The Benefits of Driving Proposals from Your CRM Solution
You’re finally tracking detailed customer information in your CRM or contact management solution that tells you everything you need to know about each of your customers and prospects. Now wouldn’t it be great if you could actually use that data to drive the content in your proposals?
I’m excited to announce that we’ve just created software that pulls data out of virtually any CRM or contact management system and into our automated proposal generation solution, SalesDoc Architect™. Any information that you can get out of your CRM or contact management system and into a merged Word document can be forwarded into SalesDoc Architect.
The most obvious benefit of this new integration is that users don’t have to re-type the contact information that resides in the CRM solution. This not only saves time, but it also reduces typing errors and increases the accuracy and quality of each proposal.
Pumping contact information from your CRM system into your proposals is just the tip of the iceberg, however. You can actually use this information to drive proposal and statement of work (SOW) content automatically, meaning proposal content is auto-selected based on that data.
Other proposal generators on the market simply enable you to pick the document sections that you’d like to include. SalesDoc Architect is what I call a configurable proposal generator, meaning that you can generate content based on rules that you define. For example, you might drive both configuration and pricing as well as proposal content based on the vertical market (aka, industry) associated with a particular contact within your CRM or contact management system. Many of our clients sell into the hospitality industry (hotels/motels); for a prospect within the hospitality industry, SalesDoc Architect might configure a different set of services at different pricing levels than other industries, and it might bring in one or more proposal sections corresponding to the hospitality industry. You could opt for an overview section near the top of the proposal and another section with references near the end. You can do all of this without clicking additional options or manually selecting any document sections!
What this combination provides is a way to quickly and accurately push data from almost any CRM or contact management system into an automated proposal generation solution that can act on that data based on the rules that you define. Provided you are tracking customer-pertinent information (as opposed to sales-pertinent information, which is pertinent to YOU, the company doing the selling), you can use that data to drive customized, customer-centric proposals that can help you to win more deals at higher margins.
The new integration not only works with virtually any CRM or contact management solution, but it doesn’t take an army of consultants to implement it; it works right out of the box. And, coupled with SalesDoc Architect’s rules-based proposal generation engine, it enables you to truly differentiate your proposals from the competition.
For more detailed information on this integration, please see “CRM Integration Added to SalesDoc Architect”.