After weeks or even months of back and forth with a sales prospect, your company finally made the shortlist. Now, the prospect wants a formal proposal. Congratulations!
If you’re like many of the sales leaders we speak to, the celebration, while well deserved, is short-lived, because you know that creating a winning response will require long days (or nights) for your sales reps, neglecting other prospects, or doing the best with what you have and hoping the competition does the same. Plus, salespeople are hired for their ability to sell, not write.
Staying competitive is tough
Today’s customers are more informed than ever. Most have researched your company before ever talking to a salesperson. At the same time, their needs — and the proposals addressing their needs — are far more complex. Sending customers generic or incorrect information puts deals and reputations at risk.
Empowering sales teams to be more competitive means arming them with the ability to quickly and easily create winning proposals. Accurate and timely proposals that specifically address customer needs can help accelerate a sales cycle.
The pressure is on:
- Sales cycles are lengthening
- B2B buyers expect greater personalization
- Sellers spend nearly three-quarters of their workdays on mundane tasks
- Two-thirds of sales reps complain that they’re drowning in tools yet there’s no single source of truth
- Competitors are investing in their sales tech stacks to drive growth and efficiency
Buyers expect more
When prospects receive boilerplate, generic, or poorly written proposals, it paints a picture of a vendor that is too overwhelmed to properly respond to their requirements or isn’t interested in their business. A disjointed proposal process has demonstrable consequences:
- The majority of B2B buyers say that the materials they get are extraneous instead of helpful
- Most say that vendors tend to focus on style instead of substance
- Poor content means lost business and diminished scalability
According to Elise Hahn, senior product manager, Experience Manager Assets, at Adobe, as cited by Forrester, “Since poor content is perceived as a reflection of the product value itself, we have to prioritize getting it right.”
How Proposal Builder helps sales teams
We launched Proposal Builder to address these challenges, helping sales reps accelerate deals and increase win rates by delivering customized proposals at scale. Here’s how:
Boost productivity
Empower sales reps to deliver custom proposals with approved content within minutes, giving them time back to spend on high-value activities.
Enable customization with control
Give sales reps access to pre-approved content that’s easily tailored to specific customers, industries or products.
Win more deals faster
Accelerate the sales cycle and win more deals with timely and bespoke proposals that make your company stand out from the competition.
The technology behind Proposal Builder
With Proposal Builder, field teams can rely on:
An intuitive UX
Every hour spent tracking down content or fumbling with cumbersome technology is an hour that should be spent selling. Proposal Builder returns hours and weeks of valuable time to sales teams.
A single source of truth
Ensure proposals include the right content. Reps leverage approved, updated content from your organization, pulling in the latest company information, product and pricing catalogs, team bios, and more.
Rich design capabilities
Professional proposals are about more than substance. Proposal Builder reduces dependencies on cross-functional partners in the proposal design process. Sales reps create polished documents with approved content and branding in just a few clicks without having to worry about formatting, design, or extensive stakeholder reviews.
Digitally sharable docs
Send your proposal in your prospect’s preferred format and track customer engagement, giving you a window into knowing where you stand and what your next steps may be.
Powerful platform
Proposal Builder is built on the Responsive Strategic Response Management Platform, supporting response use cases and teams across your organization. Customers harness best-in-class capabilities for content management, project management, collaboration, content accessibility, and business intelligence, with AI at its core.
Final thoughts
An economy in flux means that buyers are more selective with how they spend their money. Competitors, taking nothing for granted, will pull out all the stops. To remain competitive, sales teams spend their time building pipeline, nurturing relationships, and addressing customer needs – not writing and designing proposals from scratch.
Proposal Builder empowers sales teams to drive efficient growth by delivering customized, winning proposals at scale.
Reach out to learn how Proposal Builder can help your sales team narrow the gap between conversation and closed-won.
