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In the wake of the aftermath of the great economic downfall, the business environment has become a more hostile and cut throat place to be in. At present, competition is stiffer, the business environment is more complex, and customers demand more and everything else that requires extremely good sales proposals are going around these days. Therefore, it is extremely important that salespeople nowadays are equipped with the capability to put together a great sales proposal following a sales presentation.
Writing up proposals is often dreaded by salespeople and their organizations alike. Apart from taking a toll on time, energy and effort, the productivity of an individual and a firm can be greatly affected when a lot of staff is committed to write up sales proposal. However, these days, sales people and organizations should consider themselves lucky with the existence of proposal automation software. Using such proposal automation software, sales people nowadays can create deal winning proposals that are clear and consistent in a matter of minutes. However, there are a few strategies that you should follow in order to choose a proposal automation software so that you obtain the best result possible.
First of all you should try to link up all existing sales management systems, key databases and other relevant applications with you proposal software. This is because you would definitely want to have your proposal automation software to be able to gather existing customer information and store the proposal into a history file. To make things even better the proposal automation should include a link that allows for it to be opened directly from the sales system. Also, you should try to ensure that it is compatible with the regular word processing and presentation software.
In addition to this, you should be sure that the proposal software must be able to provide quality output information with minimal input. For example, for every one piece of information provided, the proposal automation software should at least produce three useful pieces of information. In other words, the automation must have at least a 3:1 value ratio. Such a software will increase the chances of coming up with a winning proposal with minimal time and effort.
Thirdly, the proposal automation system must be able to produce a quality, persuasive and customized proposal. It is very essential that the proposal that your proposal automation software generates is quality and is not generic. Thus, the executive summary of your proposal should focus more on you and your products rather than the customer and their needs. This way, your automated proposal will fit into all occasions.
The software must also be able to facilitate team collaboration. In the case when an RFP is issued, especially for big projects, it is vital that staff in your company work together as a team. This means that everyone is working together to answer the RFP questions and contributing ideas. Thus, whatever it is, before you go about selecting your proposal automation tool, you need to be sure that the software can accommodate all these requirements.
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