Creating Opportunity in an Economic Downturn
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).
In sum, these clients have viewed this economic downturn as an opportunity to sharpen the sword, improve their businesses and stomp the competition, now and in the future.
Our SalesDoc Architect software helps our clients to configure complex solutions and, with just a few mouse clicks, generate winning proposals, statements of work and other sales documents. With SalesDoc Architect, our clients can configure and propose solutions in a fraction of the time that it used to take, enabling them to sell more in less time.
When implementing a configuration and document generation tool, it is very important to understand both how you do business today, what improvements you want to make and the desired outcomes you’d like to achieve. We work closely with our clients to uncover those elements so that we can help them achieve their goals.
Our most successful clients have leveraged the investment that they’ve made in the SalesDoc Architect software by enhancing it with additional automation and content that substantially differentiates them from their competition. Some of the most notable enhancements made by our clients include adding automation and content for:
- Managed service programs.
- Support (plan) programs.
- Company history, experience and qualifications.
- Experience and references in a particular industry (based on a user-selectable “industry” drop-down box, or driven by data pushed from CRM).
- Opportunity assessment checklists that enable sales people to generate a descriptive overview of each prospect’s needs and requirements.
- “Quick quote” or short-form proposal outputs as a complement to the longer-form proposal outputs.
- Opportunity assessment checklists that enable sales people to generate a descriptive overview of each prospect’s needs and requirements that is sent to the prospect before a full proposal is sent out.
- An ROI (return on investment) chart and/or table that shows the bottom-line impact of the solution that has been proposed to the prospect.
Our clients have also been enhancing the “look and feel” of their sales documents to make them more professional-looking and pleasing to the eye. Rather than just sticking with SalesDoc Architect’s “out of the box” formatting and settings, these clients have:
- Created attractive cover (and subsequent) pages with their own fonts, images, headers and footers.
- Added graphics throughout their document sections to visually communicate their solutions and expertise.
- Added charts and tables that are generated by Excel and pushed to the Word outputs.
Some clients have also set up SalesDoc Architect to generate documents for the operations side of the house. With some operational staff not fully utilized in this economic environment, these clients have decided to use those resources to update and add content such as:
- Statement of work content describing exactly what is being provided, which helps companies to maintain job margins by preventing “scope creep”.
- Implementation documents that enable technicians and engineers to implement solutions in a consistent, high-quality manner.
- Agreement and contract documents.
These enhancements are just a few examples of the numerous possibilities within SalesDoc Architect. Our goal in working with our clients is to make them more productive and profitable, and SalesDoc Architect is the means to get them there. Over the coming months, we will be spotlighting how our clients have been enhancing SalesDoc Architect so that other clients can look to do the same. If you are a client who has something that you’d like to share, let us know so that we can facilitate the communication of best practices amongst the SalesDoc Architect client community.