Business to Business Sales Process

            You have nearly finalized a huge sale. The hard work is done, the customer knows what he wants, and the price has been agreed upon. When you get the signature, it’s payday – but the deal can still fall through. You need to lock it down with a killer proposal, but building it out takes a lot of time: writing a cover letter from scratch, copying in all the customer information and pricing data for the quote, branding it with a customer logo, finding the applicable terms and conditions, adding any visual aids and then double checking to make sure everything’s correct. After the exhausting process is complete, you still run a high risk of error and the quality of the final product leaves the customer mildly impressed at best. Fortunately, BigMachines’ Document Engine is the cure for the common proposal.

            With pre-built templates, proposal tools greatly reduce the time and effort required to build the kind of powerful documents that will give a sale the extra push it needs. One of the most attractive qualities of many modern tools is that building out the templates require little to no technical knowledge; it’s all just point and click. For a company at the top of its game, the issues usually associated with proposal generation are problems of the past. With a comprehensive proposal tool, professional, customized, accurate proposals are a mouse-click away. More importantly, your resources will be freed up to add real value rather than gather data and edit documents, and your customers will be impressed with the speed, accuracy and quality of your work. In business, win-win situations are seldom found, and not taking advantage of them can be costly. Why leave anything to chance?

            

                In a perfect world, there is a forum for everything. With the internet, I suppose the world is moving closer to this opinioned perfection. You can find a forum for everything online, from handbags to power tools. And, of course, anything and everything Star Wars is always in demand. If only these forums could be taken from the virtual world, where you could talk to everyone in person and see how they work…

                Wait! That does exist at BigMachines. Our Customer Success Forums provide the chance to talk about your BigMachines product with other BigMachines users and experts from the company. Having trouble with figuring out how to phrase a certain aspect of your selling process? Maybe Joe Gibroni from Phrasing Experts Inc. will have a solution for you (note: Unfortunately, Joe Gibroni will not be able to attend this year).

The great part about being able to interact with everyone face-to-face is the ability to network. Unlike an online forum where you have to do some serious LinkedIn investigating to find out who anyone is, you get the whole package right in front of you.

In addition to the benefits of everything being physical, there is also the chance to participate in BigMachines product roadmap brainstorming. This is our way of letting you give us as much input as you want regarding our product development. Any and all suggestions are more than welcome.

Save your spot for a 90 minute consultation with a BigMachines expert. Experience a mini Breakthrough Opportunity Analysis (BOA)^SM to evaluate your company’s sales configuration processes. The BOA is an onsite workshop conducted by BigMachines experts that helps a company evaluate the need for business changes and identify opportunities to improve and streamline its sales processes. We understand that with time, many factors within a company changes and we want to ensure that your company is utilizing our solution to its fullest potential.

The BigMachines Customer Success Forum is coming to your house this May, that is if you live in Denver or the Bay Area. Check out these dates and places to see if there is a Customer Success Forum by you:

Denver Area – May 3^rd, 2012
Hosted by Spectra Logic

Bay Area – May 10^th, 2012
Hosted by Brocade

 If you don’t live in these areas, no problem! More forums are being scheduled as we speak.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that much has changed since my grandfather’s sales days. Back then, he would travel to customers and prospects with a heavy bag of products so he could demonstrate how the product worked and interacted with its various components. Over the years, sales professionals started to move away from this approach – in part due to the back breaking pain it caused. Instead, some started to carry paper catalogs. While not as heavy to carry, these were (and still are) pricey and much more difficult to use for new and existing customers in terms of visualizing how the product actually worked.

Today, sales professionals have a new sales bag – the iPad. With the third generation iPad in the hands of more than three million people, it is having a huge impact on the way we do business – and the sales department is leading their companies through this transformation toward mobility by using the iPad and other tablets as a sales tool while out in the field. Sales professionals are using the iPad while in front of their customers to have a conversation about their products’ features and options, providing an opportunity for product configuration on the spot.

In fact, here at BigMachines, we recently conducted our Second Annual Benchmark Survey, which takes a look at the state of the sales industry today. The findings show that sales mobility is continuously growing with 66.7% of respondents currently using a tablet or mobile device for selling while on the road.  More so, the survey results indicate that face-to-face contact still provides the greatest success with prospects and customers. Taking both those points into consideration, this next statistic shouldn’t be too shocking: a total of 62.5% said their mobile device is important for completing complex sales.

Here are just a few instances as to why the iPad is enhancing the face-to-face interaction between the sales rep and customers and prospects:

• It provides easy access to critical data on-the-go. The more information a sales rep has about a particular customer or prospect going into a meeting, the greater the chance ofclosing a deal.

• It enables quick and professional price quotes on the spot. With the proper applications, an entire proposal can be generated in front of the customer and terms quickly negotiated.

• It adds an extra degree of transparency to the deal, which customers appreciate. As quotes and proposals are generated in plain sight, they have full visibility into what is being negotiated throughout the process.

• While closing deals faster is an obvious plus for sales reps, it is also advantageous to the client. The faster a customer is delivered the product or service it needs, the better off it will be.

• The iPad can minimize, or even eliminate, the confusion that often accompanies complex orders. It is equipped with adequate software applications for pricing and quoting in real-time, enabling sales rep to walk a customer through an entire order in-person, all while allowing the rep to easily explain and iterate through all of the options available right in front of the customer.

It’s pretty incredible how this new, lightweight sales bag is revolutionizing the way the sales professionals do their jobs better while on the road – ultimately leading to increased productivity and an improved bottom line.

So, tell me, is your organization rolling out the iPad to the sales force? What does your sales bag look like?

 

Tim Handorf

VP of Product Management

This is a re-post from www.bigmachines.com:

BigMachines announced that its BigMachines 11 release has achieved Oracle Database Ready status through Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN), demonstrating that BigMachines has fully tested and supports its product on the Oracle Database 11g Release 2. BigMachines is a Gold level member of Oracle PartnerNetwork.

Oracle Database Ready is part of the Oracle Exastack Ready program, which allows partners such as BigMachines to be recognized by Oracle for developing, testing and tuning their applications on the latest component products of Oracle Exadata Database Machine or Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud engineered systems. Oracle Database 11g offers BigMachines industry leading performance, reliability and scalability to power the most demanding business critical applications. It also helps customers save money by lowering storage usage, reducing administration tasks, and enabling consolidation onto secure private database cloud environments.

BigMachines software streamlines the sales process and provides solutions for product configuration, pricing, quoting, proposal generation and B2B ecommerce. BigMachines’ Oracle Database Ready status helps ensure that joint Oracle and BigMachines customers will leverage proven technology and quickly receive benefits of an integrated, joint solution including reduced time to implement, seamless user experience and rapid return on investment.


View the entire press release on our website.

For additional information on using BigMachines sales enablement software with Oracle, please visit http://www.bigmachines.com/oracle.php

BigMachines was recently featured in an article by P.J. Jakovljevic of Technology Evaluation Centers. P.J. recently had the opportunity to attended BigIdeas Chicago for the first time.  BigIdeas is the annual BigMachines conference where customers, partners and industry experts gathered to examine the latest solutions and best practices to increase sales and improve their business processes.

In part one of his two-part series, P.J. describes his impressions of the conference, summarizes some of the new BigMachines selling platform features, and examines company’s future direction.


Excerpt from part one of P.J. Jakovljevic’s two-part series on BigMachines:

[David] Bonnette pledged to invest heavily in research and development (R&D) and innovation, as opposed to the current skimping political sentiment in the United States (US) politics of only obsessing about cutting to the bone (which is not conducive to growth and innovation, to put it mildly). To that end, do-it-yourself (DIY) administration capabilities, enterprise agility, out of the box (OOTB) modules, intuitive user experience, and performance/scalability/security are the 2012 roadmap themes for BigMachines.

Currently, over 70 percent of customers are on the current BigMachines 11 release, and the idea is to bolster that number by making it easier and less disruptive for customers to upgrade and be current. One breakout session presented the BigMachines Implementation Framework, which is based on more than 10 years of experience and developed to help customers achieve success more quickly. The session outlined the following key factors to a successful BigMachines implementation:

• Follow best industry practices and processes (as much as possible); this approach allows companies to think small and incremental rather than in a “big bang” manner
• Take ownership – BigMachines should be like buying a car and not a limo with a chauffeur; for some customers that still require some handholding (chauffeuring), BigMachines offers packaged Admin Services, but the idea is for the majority of customers to be self-sufficient.
• Supportability and scalability of the product
• Constant interaction between customers and BigMachines’ project team members

Click here to read the complete article.

Annual conference focused on customer innovation, best practices and product enhancements to drive business value using BigMachines

BigMachines today announced it concluded the 7th annual BigIdeas conference in Chicago, one of the largest cloud innovation conferences to date. More than 400 attendees participated in the two and a half-day event at the Swissôtel Chicago from October 23-25, sharing best practices for increasing productivity and generating high value by streamlining their sales processes.

BigMachines President David Bonnette led the conference with a strong keynote presentation emphasizing the company’s mission to deliver unmatched customer success, with a commitment to becoming more prescriptive, predictable and focused on out-of-the-box products to help bring innovation back to its customers’ businesses. These themes carried throughout the conference presentations, along with sessions showcasing customers’ innovations and successes, demonstrating how they have increased productivity and generated measurable business value through the adoption of BigMachines software and other cloud-based solutions. Featured speaker Kaihan Krippendorff, a blogger for Fast Company who has been featured in Business Week and Harvard Business Review, and author of three business strategy books, inspired attendees on how to out-think the competition. Additional keynote speakers included Peter Gaylord, Director of Product Marketing, salesforce.com Sales Cloud, Justin Shriber, Regional Vice President, Oracle SaaS Applications Group, and Frederic Kerrest, President and Co-Founder, Okta.

BigMachines 12, the latest version of the company’s flagship on-demand software, was also previewed at the conference, delivering an enhanced user experience, easy administration and enterprise agility as key enhancements to the sales automation platform. With more than 40 new enhancements, BigMachines 12 incorporates 75 percent of customers’ input and ideas gathered over the past year, along with new innovations that help customers sell more and sell faster.

Recognizing excellence within the BigMachines customer community, the winners of the third annual Customer Innovation Awards were announced acknowledging the innovative ways these companies utilize the BigMachines’ sales quoting and proposal software. Award winners include: 

• Terremark as the recipient of the Big Innovation Award for demonstrating innovation in their use of BigMachines within their company;
• Brocade as the recipient of the Big Success Award for demonstrating a significant ROI from using BigMachines;
• Sergey Heyphets with Acme Packet, honored with the Biggest Idea Award for contributing the most innovative idea to enhance BigMachines’ product as voted by other BigMachines customers; and
• Jason Parpart with Schenck AccuRate, honored as Administrator of the Year for his skills and knowledge as well as his exemplary teamwork within his company and with the BigMachines team.

“The continued success of our BigIdeas conferences is a true indicator of the value it delivers to our customers, prospects and partners across the BigMachines community year after year. BigIdeas provides an opportunity for collaboration among attendees and the BigMachines team, and for uncovering valuable insights that can be brought back to their companies to drive more revenue and increase growth,” said David Bonnette. “It’s a tremendous event to experience and we look forward to helping our customers deliver value based on what was shared and learned at BigIdeas and through the BigMachines 12 enhancements that will drive future success and innovation.”


For the latest BigMachines news, visit http://www.bigmachines.com/press_releases.php.

Crain's Chicago Business recently published a Q & A session between BigMachines President David Bonnette and Crain’s reporter Steve Hendershot. In the article "Silicon City: BigMachines, a Maker of Cloud-based Sales Software, Sees Big Things Ahead", David highlights the tremendous growth that BigMachines has seen over the last year and plans for the company’s future expansion.

Excerpt from “Silicon City: BigMachines, a Maker of Cloud-based Sales Software, Sees Big Things Ahead”:


Crain's: What's your formula for breaking out?

DB: Survival in software comes down to two things, scale and standards. That's how this industry is made up. Those companies that scale well, like an Oracle, get to establish standards. That puts a lot of pressure on companies that don't have the scale to set standards and can't make the investments to create standardized products.
 
BigMachines grew nearly 100% in the first half of this year — we're extraordinarily healthy. So we could just keep doing what we've been doing. Or we could go try to break out. And that's what we're doing. We're making that investment into our products and our processes so that we're scale- and growth-ready. We've made all our processes, from how we address clients to how we support and retain them, scalable and repeatable. So now, when we take on a lot of really big clients, we're ready for that, and we're ready in a way that's repeatable, not just a one-off for one particular big client.



To read the entire article, visit the Crain’s Chicago Business Website.

You have questions. We have answers! Ask our team of B2B sales experts about your current challenges in the inquiry-to-order process and learn how you can sell more and sell faster with product configuration, workflow approvals, and proposal generation.

This is a repost of a press release issued by Vendavo on 10.24.11.

Vendavo® announced today that it will showcase its price management and optimization solution – the most assured way for B2B companies to become more profitable™ – as a gold sponsor at BigIdeas Chicago 2011.  BigIdeas, the annual BigMachines customer and cloud conference for B2B professionals, will be held on October 23-25, 2011 at the Swissôtel in Chicago, Illinois.

Vendavo is the leading provider of price management and optimization solutions for large enterprises worldwide. The company's solution drives bottom-line results by giving businesses true enterprise-wide control of their entire pricing process. Vendavo's enterprise-class software solution delivers big increases in profits—from 10-30 percent—by systematically driving incremental improvements in average prices throughout the pricing process.

During the BigIdeas 2011 Solution Showcase, Dan Bormolini, from Vendavo Business Pricing Consulting, will be presenting “The Art and Science of Optimizing Price in Configured Products: It’s All About the Metrics” on Monday, October 24 from 3:30-4:20 PM. This session will provide insight on how to improve price for any configured products company by using the right metrics.

“Price Management and Sales Configuration are perfectly complementary solutions,” said Ken Pulverman, Vice President of Marketing at Vendavo. “We are very pleased to highlight at BigIdeas 2011 the joint value our customers are achieving by deploying our solutions together.”

“BigIdeas Chicago is the largest gathering of BigMachines customers, partners and industry experts,” said Will Wiegler, Vice President of Marketing, BigMachines. “This annual event delivers inspiration, innovation and practical solutions to help companies grow their sales using industry-leading, cloud-based solutions from BigMachines and its partners. We are delighted to provide a showcase for Vendavo to present its solutions to our conference attendees.”

The BigIdeas conference offers sales and business professionals a chance to learn how to sell more and sell faster from cloud computing industry leaders. Attendees will collaborate on new methods to streamline their selling process, reduce costs and increase revenues using the BigMachines Selling Platform and complementary solutions. Whether a company sells direct, through reseller channels, or online to customers, BigIdeas attendees will discover the latest solutions and best practices to improve their business processes. Register now at www.bigmachines.com/bigideas.

This is a re-post from our website.

BigMachines, Inc., the global leader in product configuration, pricing and quoting, proposal generator and B2B ecommerce, today announced the featured speakers for its BigIdeas Chicago 2011 customer and cloud conference, which will be held October 23 to 25, 2011 at the Swissôtel Chicago. BigIdeas has become one of the largest cloud innovation conferences where attendees share and learn best practices for increasing productivity and generating high value by streamlining their sales processes.

BigIdeas will feature the following keynote speakers:

• David Bonnette, President, BigMachines, discussing the pillars of customer success
• Kaihan Krippendorff, a blogger for Fast Company who has been featured in Business Week and Harvard Business Review, and is the author of three business strategy books, speaking on how to out-think the competition
• Justin Shriber, Region Vice President, Oracle SaaS Applications Group, sharing lessons for sales teams to deliver strong results, even when times are tough
• Peter Gaylord, Director of Product Marketing, Sales Cloud, salesforce.com, discussing how a Social Enterprise approach can improve your sales results -- and your bottom line
• Frederic Kerrest, President and Co-Founder, Okta, sharing best practices for companies who are expanding their use of cloud apps within their organizations

"Delivering unmatched customer success is the mission for BigMachines. Period. This principle will resonate throughout our BigIdeas conference," said David Bonnette. "Many of our conference sessions will spotlight our customers' innovation and success in three core areas: driving and accelerating adoption of our solutions; increasing productivity; and generating valuable results. BigIdeas is a great opportunity to learn, share and take away insights that you can use to make an immediate impact on your business growth."

The BigIdeas Chicago conference will feature interactive sessions focused on solutions for B2B eCommerce, channel sales, product configuration, and proposal and contract generation, among other topics. In addition, a variety of training and certification opportunities are available to customers and partners of all skill levels. Conference attendees are also invited to a gala celebration at the House of Blues Chicago.

Conference sponsors will showcase their services and solutions in the BigIdeas Sponsor Expo and during conference sessions.

• Platinum sponsors include Okta, Oracle and salesforce.com.
• Gold sponsors include Channelinsight, IBM, InsideView, PROS, Vendavo and Xactly.
• Silver sponsors include Accenture, Cloud9, DocuSign, EDL Consulting, Lumographics and Pierce Washington.

Additional information about BigIdeas for attendees, media, and sponsors can be found at www.bigmachines.com/bigideas.

BigIdeas Chicago, BigMachines' Customer & Cloud Conference, is just a few weeks away and we are looking forward to seeing you there! At each BigIdeas conference we celebrate the BigMachines community and this year is no exception as we focus on the theme of Customer Success. BigMachines has grown to be the industry leader by recognizing that customer success equals our success. We live and breathe this philosophy at every level in the company. At BigIdeas, much of the focus will be on YOU: our customers, prospects and partners. We will examine best practices that enable our customers to become successful and how BigMachines, as well as our partners, can help accelerate that success. We continue to develop innovations and focus on best practices to help your business grow and be more productive, and we will showcase powerful solutions to help your organization sell more and sell faster.

At BigIdeas 2011, we will introduce BigMachines 12 – the newest release of our award-winning selling platform, designed to empower all your sales channels with innovative solutions that include guided selling, configuration, pricing, quoting, proposal and contract output, and much more.

Throughout the conference you can choose from a variety of customer panels to hear first-hand experiences from other companies that have improved their business processes and grown revenue. If you are more the hands-on type, you can attend training classes to learn all about the new capabilities of BigMachines 12. Participate in interactive product roadmap sessions and share your input and ideas with our Product Management team. For new customers and prospects, we'll discuss best practices for getting started with BigMachines and how to drive adoption across your organization. And we’ll engage in conversations with you throughout the event to learn how we can help your business succeed and generate more sales, faster and with more accuracy.

Interested in sharing your success at the event? Contact us to learn more about presentation and customer panel speaking opportunities.

2011 also marks BigMachines' third annual Customer Innovation Awards, presented to customers who show innovations in their use of the BigMachines Selling Platform, demonstrate measureable ROI, and have contributed to BigMachines product enhancements. Previous award recipients include Solar Turbines, SPX Process Equipment, Acme Packet, and Williams. Nominate your organization for the Big Innovation Award and Big Success Award. Our third award, the Biggest Idea Award, goes to the BigMachines customer who has submitted the most popular idea via the My BigIdea online community. Ideas submitted to My BigIdea help ensure that each new release of our BigMachines software includes the features that are most valuable to you.

And if all that isn't enough, we're throwing a party to celebrate our growing community at House of Blues Chicago! We hope to see you at BigIdeas in Chicago. It's October 23-25 and we still have a few seats left, so don't wait!

Oracle OpenWorld is all about exploring technology: how to get more out of what you have, how to prepare for what's coming next, and how to choose from and use an ever-growing collection of choices to develop just the system you need for your business. The new skills, new connections, and new ideas for extending the value of your company's IT investments more than justify the time and expense required for a week of unparalleled learning.

OpenWorld is a great chance to learn how the BigMachines selling platform can help you to streamline sales processes whether you sell direct, through channel resellers, or via eCommerce.  This is also an opportunity to speak to the BigMachines team about our solutions for Oracle users, view demos, meet some of our current customers, or discuss partnering opportunities.

Find BigMachines in the CRM On Demand Pavilion in Moscone West, booth 3837, October 2-6, where we'll demo our award-winning product configuration, pricing, quoting and proposal, and eCommerce solutions. As a member of the Oracle Inner Circle, BigMachines is part of a select group of best-of-breed partners that have demonstrated significant value driven by proven customer success, traction with Oracle's sales organization, and synergy with Oracle CRM On Demand's current and future direction. Learn more and register.

Unable to make the event? Join us for a live product demo on September 22!

BigMachines booth at Dreamforce was buzzing throughout the event with many new and experienced salesforce.com CRM users interested in learning more about product configuration, pricing, quoting, proposal and eCommerce software.

In addition to showing our BigMachines selling platform, we also shared demos of QuickConfig integrated with Salesforce Real Time Quotes and Conga Composer - which creates a complete quoting and proposal solution for small business in need of guided selling and configuration.

In addition to live product demos of our award-winning software, BigMachines could be found during general sessions with our customers from ArcSight (an HP Company), Brocade Communications and Acme Packet who shared how they use the BigMachines selling platform and the measurable benefits achieved after implementation.

If you had a chance to stop by and say hello - thank you! We hope you will join us later this year at our customer and cloud computing conference, BigIdeas. If you were not able to make it, join us on September 22 at 2 PM Central Time to learn how you can streamline the sales process from inquiry to order with product configuration, workflow approvals and proposal generation.

This is a repost from our website.

BigMachines, Inc., the leader in product configuration, pricing and quoting, proposal generation and B2B ecommerce, was named to Inc. magazine's fifth annual Inc. 5000 list. BigMachines is number 1307 on this exclusive ranking of the nation's fastest-growing private companies. The list represents the most comprehensive look at the most important segment of the economy—America’s independent entrepreneurs.

This announcement marks the fourth consecutive year that BigMachines has been named to the Inc. 5000 list.  The company also ranked number 42 on the list of Top Companies in the Chicago Metro Area and number 105 on the list of Top Software Companies in America.

The company has seen a three-year revenue growth of 221 percent. The first half of 2011, BigMachines achieved 92 percent growth in contract bookings and added over 30 new customers. BigMachines has also added to its worldwide team by hiring employees in the areas of product development, services and support, and sales.

"BigMachines' sustained growth can be attributed to ongoing innovations in its industry leading selling platform; the company’s unwavering focus on customer success and delivering measureable business results; and in hiring world-class talent," said David Bonnette, President, BigMachines. "Our SaaS solution helps customers streamline their sales processes, so they can sell more, sell faster and drive more revenue. "

BigMachines will showcase its ongoing innovation at BigIdeas 2011, BigMachines' annual Customer and Cloud Conference, at the Swissotel Chicago on October 23 to 25.  Attendees of BigIdeas will discover the latest solutions and best practices to streamline their sales processes reduce costs and increase revenues.  Information is available at www.bigmachines.com/bigideas.

At BigMachines, we love numbers! Reporting, analytics, statistics, dashboards...give us some data and we'll dig in!

We recently examined traffic to our blog to better understand our readers - sales reps from around the world, data savvy executives, and business operations analysts looking for innovative ways to help their teams sell more and sell faster.

One of the biggest trends we found is the high number of readers visiting us from mobile devices - our readers are on the go and don't have time to stop!

So why should manual sales processes get in the way? BigMachines Customers take advantage of web-based product configurators, mobile web and email approvals, offline quoting using BigMachines Unplugged and more to continuously drive sales, delight their customers and never stop.

If you're reading this on-the-go, leave us a comment about the tools you use that help streamline sales remotely.

Sales Documents convey how "together" you are as an organization - did you throw something together, or take the time to understand, customize, and prioritize the relationship?

In this weekly series, we'll share the benefits of the BigMachines Document Engine and leave you with a better understanding of what makes a winning proposal (or quote, or contract)!

Reporting on Sales Contract Trends
Sales documents present a unique challenge to compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX). A typical inquiry-to-order process introduces a high probability for SOX compliance issues to arise. Manual sales processes with high levels of manual interaction are fraught with SOX compliance risk Approval Tracking. BigMachines creates an electronic approval trail and records a complete quote history which enhances a company's compliance efforts by creating an audit trail and more transparency within the financial reports.

In addition, with so much data spread across systems, companies often aren’t digging into the data effectively – which means they are lacking a line of sight into how well their products are performing – and still being held accountable to achieve goals and provide metrics.

Contract data stored in BigMachines can be used to generate reports and analyze contract trends. In today's competitive market, you will have the advantage of understanding the patterns found in your successful contracts and can use that knowledge to close more business in the future.

If you're ready to take Sales Documents to new levels of efficiency, accuracy and branding, keep the following in mind:

• Sales Quotes, Proposals, Contracts, Order and Receipts all offer opportunities for enhanced branding and promotion of additional offers
• Consistency with messaging across sales and marketing collateral helps to solidify your attention to the relationship
• Integrating to CRM, ERP, eSignature and Document Libraries guarantees accuracy and increases efficiency by eliminating multiple points of manual data entry
• Great sales documents are just the beginning, reporting and understanding of trends is the next step in optimizing the sales process

Learn more about BigMachines Document Engine or read a case study on how Bottomline Technologies utilizes BigMachines to provide a single view of customer data, in addition to automatically updating sales forecasts as quotes and orders are created and changed.


Other posts in this series:
Sales Documents: Quote, Proposal, Contract, Order, Receipt
Sales Documents: Marketing's Perspective on Sales Quotes, Proposals and Contracts
Sales Documents: Streamline the Creation Process with Integration, Versioning, and eSignatures
Sales Documents: Reporting on Sales Contract Trends

If you sell directly to other businesses or consumers, you already know how important speed, accuracy and presentation are to close deals.

BigMachines offers a variety of solutions to add speed and accuracy to the quoting and proposal, and order process. Here's how a BigMachines Customer utilizes product configuration, quoting and proposals to sell more and sell faster.

Configure products and services in minutes instead of days using BigMachines Guided Selling, which organizes product specifications as a series of question menus to guide users through the configuration process.

Send custom, validated, configurations on for review and approval via automated workflows. Sales Management, Product Engineers or Finance teams can approve sales quotes on the go via email and eliminate bottlenecks.

Once approved, use BigMachines Document Engine to send a dynamic, personalized sales quote, proposal or contract to customers. Easily add product datasheets, custom terms and conditions, customer logos and more via print, email, or fax in MS Word, Adobe PDF, and/or HTML format.

Need your document signed? BigMachines supports integration of leading electronic signature vendors to provide convenience and fast turnaround for your customers.

When you're ready to submit, use BigMachines to eliminate manual order entry and send approved quotes automatically to back end accounting or ERP systems; orders can even be routed through another approval process as needed with the electronic workflow.

Finally, take advantage of BigMachines Reporting and Analytics to stay on top of the pipeline by generating reports to help you improve quote management, forecasting, and product management.

Now what? Let BigMachines help streamline the renewal process for your existing customers. Quickly and accurately repackage or extend agreements for service and support, software licenses, subscription annuities and more.

In the field and on the go? Generate quotes even when you're offline from the Internet using BigMachines Unplugged. Offline users can configure, price, and generate quotes as well as go online to upload and download quotes to and from a central database.

Ready to extend your reach? BigMachines eCommerce Engine allows you to build a self-service, guided selling and configuration platform for your B2B and B2C customers to shop online.

Sales Documents convey how "together" you are as an organization - did you throw something together, or take the time to understand, customize, and prioritize the relationship?

In this weekly series, we'll share the benefits of the BigMachines Document Engine and leave you with a better understanding of what makes a winning proposal (or quote, or contract)!

Marketing's Perspective on Sales Quote, Proposal and Contracts
Whether it is realized internally or not, sales quotes, proposals, contracts and other sales-related documents are some of the most important pieces of marketing collateral you give a prospect.

As someone on the marketing team, I cringe when I receive a spreadsheet proposal at the end of an otherwise well polished sales presentation. I may be biased, but I notice copy/paste errors, incorrectly populated formulas, and poorly sized graphics.

Connect sales with marketing by keeping three key concepts in mind while preparing sales documents:

• Brand - Are documents consistently labeled and branded?
• Image - Does your document represent you and your company in the best light?
• Value - Did your document take over a week to prepare or are you ready and willing to engage in business at the same time as your prospect?

Take a look below to see how one BigMachines’ customer transformed their sales documents from manual, messy, and often inaccurate to streamlined, polished, and validated.



Other posts in this series:
Sales Documents: Quote, Proposal, Contract, Order, Receipt
Sales Documents: Marketing's Perspective on Sales Quotes, Proposals and Contracts
Sales Documents: Streamline the Creation Process with Integration, Versioning, and eSignatures
Sales Documents: Reporting on Sales Contract Trends