To stay ahead of the curve and competition, businesses need to optimize their pricing, speed up the quote-to-cash motions, and have a scalable, configurable, and adaptable system in place to close deals faster. All this, while managing increasingly complex service quoting processes without losing customers in the process.
The key driver for achieving these goals is sales acceleration. With competition being more intense now than ever and buyers being educated, sales reps need to provide solutions faster to stay relevant and successfully close deals.
Businesses are refining their sales strategy by improving the efficiency of their sales processes, to expedite the often lengthy sales process. Assessing what’s working, what’s slowing you down and the areas of opportunity within your sales approach is an effective way to accelerate your sales cycle.
Read more: Why is service quoting a must-have for your growing business?
This article is aimed at helping business and sales teams drive sales acceleration. Let’s start by learning what sales acceleration is.
Sales acceleration
In simple terms, sales acceleration refers to strategies used by businesses to move prospects through the sales cycle faster, right from the time they’re a lead to being a customer.
By automating tasks and streamlining processes, effective sales acceleration helps speed up the sales cycle.
What are the challenges at the root of lagging sales performance?
#1. Quoting inconsistencies
Revenue leakage and low profitability are the results of inaccurate and inconsistent pricing. The reasons for inconsistent pricing functions are the inability to provide quick pricing, incomplete pricing based on different market factors that affect pricing, or outdated information being circulated and used by clients and team members.
For example, it is hard for sales reps to manually (and quickly) calculate the estimate based on currency conversions, geography, payment conditions, and reseller or volume discounts.
#2. Configuration errors
Some factors that lead to churn and slow quote-to-cash processes are slow and error-prone configurations, quotes, and contracts.
It is reported that 84% of pricing and sales professionals use spreadsheets to manage their pricing strategies. As a result, there are increased possibilities of errors and slowing the sales process.
For example, especially for complicated services where there are several resources involved, the configuration may become difficult and slow, even for an experienced salesperson.
Read more: Evolution of “As a service economy.”
#3. Limited or lack of collaboration between multiple stakeholders
When there are multiple teams involved in sales, collaborating over emails and document threads leads to error, miscommunication, and friction. Going through multiple rounds of reviews and approvals is one of the common pain points in service quoting, especially for companies that still rely on emails for communication.
#4. Missed interaction opportunities
If your sales reps spend most of their time manually building pricing, configuring products, creating contracts, getting approvals, and correcting errors in miscalculated quotes, they’re losing the time otherwise spent on maximizing the impact of sales. Furthermore, all these tasks squander opportunities for sales to truly connect with customers.
Yet, their major focus should be on revenue-generating activities in building relationships with customers by providing industry insights and engaging customers to help solve their problems with process advice.
Issues in the service quoting process, ranging from pricing errors to lengthy approvals can prevent your team from meeting customer expectations. And ultimately slow down the entire sales process.
Read more: The role of customer experience in services quoting.
How does service quoting accelerate the sales process?
Implementing the right service quoting processes can help mitigate these problems and lead to sales acceleration. Here’s how.
#1. Consistent and accurate pricing
Provus services quoting cloud software helps sales teams optimize growth and profits, thereby accelerating sales and reducing cycle time significantly. We templatize your scoping and discovery needs. The natively built intuitive Excel-like experience of the product ensures easy adaptability across teams. Within the quoting experience, you can easily model your scenarios and collaborate in real-time with several stakeholders.
#2. Faster sales processes
Provus’s AI-guided and data-driven selling approach reinvents how services are estimated, priced, and quoted. Our AI engine gives scenarios, win/loss probabilities, and risk analysis by analyzing historical data. This way, the traditional inefficiencies faced by sales teams, in creating and managing service quotes (be it simple services or complex recurring agreements) – are eliminated. Provus services quoting cloud improves sales acceleration and leads to revenue maximization and margin optimization.
#3. Real-time collaboration between sales and pricing teams
Provus services quoting allows collaboration on a quote in real-time with internal team members and approved partners. All teams involved in the quoting process from sales, pre-sales, solution engineering, human resources, and finance can work independently on respective sections without losing sight of the overarching big picture or sales goals.
#4. Free up the time of the salesperson
Services quoting is a complex process that requires a delicate balance between gross margin, resource mix, and other levers. The sheer amount of manual work can make you lose sight of the risks. Provus services quoting automates approval processes, and generation of proposal documents and provides easy and intuitive risk scoring with analysis and recommendations to minimize risks.
Your salespeople can reclaim the time they would spend on manual processes and use it better to provide consultation and problem solving for clients.
Also, services quoting cloud software allow for easy integration with hundreds of data points within a single click. An important part of sales acceleration, service quoting is made more efficient and effective with integrations to CRM, HCM, ERP, and more.
Remodeling your services quoting leads to sales acceleration
Manual processes, poor service quotes, and the lack of ability to offer the right products impacts sales, growth, and profitability. For sales acceleration to drive growth, you need to align buyers with products as per their needs, drive accurate interactions using the data available and enable salespeople to be consultative.
Future-ready companies are actively investing in sales tools that accelerate sales velocity while increasing sales productivity.
Provus’s services cloud quoting software is an intuitive and fully integrated platform aimed at eliminating barriers between sales and pricing. Schedule your demo here.
