Speed is a Competitive Advantage in Sales Proposals

Delivering a proposal to your prospects faster can not only help you close faster, it can also help you win more deals. If you can turn around a compelling proposal before the competition, by the time they submit their proposals, the customer may have already decided to go with you. (Especially if they have already signed the deal.)

How fast should you be? Many sales reps and small business owners kill themselves to turn around proposals in 24 hours, regardless of when the prospect will read them. This causes stress and worse proposals, because you’re more likely to make a mistake if you’re rushing and sleep deprived, and you may not properly understand the real problems without time to digest. So just ask when the prospect wants the proposals. I’ve had people tell me, “I wanted to contact you today, because I’ll be out of the office for a couple of weeks and I wanted you to get to think about it and have a proposal for me so we can start when I get back.” In that case, no point in rushing. In other situations, it’s “yesterday– we want to solve this as soon as possible.”

Mimiran really shines in turning around these asap proposals. Using templates, you can create a proposal in seconds, and then adjust the product/services offerings and any customer-specific text. (One customer sent a proposal for the same service to 2 customers in about 20 minutes.) Custom proposal fields even let reps input a few deal-specific items and have them laid out in the proposal. For example, you could define a Project Start Date, or a Total Budget.  In some cases, companies want to approve any proposals before they go out. Mimiran’s mobile-friendly approval process makes this easy.

How long to create a proposal, submit for approval, get approval, send to customer, and get customer’s signature? In some cases, less than 3 minutes. Wouldn’t want to be the competition on those deals.

 

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