A Comprehensive Guide on Speeding Up Your Quoting Process
Introduction
Today’s highly competitive environment calls for professional services and consulting organizations to speed up the quoting process to effectively orchestrate the sales cycle. Unfortunately for sales teams and service delivery personnel, not having a systematic approach to the quoting process leads to issues such as deal closure delays, revenue leakage, reduced customer satisfaction, and ultimately lost deals.
In services organizations, preparing quotes is an iterative process with adjustments in costs, timelines, discounts, deliverables, and resources leading to the best customer quotation.
The winning formula for speeding up your quoting process is based on a combination of a supporting technology platform with capabilities of professional services automation and cloud services quoting and aligned business processes.
In this guide, we delve into the root causes of quoting dysfunctions, identify common business process breakdowns, and how Provus’ AI-driven services quoting platform aligns the quoting process.
The struggle is real: Lengthening sales cycles and growing complexity of services quoting
Fast forwarding to today, identifying opportunities and converting them into successful client engagements has become complex for sales teams. It requires a seamless flow of information between departments and an overall structured approach to business development. Sales teams have to ensure that opportunities are properly scoped, prioritized, staffed, and billed.
What’s more, manually scoping the complex quoting process over spreadsheets is time-consuming and prone to errors. In addition to this, another complexity arising in the sales process is that:
When fewer deals are available and sales cycles are longer, there is an increased pressure and sense of urgency to close deals: which may lead to big discounts. Alternatively, when opportunities are abundant, resource imbalance can strain customer relationships and the relationship between sales and service teams.
Critically, service quotes, estimates, and pricing need real-time and dynamic data about resource availability, revenue leakage, regional pricing, contractual obligations, and so on. Before covering ways to speed up the quoting process for professional services organizations, let’s look at the roadblocks in the process.
Typical sources of service quoting dysfunction responsible for sales breakdown
Proposals
A common problem we’ve noticed with PSOs is that they often demonstrate a lack of clarity in deciding which opportunities to pursue, how to create a winning proposal, and who is in charge of the proposal-creating and quoting process. The result of ambiguity is: Procrastination, excessive bid costs, and not enough time to bring all resources together into a compelling value-based proposition.
Without reusable proposal components with best practices, valuable insights into costs and pricing get lost.
Pricing and Scoping
Often, who has the authority for discounting and contract terms is unclear. Poorly defined requirements, weak estimation tools, inaccurate understanding of the true cost, vague or unclear discounting limits, and no contractual review result in mediocre financial results and unacceptable levels of risk.
Forecasting and Staffing
Many teams are deficient in understanding how a sales forecast is translated into the resource plan. This lack of alignment leads to either incongruent sales bookings or reduced service margin goals.
A disconnect between sales and resource planning leads to unreliable sales forecasts and insufficient interlock between required staffing and opportunities.
There cannot be a worse experience for a customer than receiving a compelling quote only to discover the required resources are unavailable.
Inconsistent Communication
Omissions and errors in the quoting process, improper planning, poor execution of scope changes, and no project dashboards lead to project overruns and unhappy clients.
How can services quoting cloud accelerate the sales quoting process?
We’ve seen that a lack of tight alignment between your quoting approach and sales teams is the reason for revenue leakage, missed billing opportunities, and staff underbooking or overbooking.
Here’s how Provus’ AI-driven services CPQ platform accelerates the quoting process.
1. Tap into the power of a cloud platform
A cloud platform like Provus gathers all the data associated with your quoting process and gives you end-to-end visibility into everything related to your services engagements. This approach is much better than having individual software give you different forms of data from multiple cloud providers. The third-party integrations help multiple teams (sales, finance, delivery, and so on) perform all tasks related to quoting on a single cloud platform. The result is billing accuracy, time efficiency, and audibility.
For the C-suite leadership and executive team, Provus identifies trends, forecasts, summaries, and customer insights to help the business adapt to changing environments.
2. Complete visibility into the quoting process
What makes Provus a true game changer in the quoting process is that it enables you to trace every transaction along the quoting journey right from the time the original quote is generated, to the different departments working on the quote and where the process slows down. In other words, you have a bird’s eye visibility into the roadblocks as well as their impact on the overall business.
3. Better customer experiences
Accurate data flowing from a single source of truth is critical for building a truly customer-centric business culture. It has the ability to deliver innovative customer experience as a real-time view of data empowers teams to make decisions to optimize the business.
A 360-degree view of accurate information ensures that your organization can:
- Understand the availability of resources
- Keep the quoting process moving faster without necessary delays
- Ensure traceability during the quoting process
4. Develop trusted revenue forecasts for improved margins and profitability
With historical visibility into the most profitable services, best clients and vendors to work with, optimal resources, and dynamic resource pricing, Provus’ cloud platform helps professional service organizations create resource-forward plans that focus on sustainable profitability. Over the same dashboard, managers can view target margin vs delivered margin to improve margins and revenue.
5. Faster turnaround with automated SOW generation
Significantly reduce the cycle time for services quotes by automating manual tasks and using template libraries for quick SOW generation. Provus’ rule-based engine and AI-based algorithms, intuitive selling, configurable approval processes, and intuitive UX help improve efficiency in the quoting process.
Regardless of complexities, resource details, and terms and clauses, the document generation feature combines the power of dynamic data and clause library to produce professional-looking documents within a few clicks.
6. Minimize risk with risk scoring and analysis
What makes services quoting a complex process is that a delicate balance has to be maintained between gross margin, resource mix, and other levers, making it easy to lose sight of the risks. To minimize risk and improve compliance, Provus provides risk scoring combined with analysis and recommendations.
7. Interdepartmental collaboration
The quoting process requires real-time collaboration between sales, finance, human resources, and delivery teams. Think of Provus as a powerful collaboration workflow where all parties can work independently on their deliverables without losing sight of the big picture.
Provus Solution
Provus’ powerful AI-led and data-driven features reinvent how consulting services are estimated, priced, and quoted. By removing the traditional inefficiencies of creating and managing complex services quotes, Provus helps increase win probability and optimize gross margins.
No more inefficient or manual quoting processes means you win deals faster. Guided selling pulls from historical data so you can create the best quote every time. And AI-led scenario planning enables you to instantly create various scenarios and identify options that increase gross margin and curb leakage.
Provus Capabilities
Services Quoting
Automate tedious tasks with our template library, rules-based engine, and AI-based algorithms.
Faster Turnaround
Reduce quote cycle times with scenario planning, configurable approval processes, and real-time collaboration.
AI-Guided Selling
Curb revenue leakage with step-by-step guided selling and insights from historical data.
Optimize Gross Margin
Identify options to decrease costs using “what-if” scenario planning to instantly increase gross margin.
Real-Time Collaboration
Empower various groups across the organization to work independently then collaborate in real-time.
One-Click Integrations
Avoid data duplication by easily integrating with hundreds of data points across CRM, PSA, ERP, and HCM.
SOW Generation
Produce professional documents with the click of a button using document generation.
