Sales Proposals

            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?

It seems like there is always some new kind of marketing trend each day.  Between tagging, tweeting, commenting, blogging and joining groups, it seems easy for your business to get lost in the jumble of things. As a social media addict, I at times lose hours to my habit/addiction. But social media marketing should not be one of them.  Social media is a great way to get word out about your business and its capabilities.  Whether it’s through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or any other social media outlet, word spreads around and it is a great way to make connections and network with others in your industry. 

As opposed to traditional marketing strategies like advertisements through different forms of standard media, social media marketing is a new-ish method of marketing your business and it is transforming the ways in which we speak today.  With the growth of Internet users and smart phone owners, it is now easier than ever to find information, discuss news and reach a larger audience, all without your checkbook every being disturbed.  According to Dave Evans and Jake McKee, authors of Social Media Marketing: The Next Generation of Business Engagement, “A July 2009 Anderson Analytics study found 60% of the Internet population uses social networks and social media sites such as Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter.”  Over half of users!     

With such a large audience to reach out to, BigMachines has taken the opportunity to use resources like Facebook, Twitter and blogging to inform both prospects and customers about our capabilities, press releases and best practices.  By taking advantage of new social media trends, BigMachines can reach more people than we could have before.  Our clients can not only be up-to-date about news like the annual BigIdeas Conference and new software releases, but they can discuss these topics together as well.  They can also have more access to information about different aspects of our software including Enterprise Resource Planning software, online sales tools and proposal automation. Best of all, our customers can interact with one another and share ideas and best practices. We have found great success with social media not because we are industry geniuses (even though we like to think we are) but because we center all of our offerings on our customers. We let them guide us on topics to even how we shape our product. 

With social media marketing, we can increase sales and provide more information and resources to our customers and prospects.  Social media marketing is the future in building both the knowledge about your business and its success. If you haven’t done so already, join the movement!

Join the Official BigMachines Facebook Page here.

Join one of BigMachines' LinkedIn Forums here.

Join my network of professionals on LinkedIn here.

Tweet with us here.

See what I have to say about the IT and Sales Industry on Twitter here.

2.6 seconds left.  Down by 1.  A spot in the National Championship on the line.  It all comes down to a full-court pass and making an open shot.  We all remember the epic 1992 East Regional Final game when Duke miraculously came back from a deficit and beat Kentucky in the final seconds of the game.  But that last-second, buzzer-beater shot he took was more than just luck.  It was well-planned.  Every play has been thought out and practiced before being executed on the court.  Without good planning, training, practicing and the right tools, each team would be unable to continue on in the bracket.  With the chance of either going home or staying in the tournament, a team and its members ensure that they are prepared for March and its ensuing madness.  For example, a team must know their opponent’s best zone defense, their sweet spots, their best free throw shooters and how to get past their defense.  A team would not be able to do that without the proper information and resources.  They not only need a coach who knows the ins and outs of how to stay in the tournament and beat your opponent, but each player from the center to the guard needs to be on the same page as well.                                      In keeping up with the spirit of March Madness, BigMachines’ sales team functions in much the same way.  Similar to the basketball coach, Sales Managers must coordinate their team of associates and interns in order to find leads and make contacts.  Ultimately, the manager's goal is to call the plays and close the sale, much like that last-second, buzzer-beater shot that ensured Duke a spot in the championship.  The Sales Associates run out the play and use online sales tools like sales and marketing software, proposal development software, and an order management system to help close the case.  Without the proper resources to research, contact and inform the client of BigMachines’ capabilities, the sales team would end up on the losing side of things like Kentucky. 

As an Ecommerce Solution Company, we strive to provide a Business to Business Ecommerce Solution that helps you sell more and sell faster.   With the right solution, Duke ended up winning that year and becoming the 1992 champions.  Without that well-executed full-court pass and final second shot, Duke never would have become the National Title holder that year.  It’s something to consider, does your sales team have the right tools and resources to close the sale and win it all?

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

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

BigMachines recently announced a partnership between its Japanese subsidiary, BigMachines, Co., Ltd., and Giraffa Factory, headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. This partnership will expand the availability of BigMachines' award-winning sales solutions to meet the growing demand for accurate configuration, quote generation and sales process management in the Japanese cloud computing market.

Giraffa Factory, a salesforce.com consulting partner and BigMachines customer, is a rapidly growing company that signed more than 30 new customers in Japan within the first half of 2011. Giraffa will offer and implement BigMachines’ cloud-based selling software to fulfill the configuration, quoting and proposal generation needs of its growing customer base, which encompasses a wide variety of industry verticals. As a BigMachines customer, Giraffa will also use BigMachines SaaS solution for its own configuration and quote generation needs.


Visit www.bigmachines.com for additional information and to read the complete press release.

BigMachines recently announced the release of BigMachines 12, the latest version of the company's award-winning SaaS selling solution. BigMachines software assists sales teams, channel partners and resellers in product configuration, pricing and quoting, proposal generation and B2B ecommerce.

Customers will benefit from enhancements and new features in BigMachines 12 including:

• The improved Migration Management Center allows customers to easily transfer changes between their BigMachines test and production sites. Customers can easily compare changes between two BigMachines instances, filter results, and select specific components to update. The new migration management center allows for greater visibility of changes and speeds up the migration process.

• BigMachines’ new Configuration Layout Editor allows customers to create complex configuration and search layouts with an easy to use drag-and-drop editor for pixel perfect control of the page layout. The results are web pages are easier to design, faster to load, and allow for richer functionality.

• BigMachines updated Commerce Rules Wizard now provides customers with a centralized location to create and edit all commerce rules.  The new functionality adds more flexibility in the BigMachines commerce process and improves the user experience by providing a more scalable, standardized way to create hiding attributes, constraints and validations within BigMachines.

Additional information can be found at www.bigmachines.com. Customers can view the BigMachines 12 release notes and learn more about scheduled upgrades by visiting support.bigmachines.com.

BigMachines' breakthrough innovation is on display in its brand new release, BigMachines 12, the latest version of the company’s flagship, award-winning SaaS platform. A sneak peek of the BETA version of the new release generated much interest and appreciation at BigIdeas, the annual BigMachines Customer and Cloud conference held October 23 – 25, 2011 in Chicago.

BigMachines 12 enriches the end user experience by allowing sales teams, channel partners and resellers to easily configure products, manage complex pricing, and generate quotes and proposals more efficiently and securely. The powerful online administration feature enhancements in BigMachines 12 will help admin users easily set up visually rich configuration pages, enhance the quoting experience for their end users and seamlessly migrate data from their staging and test environments to their production setups.

New features delivered in BigMachines 12 are the result of extensive industry research combined with customer input. BigMachines encourages active community participation in the form of:

• Customers ideas via the My BigIdea innovation web portal
• Interactions at Regional Customer Success Forums
• Votes on most-requested enhancements during BigIdeas in the United States and Europe
  

Current BigMachines customers will benefit from enhancements and new features in BigMachines 12 include the following:

• Intuitive drag and drop interface allows for high quality UX layouts of configuration pages.
• New AJAX commerce rules enable dynamic updates without the need to refresh pages, resulting in a rich end-user quoting experience
• One stop migration center administration provides enhanced ability to compare data between local and remote instances as well as seamlessly migrate data
• Enhanced step administration user interface simplifies management of workflow set ups

BigMachines BETA is scheduled to be available November 18th, 2011. Additional information can be found on the BigMachines Support Center.

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.

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.

Channelinsight, the leader of channel sales management solutions today announces a new partnership with BigMachines, the leader in product configuration, pricing and quoting, proposal generation and B2B ecommerce. Together these industry leaders have created a cloud-based solution that empowers enterprises to fully automate closed loop control into the discount management process, enabling customers to gain unprecedented visibility into channel sales data.

The partnership allows both companies to offer a channel sales management solution with unparalleled ability to maximize the return on discount pricing policies in the channel.  The solution leverages Channelinsight’s Lead to Ship™ functionality in tandem with BigMachines configuration, pricing and quoting capabilities to automatically close the loop from configuration to quote to shipment.  This results in better forecasting, reduced discounting and improved management of opportunities being fulfilled through the channel.

"We are consistently looking for ways to enhance the value we bring to our customers," said Mark Geene, CEO of Channelinsight. "Our partnership with BigMachines closes the loop on the discount management process with unprecedented control over special pricing and discounts. BigMachines cloud-based selling platform combined with Channelinsight Discount Manager allows enterprises to effectively manage the channel discount process."

Companies benefit from the new partnership by using the BigMachines cloud-based selling platform, integrated with Salesforce CRM, to help their sales teams and channel partners generate quotes, select and manage product configurations, automate renewal contracts, and enter orders.  Channelinsight Discount Manager reconciles POS data with quotes issued from BigMachines to automatically track sales results against special price quotes, reducing the time spent manually processing discount claims.  This provides complete visibility into their indirect sales channel. As a result of implementing this solution companies can expect to reduce their cost of processing discounts by 80 percent and ensure that partners are in compliance with their discount process.

"We look forward to working closely with Channelinsight to help enterprises across all industries sell more and sell faster," said Matt Gorniak, SVP Worldwide Sales and Alliances, BigMachines. "Our products and expertise are complementary, creating a win-win scenario for companies looking to better understand and serve their customers."

In addition, Channelinsight will be gold sponsor of BigIdeas Chicago 2011, the annual BigMachines customer and cloud conference for B2B professionals. Attendees can see Channelinsight’s offerings in action in the BigIdeas Sponsor Expo from October 23 – 25 at the Swissotel.

"We are excited to show BigIdeas attendees the synergies between BigMachines and Channelinsight, as we are both focused on streamlining and increasing the efficiency of the sales process," continued Mark Geene. "By pre-integrating our products we provide the most functional and cost-effective end-to-end discount management solution in the industry."

Learn more about BigIdeas at www.bigmachines.com/bigideas and more about Channelinsight at www.channelinsight.com

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.

This is a re-post from our website.

BigMachines, a Gold level member of Oracle® PartnerNetwork (OPN), today announced that BigMachines 11.1 software has achieved Oracle Validated Integration with Oracle CRM On Demand Release 19. BigMachines' on-demand selling platform enables customers to help increase sales and revenue. BigMachines provides innovative solutions for product configuration, pricing and quoting, proposal generation and B2B ecommerce. With this Oracle Validated Integration, key quoting activities from BigMachines can be accessed directly from Oracle CRM On Demand, providing customers with a seamless user experience, and ensuring accurate and convenient data flow between BigMachines and Oracle CRM On Demand.

To achieve Oracle Validated Integration, Oracle partners are required to meet a stringent set of requirements that are based on the needs and priorities of the customers. BigMachines integration with Oracle CRM On Demand Release 19 allows customers to extend the value of their CRM investment by providing a streamlined opportunity-to-quote-to-order process. Data stored in Oracle CRM On Demand can be accessed by BigMachines during the quoting process, helping ensure accurate product configurations and quotes. This data sharing also enhances CRM reporting and forecasting capabilities and eliminates redundant data re-entry into multiple systems.

"Our relationship with Oracle ensures that our customers experience seamless integration between Oracle CRM On Demand and BigMachines, enhancing user adoption and delivering more meaningful results," stated Tim Handorf, VP Product Management, BigMachines. "Many mutual customers have demonstrated measurable benefits from extending Oracle CRM On Demand with BigMachines, and the Oracle Validated Integration further demonstrates our product alignment."

Read the full press release on our website.

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!

CRM Magazine recently featured an article by Tim Handorf, BigMachines' Vice President of Product Management, titled Successful Sales Mobility Practices.  In this article, Tim describes the results of a recent sales mobility survey conducted by BigMachines. He reports on how salespeople have led the charge for mobile device adoption, not only as a means to facilitate selling, but to also enhance face-to-face customer interaction. 


Excerpt from Successful Sales Mobility Practices:

Customers appreciate mobility because it adds an extra degree of transparency to the deal. 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 incredibly advantageous to the client. The faster a customer is delivered the product or service it needs, the better off it will be.

Another benefit that applies to both the sales rep and the customer is how mobile devices minimize, or even eliminate, the confusion that often accompanies complex orders. Devices, equipped with adequate software applications, enable a sales rep to walk a customer through an entire order in-person, allowing the rep to easily explain and iterate through all of the options available right in front of the customer.


To read the entire article, visit CRM Magazine's Viewpoints section.

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.