Sales teams across the world are rapidly realising that the time has come to stop using PDF proposals and to create online proposals instead. Apart from the obvious benefit of having a cloud system which keeps your proposals all in one place, online proposals can increase your close rate (it certainly did for us).
I looked around for a while at how we could systemise sending proposals to help us scale. I trialed quite a few systems and only one did all the things I wanted it to do. Service providers, if you are not already using Quote Roller, get on it. I will run you through the four main reasons I love this service.
Templates Save Time
I don’t know about you, but I certainly sell the same thing more than once. I have a few services that are pretty much sold over and over again without customisation (that’s the beauty of aiming for a scalable business, right?). With that in mind, I used to have to open the proposal template in a Word Processor and manually go through pages and pages of content to add my clients name and company details. I calculated that I was spending about 40 hours per year doing this annoying data entry task that should be automated. Since using Quote Roller for my online proposals, I just select the proposal template I would like to use, choose which contact I am writing the proposal for and send it. If I need to, I can still make customisations to the proposal really easily. But that rarely happens. So right there, signing up for Quote Roller and implementing it in my sales process has given me about 40 hours back each year. This time can now be used for further prospecting and strengthening relationships with existing clients through more frequent personal contact. Templates and automated entry of contact information have been an absolute life saver.
Open Notifications and Analytics
This is where the close rate really sky rockets with this software. In sales you probably hear “I have not had a chance to take a look at it” almost as much as “He/She is in a meeting, can I take a message?” These deals often fall through the cracks. As time goes on they become colder and colder, but not with Quote Roller. You’ll receive an instant email notification when your client opens their proposal so you know exactly when to jump on the phone and say “Hi, I noticed your opened my proposal, let’s run through together. You can ask me questions while they are fresh on your mind.”
Also, clients is being tracked while they browse around the online proposals. You can look in the analytics tab of the proposal to see exactly which sections they have looked at and for how long. This has been useful for me in a couple of ways. Usually it comes in handy because I can say things like “I noticed you spent a fair bit of time on the scope section, was their any questions you have about what we are going to do and how it will benefit your business?” More recently the analytics function came in handy for dispute resolution. A client was requesting work which was out of scope and insisting that she never saw a scope for the project. We were easily able to jolt her memory by using analytics to show her that she did read the scope and actually spent a significant amount of time doing so. We all have those clients every now and then.
Discussions
This is amazing. Once I send the proposal, the correspondence does not add to the millions of other emails I have to sort through each day. With the discussions feature in Quote Roller, my clients can provide their proposal feedback online and we can hold a real time discussion in one thread. This keeps everything in one neat spot, making the close faster and preventing any misunderstandings from occurring down the track.
Signing Online
I swear, nothing kills more deals than when the client is sent a PDF contract after agreeing to go ahead. You are giving them time to come up with reasons not to move forward when you could be getting a legally binding signatures on your online proposals with Quote Roller. When you have them on the phone and they are ready to go, tell them to click the “Accept” button and sign the proposal online. At this point it is either time for an invoice or you may be taking credit card details over the phone for your service. Either way, money is in the bank.
Waiting for something?
Congratulations on reading through this entire post. This probably means you are seriously sick of losing deals and keen on using Quote Roller to increase productivity and your close rate with online proposals like I have. So… why wait until later to start seeing the benefits? Check it out:
