed Readers

March 29th, 2012 by Hazel Lychak

If you sometimes feel like you’re drowning in business information from partners, manufacturers, distributors – the list goes on – then you’re not alone. It’s a balancing act to stay up to date on what’s happening in the techno-sphere and not evaporate a good portion of your day by getting sucked up into the world wide information vacuum. A great way to streamline and summarize information on the companies/products that you want to follow is by subscribing to RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds, and using a web-based feed reader, like Google Reader, FeedReader, NewsGator, or one of many more, to bring together (or to “aggregate”, to use RSS parlance) these feeds and organize them on one centralized viewing screen. (Imagine the front page of a newspaper with only the headlines showing).

It’s easy to get started:

First, pick a web-based feed reader of your choice. Many tech websites like Cnet offer recommendations for readers (also called aggregators) , and some web browsers like Google and Firefox have built-in feed readers, so you may want to do a little research to decide on the best reader for you. Google Reader is used as an example in this post.

Next, go to the website of a company that you want to keep track of regularly – chances are they have a link to their RSS feed already set up. Look for a button (that may be located with all of the other social media buttons) that looks like the one below, located on the bottom of the home page of the CorsPro website…

Read the rest of this entry »

Embracing Change for Significant Sales Gains

February 29th, 2012 by Hazel Lychak

Our latest case study highlights Site Services, Inc. (SSI), a Mitel reseller and solution provider that decided to embrace change and implement SalesDoc Architect in the midst of an extensive Tigerpaw CRM implementation. They elected to do both implementations simultaneously in order to get immediate productivity benefits to their sales process and increase their top and bottom lines. They were able to implement SalesDoc Architect in just three days, with minimal disruption to business, realizing immediate, measurable results! With little time to spend on implementation, SSI took an ’implement first, customize later’ approach with SalesDoc Architect that paid off by helping them achieve a 56% in proposal throughput over a two month time frame, integration with their CRM system, as well as giving them significant savings by reducing costly errors and omissions in the quoting process. Read their story.

When is the Best Time to Implement Automated Proposal Generation?

February 25th, 2012 by Hazel Lychak

The decision to implement a sales productivity tool can really pay off by delivering significant benefits to your business, such as a major reduction in quoting errors, increased efficiency and increased revenues and profits. These benefits certainly sound appealing, but what about all of the other priorities and must-have technologies that you’re considering to move your business forward? Should sales productivity be put on the back burner, or should it be put at the forefront of your 2012 initiatives, alongside some of the major enterprise-wide projects? The answer is…you’ve got to do the math! If the proposed benefits from the tool are high (and quantifiable), implementation and training time are low and you can expect ample support from the vendor, then you can implement quickly and capitalize on immediate benefits, even when more extensive projects or technologies are already in the works.

Consider these items as part of your equation: Read the rest of this entry »

VoIPMyBiz.com Raises Their Game With SalesDoc Architect

February 9th, 2012 by Hazel Lychak

VoIPMyBiz.com, a division of Axess Communications and an Avaya reseller, was looking for a way to gain efficiencies in their sales process and support sales growth into new product lines and new customer markets. They also wanted to address some familiar issues that many solution providers face: spending too much time proposing small system sales, and needing a tool that could integrate and enhance their existing sales tools and technologies, including CRM and vendor and distributor configuration/pricing tools.

CorsPro’s latest case study describes how by implementing SalesDoc Architect, VoIPMyBiz.com was able to meet these sales challenges and sell more solutions, achieving a 40% growth in revenues in 2011. With their sales game most definitely raised, Brian Thomas, Chief Operating Officer at VoIPMyBiz.com believes that his company is well positioned and ready for new opportunities in 2012. Is your business ready?

Enhanced Proposal Automation for Avaya Enterprise Solutions Added

February 1st, 2012 by Hazel Lychak

We are pleased to announce that enhanced proposal automation functionality has been added to SalesDoc Architect for Avaya’s enterprise product solutions.

What does that mean for our clients who sell Avaya systems? Generating Avaya-based solutions is faster and easier than ever before. Here’s how it works: SalesDoc Architect takes your Avaya configuration (which you can import from the Avaya ASD, EC and EZQuote tools and from the Avaya configuration tools from Catalyst and Jenne) and then auto-configures your labor, peripheral products and other elements – including document content – to generate fully customized, professional sales proposals, scopes of work and other sales documents…all within minutes.

CorsPro offers Avaya content through a monthly subscription service for SalesDoc Architect and includes up-to-date proposal content for these Avaya solutions:

IP Office
Aura
Business Communication Manager
Legacy Nortel product line

Existing SalesDoc Architect clients who subscribe to Avaya proposal content updates received the enhanced functionality and updated content at no additional charge when they downloaded and installed the December 2011 release of SalesDoc Architect. Happy Selling!

Proposing IT Managed Services Just Got Automated

January 19th, 2012 by Hazel Lychak

Proposing IT managed services solutions can be a complex undertaking. Customers want to know every detail – in a format that breaks it down for them to easily understand exactly what they’re getting. Without automation, it can be a struggle each and every time you have to customize a managed services proposal for a prospective client. Not to mention the coordination of the back end processes to make the sale and implementation go smoothly and avoid cost overruns.

We’ve listened to our clients, many of whom are already selling IT managed services. We’ve loaded new content and functionality into SalesDoc Architect to automate the complexities of managed services proposals, from providing mixed payment types to incorporating multiple levels of service by location or within each location. You can also incorporate data from network assessments into proposals, scopes of work and any type of documents that you use in your sales and service delivery processes.

All of this new functionality, combined with SalesDoc Architect’s existing integration with CRM software (including advanced integration for those of you who use Tigerpaw) – and the ability to import parts and pricing from configuration tools from vendors like TechData, Jenne, Ingram Micro and Catalyst – come together into one integrated process to save your business a substantial amount of time, reduce errors and produce better proposals, scopes of work and other sales documents.

I invite you to read our news release on managed services and our latest case study to find out how SalesDoc Architect can improve your ability to quote and propose IT Managed Services solutions.

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