Customizing SalesDoc Architect with Basic Automation
One of the nice things about SalesDoc Architect is that you can “start small” with basic automation that requires a relatively small up-front investment of time and money – but pays big immediate dividends for your company – then gradually add more automation over time.
Create a basic proposal generator
A great place to start is to set up SalesDoc Architect as a basic proposal generator that blends schedules of pricing for the specific solutions you are offering with proposal content that describes your company and its products and services (with a few good graphics thrown in for illustration).
Start by identifying 20-25 document sections that you’d like to include in your initial proposal library. You might want to include a section that provides an overview of your company and its key competencies, along with sections describing and illustrating your key product lines. You should also include a document section with legal terms and conditions, as well as a place for the customer to sign.
Once you’ve imported those document sections into SalesDoc Architect’s Document Section Manager and placed them in the order that you’d like for them to appear by default in the output documents, the next step is to create an Excel-based tab that lists all of the available document sections (in an Excel range named “DocSections”) and gives users the opportunity to select the document sections that they’d like to include in their output documents.
A quick way to create this list is to open up Reports.xls in your PQManager folder, select “Doc sections” from the drop-down, and click Go.
If you’re familiar with Excel, you might also include some proposal “configuration logic” on the tab. For example, you might create a drop-down so that users can select the industry that they’re selling to (manufacturing, financial services, etc.). Then, based on their selection, the logic on the tab could auto-select one or more document sections that are pertinent for that industry.
That’s it…you now have a proposal generator that your users can start to use right away to generate customized, professional-looking proposals!
Incorporate Solution Pricing
In the last section, we assumed that solution pricing would be added to the descriptive proposal after the proposal document was generated. For the next step of automation, you might want to customize SalesDoc Architect to automatically include solution pricing within your descriptive proposals. To do this, you must first find a way to bring solution pricing into SalesDoc Architect, after which you can utilize SalesDoc Architect’s many built-in options for formatting the solution pricing schedule on-the-fly including options to show or not show line-item pricing, sub-total equipment and services, etc.
One way to get pricing into SalesDoc Architect without any up-front customization required is simply to import the pricing (and quantities and part numbers) via a spreadsheet that contains the field names (Part Number, Description, etc.) in the first row of the spreadsheet. Once you’ve created the spreadsheet and saved it, you can import it simply by clicking SalesDoc Architect’s Import Excel spreadsheet button.
CorsPro also has the capability to directly import pricing generated by outputs from several manufacturer’s configuration tools, making it even easier to import pricing. It’s a two step process: create an output from the manufacturer’s configuration tool, then click the import button within SalesDoc Architect to import that output. Please contact us to see if an import facility exists for a particular manufacturer. If it doesn’t, CorsPro has the capability to create one for you.
Configure peripheral products and labor
The next stage in customizing SalesDoc Architect to provide basic automation is to update the Excel-based miscellaneous products and services tab (MiscProd) to include your most common peripheral products (such as racks, UPS systems, cabling, etc.) and the labor that you want to factor into the solutions that you propose.
Adding products and services to product configuration tabs – including the MiscProd tab – is a two-step process:
- Import the part numbers and associated pricing into the Parts Master table of SalesDoc Architect’s database (there are all kinds of other things that can be associated with parts, but that’s a subject for another day). This is easily accomplished by creating a spreadsheet of parts and using SalesDoc Architect Manager’s import function.
- Add the parts to an Excel-based product configuration tab (in this case the MiscProd tab). At the same time, you can also program configuration logic on the tab using any of Excel’s formula functions. For example, you could program several cabling items to be configured automatically if a certain type of system is configured.
Once set up, users will be able to select the appropriate peripheral products to include in their configuration. They will also be able to enter the number of required labor hours. Or, better yet, you might create a drop-down on the tab for each of the types of systems that you sell, as well as cells where users can input quantities of items that require labor to implement. Based on those input, your configuration logic could drive the number of labor hours required to implement the selected solutions and entered quantities.
At this point in time, you are now able to generate descriptive proposals that include solution pricing and associated peripheral products and labor without investing lots and lots hours in setup and customization. For most organization, this level of automation – and the ability to generate professional, descriptive proposals for complete turnkey solutions – is a quantum leap over what they had before, and provides them with a real advantage over their competitors. However, this is just the start of what SalesDoc Architect can do. We will explore higher levels of customization and automation in articles that discuss medium automation and advanced automation.
Note: CorsPro is able to provide consulting services to assist our clients with implementing any of the ideas suggested on The Productivity Edge. In addition to our industry expertise and experience, we also save you time by condensing the required implementation time – enabling you to realize SalesDoc Architect’s benefits more rapidly – while offloading implementation work to us so that you can continue to focus on your day-to-day business activities.