I wanted to actually title this article: "The Art of the Deal Quote" but couldn't figure out how to use the strikeout feature in the title. But you get the idea I think. Often, we may not really appreciate how much of the sales process is encompassed in the quote process. I have had the great (mis)fortune to re-learn this recently and thought it worth sharing.
It's no secret that technology organizations love their technology. We sometimes get so enamored with our technology we feel that if our prospective customers could just understand our technology, they couldn't help but love it too.
Problem is, our customers may not be technology organizations, and often their problems are not directly technology related, it's just the tool we have that we can hit them with. As a result, our deeply technical RFP responses can sometimes completely miss the mark of what the customer is actually asking for. We say "our high-availability, fully redundant systems deliver 'five nines' of guaranteed uptime within specified operating parameters." They've asked how reliable our product is.
Alternately, we've had companies with RFPs asking very specific technical questions for very highly technical operating specifications. Once the marketing and sales department is done preparing the bid response, the customer receives 24 pages of white papers, press releases, spec sheets and one page of brief ambiguous non-answers to their technical concerns. This concept of "killing a tree" to distract the client from insufficient technical doesn't work either.
Our company has recently instituted a "quote management" process that puts as much emphasis on development and delivery of the RFP response and quote as we've previously applied to the product design and development effort. Dedicated "project manager", peer review process, budget and schedule authorization sign-offs. Sure it's Bureaucracy with a capital B, but when so much rides on the acceptance of the quote, it makes a lot of sense.
How much QC and management oversight is applied to your customer quotes?
