When sales targets are missed, sales leaders often look to troubleshoot the efficiency of the overall sales process, the quality of their identified prospects and the ability of their sales reps to close deals.
Few consider how much of an impact the quoting process can have on an organization’s bottom line. But if your quoting process is slowing down the whole sales machine and creating a frustrating customer experience, it’s got a direct effect on your ability to hit your sales quota.
Here are three easy ways to fix your broken quoting process and stop leaving money on the table:
- Get Rid of Those Spreadsheets (Once and For All)
If you want a modern sales organization, you need to modernize your sales—and, in this case, quoting—process. There are two main issues with the use of spreadsheets that any sales rep who’s had to use them knows well: they’re rife with manual errors and outdated information and they’re impossible to keep track of.
When sales reps have to cross-reference several spreadsheets just to create a quote (often with incorrect pricing information in the first place), sales get delayed, customers get frustrated with the back-and-forth and the organization has to eat those pricing errors. - Stop Creating Manual Quotes
Before sophisticated quoting tools were readily available, sales reps were expected to be able to take complex pricing sheets and do the math to create customized pricing models.
Not only is that no longer necessary—it significantly slows down the sales cycle and leaves enormous room for error, especially for companies with a large number of products. - Bridge the Gap Between Customer Service and Sales
Sales and customer service teams have long operated in silos. (In many organizations, they’re even known to have an acrimonious relationship.) But when leveraged correctly, customer service teams can be enormous revenue drivers in helping sales reps upsell current and potential customers who land on their doorstep. The biggest hitch? Sales and customer service teams need a streamlined workflow to communicate opportunities and customer service teams need to be armed with factual, up-to-date pricing information to help support those sales.
To confidently fix these three issues, your team needs a streamlined quoting tool built for the modern sales cycle. If you’re still on the fence about investing in a CPQ platform, consider a study conducted by Aberdeen that found the average sales cycle is 3.42 months for CPQ users compared to 4.68 months for others. Additionally, 58% of CPQ users achieve their quotas compared to 46% of others; enjoy a 35% lead conversion rate compared to 30% of others and deliver 20.9 proposals each month compared to 14 for others.
SalesWon, a CRM and CPQ application built on the NOW Platform®, helps ServiceNow customers improve quoting accuracy, generate quotes more quickly, gain greater visibility into sales forecasts and create greater internal adoption. And because SalesWon is built on the NOW Platform, it easily integrates with ServiceNow’s CSM platform further uniting the teams. Click here to learn more about the application.