I’ve worked with a lot of small businesses (and plenty of large ones, too) to improve their pricing. This creates fundamental changes in the business model that greatly improves profitability. Yet once that’s done, what the sales team needs, whether a multinational group with regional sales managers or the “team” is the owner of the business, is a simple, easy, compelling way to get those prices in the hands of customers and prospects. While companies struggle with pricing, once they have that set, the real sink in time and stress is putting together the proposal.
This process typically involved calculating some prices in Excel, copying them into a Word document, doing some Find and Replace on the Word document to make sure the company name from the previous proposal was replaced with the company name for this proposal, and so on. Hours, or perhaps a day or two later, you email the proposal to the customer. Then you spend a week trying to find a time to discuss it. The customer wants changes, and the process repeats. I know, because I had this experience personally.
So, we added the ability to turn a quote into a rich, online proposal. Now you can calculate your prices automatically, then drop the pricing information into a proposal template with rich formatting, including images and video. You can upload your existing proposals as templates, or create new templates. Best of all, when you send a proposal to the customer, you know when they are looking at your proposal– you get an email notification. Now you can call at the right time. You can even see which sections the customer viewed, and for how long. You can exchange comments with the customer, and update the proposal while it’s in Collaboration mode.
You can also pull in contact information from CRM systems: Highrise by 37Signals or Salesforce.com.
The Highrise integration is very simple– just enter your Highrise address and API key, and you can sync contacts down from Highrise and deals back up to Highrise. Proposal activity in Mimiran turns into notes on Highrise Deals.
(The Salesforce.com integration currently takes anywhere from a couple of hours to a couple of days, depending on what you want to do. Just contact us or our Salesforce.com implementation partners, led by Salesforce Gold Cloud Alliance partner, Strategic Growth, Inc, can you get you going.)
It’s made my life a lot easier, and if you’re still using Excel/Word/Email to handle your proposals, step into the 21st century. Start a 30 day free trial and see how you can create, send and close killer proposals. Spend more time doing what you love, make more money doing it, and spend less time on the paperwork. (Check out a sample proposal, and read more about how to create a killer proposal.)