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!
January 25th, 2012 by Amy Thomas
I have been a PC user for the majority of my working life. I have become increasingly familiar with all the usuals – Outlook, Excel, and Word. I could not have done the majority of work in my career without having a PC. Or so I thought…
Once I converted to the iPhone, though, I started to become more and more of an Apple “convert”. The Mac Book Pros were looking better and better to me for everything that we would want to do at home with our children and personal life. So we bit the bullet, dug into our wallets and got a Mac. My first thought was this is crazy, how am I supposed to do work at home with a Mac? My software program, SalesDoc Architect, is completely run on a Windows platform.
But it was such a nice computer and custom built that it was now ours. For six months it sat in my office, used only for occasional internet surfing and downloading pictures. I continued to stick with what I knew and kept using my slow, somewhat archaic Lenovo Thinkpad…until the day that we all dread finally happened. I went to log in from home to do some work on Thinkpad and…nothing. Dead as can be. So now what??? Read the rest of this entry »
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.
January 11th, 2012 by Hazel Lychak
For all SalesDoc Architect clients who subscribe to Toshiba TSD proposal content, we’ve added new Toshiba content in both the Toshiba and Pro Editions of SalesDoc Architect. Now you can create comprehensive proposals for Toshiba surveillance and IP video solutions that are descriptive, accurate and designed to help you win more deals. CorsPro clients automatically received the new content in the most recent software update of SalesDoc Architect.
If your goal is to successfully sell Toshiba surveillance and IP video solutions, you’ll find the new content a valuable addition to your Toshiba-based system proposals.
December 20th, 2011 by Hazel Lychak
We’ve recently added functionality to SalesDoc Architect that enables you to import parts and pricing from Anixter, Catalyst, Ingram Micro, Jenne, ScanSource and Tech Data distributor pricing tools so that you can more easily and efficiently generate proposals and other sales documents for all of your complex solutions. This newest import functionality complements CorsPro’s existing import functions for several telephony manufacturers, including Avaya, Mitel, NEC, ShoreTel and Toshiba.
Once a distributor and/or manufacturer quote is imported, SalesDoc Architect can then auto-configure labor, peripheral products and other elements to round out the complete customer solution, after which various sales documents can be generated.
These new import functions can help to streamline your entire sales process, and can also help you to significantly reduce costly errors by eliminating the need to re-key data at any point in the process.
Existing SalesDoc Architect clients received the import functionality when they downloaded and installed the December 2011 monthly software update for SalesDoc Architect. Please contact us to add any of these import functions to your Import menu.
December 16th, 2011 by Hazel Lychak
We’ve added Scope of Work content to SalesDoc Architect so that you can significantly reduce margin erosion and set customer expectations by enabling you to provide a detailed Scope of Work document to prospective customers as part of your sales process.
SalesDoc Architect’s Scope of Work (SOW) content lays out the key responsibilities for both you (the seller) and your prospective client in order to ensure a successful sale and profitable implementation. In addition to outlining each party’s commitments, the SOW establishes a project plan, cut-over dates, financing arrangements and a detailed list of equipment and services to be provided. The SOW content is also easily customizable to your company’s specific business practices and sales/implementation workflows.
Resellers who have been using SalesDoc Architect to create SOWs tell us that prospective clients appreciate the professionalism of the scope of work document and level of detail provided to them, building a positive provider-client relationship from the start and setting a solid foundation for future business.
Existing SalesDoc Architect clients received the SOW content automatically when they downloaded and installed the December 2011 software update for SalesDoc Architect.
November 12th, 2010 by Brian Cors
Do you ever have too many things that you want to do all at the same time? Copper State Communications, one of our newer clients, recently faced that challenge when they were trying to determine what to do next with regard to further customizing SalesDoc Architect. First, they brainstormed to put together a list of what they wanted to do. Next, they prioritized that list by using a technique called Matched Pairs for Prioritization. The exercise works like this: Read the rest of this entry »
September 28th, 2010 by Brian Cors
One of the features that SalesDoc Architect (our sales document automation software) offers is the ability to easily import data such as product information. When importing product data, however, we require that only one version of each part number exists in the import file. We do this to protect against situations where the part number exists more than once but the associated data differs for each instance of the part number.
When importing a file with duplicate part numbers into SalesDoc Architect, the import process will be halted and an error message will pop up indicating that duplicate part numbers exist. I’m often asked how best to identify and delete the duplicate part rows with Microsoft Excel. Using Excel’s sorting function and IF formula, it’s easy to do, and it’s a three-step process… Read the rest of this entry »
September 21st, 2010 by Brian Cors
As mentioned in an earlier post, we’ve added a third integration between SalesDoc Architect and Tigerpaw. In addition to being able to push contact information from Tigerpaw to SDA and quote information from SDA to Tigerpaw (described in another earlier post), you can now import parts/pricing from a Tigerpaw quote into SalesDoc Architect. All three integrations are available at no additional charge to our clients.
Most of the parts that users will need to quote should be resident in the SDA database or can be imported from a vendor configuration tool such as Mitel’s Sales Workbench or ShoreTel’s QMS configuration tool. In some cases, however, those parts might not exist in either source. The new integration enables SalesDoc Architect clients to use Tigerpaw’s database, which maintains the list of all parts ever sold or quoted by the Tigerpaw software, as another source for parts and pricing information. Read the rest of this entry »
September 17th, 2010 by Brian Cors
New this month to SalesDoc Architect is a feature that enables clients to apply rules with regard to the way that they do business. Prior to this new feature, users could create any output (proposals, statements of work, contracts, etc.) even if information was missing or invalid. Now, with the brand-new “OutputStatus” feature, administrators can create rules using Excel formulas to prevent users from being able to generate outputs if information is missing or invalid or certain conditions aren’t met. For example, you can prevent outputs from being generated when…
- A customer name hasn’t been entered
- The job margin is insufficient
- Required inputs have not been selected
- Equipment or services have been misconfigured
The beauty of all this is that you can use Excel formulas to create these rules; you don’t have to be a programmer to implement them. How does it work? Simply create a named range on any tab that is called “OutputStatus”. Next, insert an Excel IF formula into that range that tests for one or more conditions and, if those conditions aren’t met, the error message that you’d like to display to the user when the output is prevented from being generated. When the user tries to generate an output, SalesDoc Architect will sweep through all of the tabs in a quote looking for non-blank OutputStatus named ranges and, when it finds one, will prevent the output from being generated and display the specified error message.
