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Do you know why you need to create sales quotes fast? Understanding the impact of creating accurate quotes quickly is the first step. Faster quotes lead to more sales. The next step is to understand how to achieve the goal of creating fast, accurate quotes. The challenge many companies face is that they have complex product configurations and pricing options, and they may not have the processes and tools in place to streamline their quoting processes. If your company isn't getting sales quotes created quickly, it may be costing you money and you may be losing deals as a result. In this post, we'll take a look at some tips for cracking the code to shorter sales quote time.
The first step in cracking the code to shorter sales quote times is to be organized. This includes organization of pricing, products and rules, and storing this information in one system of record. Organizing product and pricing information allows your sales reps to point and click through the information they need, which not only reduces your sales quote time, but also ensures accuracy and standardization. Setting up rules, such as which products should be bundled together and which should not, will help your team, especially new reps, put together quotes quickly. Using a guided selling app can help guide your reps, even new reps, to select the best options for each customer.
Automating steps in the sales quote process will help you reduce the time it takes to create a quote, and helps you scale the process as your company grows. Identify and review all of the steps in your sales process and evaluate what can be automated. Setting up automation for approvals is a great first step to streamline the quoting process. For example, if you require your VP of Sales to approve any quote with a discount above a predetermined threshold, you can set up rules to automatically alert the VP via email that she needs to review and approve the quote.
Setting up quoting rules for your sales team may not be enough -- you may need to check periodically to ensure that your rules and processes are being followed. Having a plan and a process is important, but then you must be sure it's being executed. Walk through the process on your own from time to time to ensure that everything is working and the rules and processes are effective, and also check to be sure your reps are following the process the way you intended. As you review the process periodically, you may need to update it as you learn what's working and what's not.
Gathering feedback is very important to ensure your process is working well and you should solicit feedback for continual improvement. If you are a Salesforce user, consider using Chatter as a place for your sales team to ask questions and share ideas. This helps you learn who is actually following the processes you have in place. You can also discover if anyone is doing things differently, or has a good suggestion for a new way to do things, and it can easily be shared with everyone. Be sure to designate a specific Chatter group where your team can share tips, tricks, best practices and potential issues about the quoting process.
