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Do you know that poor quotation management leads to poor follow up leading to 60% of lost businesses?
Improve your quotation management: follow ups will improve and more sales will be closed
The net result: MORE SALES
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What is quotation management?
Quotation management is the art of managing your quotations systematically. Typically, your potential sales deals will be in various stages.
After a quotation is made, you may follow up with one or more phone calls, and one or more visits. Some of your potential sales deals with be in
the stage just after a quotation is made, some will be after one follow up phone call, some will be after two follow up phone calls and so on.
Each of them will be a mini-project of its own, and keeping track of the details and the dates for subsequent contact, for each potential sales
deal, can be difficult. Quotation management is about systematically keeping track of these details and dates, and carrying out the necessar
follow up accordingly. It helps maximize sales closure.
Why is quotation management important?
In many cases, buyers would have obtained multiple quotations. There may be one or more rounds of elimination before the final round where the
buying decision is made.
You want to maximize the chances of your quotation being eliminated before the final round where the buying decision
is made. Perhaps surprising (to many people), 60% of the time when your quotation is eliminated before the final
round, it is because of poor follow up (click here for more details).
It is therefore important that follow up, in whatever form, it be done regularly and systematically.
So how does one have good follow up, regular and systematic? Good follow up results from good quotation management!
How do you manage follow up systematically?
In other words, how do you achieve good quotation management? Some sales people try to keep it all in their head.
However, the more quotations they make, the harder it is to keep track of the various stages of all the outstanding
quotations. They will inevitably make mistakes, forget, and lose sales because of not following up systematically.
Some sales people also try to use paper tools, such as a calendar, date book, and so on. This may work for a small
number of quotations, but it also gets more and more difficult and error-prone as the number of outstanding quotations increases.
It may also consume valuable time to keep the paper tool neat and usable.
Furthermore, the calendar or date book is passive, and does not actively remind you when a follow up call is due or overdue.
In this technological age, we use technology to keep our calendar, our date book, and so on (in PDAs, laptops, etc.). Why not
also use technology to help us with quotation management?
Since sales closure is so important, we consider the use of computer-automated tools for
quotation management to be the smart way to go.
What would be a good computer-automated tool for quotation management?
We would recommend taking a look at our Business Enhancement Method software to enhance your
quotation management today.
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