Quoting Software Can Lead to Lost Sales

Sales Process, Sales Quoting Software
February 6, 2018

Is Quoting Software Causing You to Suffer From Sales FOMO?

Do you suffer from sales “fear of missing out” (FOMO)? Do you get stomach pains/nausea at the thought of other organizations taking your team’s sales? If you discover that an account rep has lost a deal to a competitor, do you find yourself getting unreasonably angry? Are you just using a simple quoting software instead of a robust tool? If the answer to any of these questions is “yes,” you might have a moderate to severe case of sales FOMO.Sales Quoting Software can Equal Sales FOMO

Here’s the bad news: If you’re only using sales quoting software, you might be missing out on sales (and the FOMO might be grounded in reality).

Your account managers might be losing sales because of ineffective quoting software.

Comparisons between quoting software and true proposal software highlight the difference between a simplified quoting or BOM software that merely produces price lists and a robust sales tool that assists your entire sales team from discovery to close.

The right quoting proposal software, on the other hand, can be invaluable for your organization and provide the assistance that your team needs during each step of the sales process. This assistance ties back to the key sales tips industry experts give.  This ensures that your account managers and sales engineers are able to work through the sales stages quickly and efficiently and are able to produce a proposal that is professional, persuasive, and polished in just a short time.

Does This Sound Familiar?

Your sales rep meets prospect and proceeds through qualification and discovery in an informal manner.  Because there is no companywide, documented, and vetted process, the rep gathers some of the information needed to produce a proposal (but probably not all of it).

Typical quoting software doesn’t provide your team with a consistent list of questions to ask and therefore does not adequately ensure that your rep clearly understands the customer’s needs.

This incomplete assessment will also decrease the likelihood that your rep has everything your sales engineer will need to develop a complete solution that fully addresses the customer’s pain points.

The result is a solution that ultimately falls short of what the customer requires or causes your rep to repeatedly go back to the customer with follow-up questions. This is not the way to present your team as experts in technology integrations.

Qualification module

SDA Qualification Module

The solution is to ditch the quoting-only software and level up to a more sophisticated proposal generation tool, namely CorsPro SalesDoc Architect (SDA).  SDA overlays your current presales process, integrating with your tool to produce consistent, fully customized proposals, scopes of work, and other customer-facing documentation. A unique aspect of SDA is its ability to include a complete set of qualification and discovery tools. These can be customized to your company’s unique market and decision-makers to ensure that your sales team is working with businesses that have the ability to close and are getting to the root of the issues problems in one conversation.  Using the SDA Qualification module allows your sales team to avoid all the back-and-forth that leads to a lengthy proposal process and cause you to lose out on sales.

See how CorsPro automates the Pre-Sales Process to end Sales FOMO. Click here to watch the video.

This is Usually The Next Step in Sales Quoting Software

Once your rep has had a meeting, this person will work with your sales engineers to put together a solution. If you’re using typical sales quoting software, that solution will be explained in the form of a quote, price sheet, or schedule of equipment. Because it’s merely a list of prices and parts, this document can’t possibly get to the root of the most important part of the sales process: what’s in it for your customer(s), and it’s also missing the incredibly important scope of work.

If you’re just using quoting software, it likely lacks key information, such as customer journey, obstacles to desired results, solution provided, and expected results (aka the Executive Summary, which is found in a fully customized proposal).  The simple quote or price sheet can potentially have some typos or formatting errors and be missing key components of the overall solution.

These issues all stem from the fact that traditional CPQ software doesn’t go far enough in resolving pain points and is unable to include dependent technologies, resulting in missing vital parts that can cause margin erosion.

Think of those pesky patch cords or other seemingly insignificant parts that really add up financially and can cause your technician to have to face the embarrassment of leaving a customer site to pick up a missing part.  Not only is this awkward for your installation team, but it causes implementation delays and makes your customer wonder how your team will handle future issues. We take a deeper look into this issue here: “When Sales Go Bad: The Curse of the ASP (After-Sales Problems”).

Then the Shoe Drops

While your account reps and sales engineers are playing this cat and mouse game with your quoting software, it’s entirely possible that other sales teams are already presenting their proposal to the prospect and closing the deal.

This back-and-forth can cause unnecessary delay that opens the door for your competitors to swoop in and make the sale.

Worse yet, your sales team rushes through the process and presents an incomplete, inaccurate, and inconsistent proposal just to get something out the door and into the customer’s hands.

Your sales FOMO might be completely rational—these delays and incomplete quoting outputs do cause missed sales every single day.

There is a Cure for Sales FOMO Syndrome

The problem is that typical quoting software doesn’t have fail-safes built in to prevent proposals from going out the door until they’re right. Conversely, they don’t provide the integrations and automation that will enable users to generate professional proposals with an extremely fast turnaround time.

CorsPro SDA was carefully engineered to make the sales process smooth from start to finish.

Your team has the required tools to ask the right questions to determine if the customer is a good fit and will be ready to move ahead with a project. We also ensure that your account reps gather the correct information to provide to the sales engineers, who can then build a solution that properly manages the customer’s needs while ensuring that the technology will work and be acceptable. This, coupled with CorsPro SalesDoc Architect’s ability to quickly generate professionally formatted proposals that resolve the customer’s concerns, means that your days of sales FOMO are in the past.

Goodbye, FOMO

The result is much better when you use a system that goes well beyond the capabilities of typical proposal quoting software. It’s not enough to just put together a list of prices and technologies if you don’t want to miss out on sales.  While the traditional quoting software doesn’t provide the support to help you close more sales (and feel the sales FOMO less often), CorsPro SDA was created for exactly that purpose. It provides support at each stage of the sales process and enables your team to work together to experience sales success more and sales FOMO less.

Trade your configuration and quote-only software for SalesDoc Architect—a solution that includes a configuration model designed for seamless communication between account reps and sales engineers, automates technology dependencies (solving the issue of potential oversight), and includes workflows and rules that prevent sales proposals from getting out the door before they’re ready.

Remember: You only get one opportunity to send the first proposal. Make sure it’s effective.

Automate the Pre-Sales Process

For more information on this blog post or any other CorsPro functionality, please send us an email.