This is the fourth in an eight-part series looking at the typical failure points in the last mile of the sales cycle, often referred to as the quote-to-cash process.

In our last installment, we looked at the price & quote step in the quote-to-cash (QTC) process, in which the products and services offered are selected and accurate pricing is built. The stress of the price & quote process is reduced by automating approvals and reviews, and ensuring that a valid, accurate, complete quote is created on the first try.

In this installment, we’ll look at the next step: creating the presentation-quality proposal and the accompanying contract that you’ll send to the customer. What you should expect here (and what your customer definitely expects) is a professional, complete, and accurate document. You should also expect that it requires almost no time for formatting and assembly by your field team.

There are two critical things to now consider:

1. Will the proposal reflect well on your company?
2. Do the terms and conditions match the deal and mitigate risk?

Professionalism still matters

Even with automation in the steps preceding this point, relying on manual proposal creation adds unnecessary risks and room for mistakes by reintroducing error-prone, time-consuming, review-intensive steps that result in delays without ensuring better results.

Mistakes of omission, or using expired attachments, are a clear and obvious risk. Being honest, we’ve all manually assembled proposals that we later found to have an incorrect attachment or out-of-date terms or some other human error. It just happens.

But just as important as completeness and accuracy, the risks related to the look and professionalism of your proposal can be just as damaging. We’ve all seen—and cringed at—proposals where the logo looks squashed, with fonts that change from paragraph to paragraph, alignment issues, wrong page numbers, or any of the hundreds of issues that frustrate you with Word on a daily basis and seem to multiply when you’re in a rush to get something out of the door.

When you’ve read a document with those types of formatting and design errors, what did you think? Like me, you probably thought, “Couldn’t they have taken the time to clean this up?”

Regardless of the content, it undermines the reader’s view of you and your company. If a vendor is this sloppy before the contract is signed, what will happen after? It’s the likely reaction, and in a competitive deal, it could be the difference between winning and losing.

Contracts customized for this—and every—deal

While the look of your proposal is important, the accompanying legal contract is even more so. With a manual process, you’re risking incorrect or incomplete terms and conditions, and you’re adding days (if not weeks) of delays for contract assembly and approvals.

With automation, CPQ dynamically creates terms and conditions based on how your team configured the offering and structured the pricing. It also automatically incorporates existing contractual pricing and discounts. In the event of a non-standard request, there are built-in approval workflows to streamline approval cycles, and even automated amendment workflows.

The benefit for sales reps is that they don’t need to understand the rules or go through lengthy legal approvals. They can instantly move forward knowing that the contract is completely appropriate for the deal.

For legal and management, automated approvals mean less workload and faster deals. Automation also provides analytics for visibility into risk levels and pipeline. And, with Salesforce CPQ, all contracts are stored in Salesforce to provide streamlined tracking, auditing, and compliance.

Automation makes you look better and win faster

Salesforce CPQ’s propose & contract automatically generates branded proposals and contracts at the click of a button. You define the customizable templates ahead of time, ensuring that proposals meet your company’s branding standards. It takes the layout, formatting and design effort off of the sales rep’s shoulders so they can focus on the deal, not the paragraph indentations and image aspect ratios.

When they’re ready to generate the proposal, it can be created in PDF to lock down the content for easy distribution or in Word for further tweaks. They can even include electronic signatures, allowing for easy turnaround on your deals and easy integration with your choice of e-signature applications.

Even more, Salesforce CPQ’s partnership with SpringCM integrates their platform for managing content and automating workflows with Salesforce CPQ’s platform for generating customer-friendly quotes.

Salesforce CPQ gives you the fastest way to produce an accurate, complete and professional proposal!

Case study: Domino Printing Sciences

Domino Printing Sciences develops and manufactures coding, marking and printing technologies to add information to everything from food packaging to concrete blocks. While their products are cutting edge, their global quoting system was purely manual and relied on Excel price sheets that required constant maintenance and updates.

Domino’s North America team had been using Salesforce CPQ successfully for for two years, and they wanted to roll it out internationally to streamline their quoting process across all regions. They quickly found that each country and region had different quoting requirements, which threatened to derail their efforts.

Domino worked with Salesforce CPQ to create a quote template that provided the same look and feel, but was dynamically generated based on the region for which it was created. Not only were sales teams now able to configure and quote their products with ease, they created quotes and proposals in 80 percent less time than previously required!

“It used to take 30-45 minutes for a basic quote, and now it takes just 5-10 minutes,” said Avril Kirwan, Global Project Manager at Domino Printing Services. “Salesforce CPQ is a huge time saver for all of our teams around the world.”

Next installment

Next, we’ll dive into the next phase of the QTC process: order & renew. This phase is where, once your proposal is accepted by the customer, the details are converted into an order that can be loaded into your back-end financial systems.