Top 5 Challenges for Sales and Distributors
Problems commonly found with sales teams and their documents often relate to organization, consistency, accessibility, accuracy, and collaboration.
Sales teams need software that can track leads, opportunities, bids/quote/estimates/takeoffs, quoted line items, orders from factory, Vendor agreements, pricing, discounts, and product information.
1. Information is not Consistent and Up-to-date
Sales documents often include outdated or inconsistent information, like pricing, policies, and product details. Without regular updates, sales teams may inadvertently provide incorrect information to customers, which can harm trust and credibility.
The software should provide a platform where everyone knows where the latest, most up-to-date information is located for quotes, agreements, vendor pricing documents, product information, links to supplier website pages, takeoff spreadsheets and more.
2. Non-standardized Quotes and Sales Tools
When there isn’t a standardized format, or branding, sales documents become inconsistent, and it’s challenging for sales teams to maintain a cohesive message. A lack of templates can result in varied quality and style, confusing clients and prospects.
The software solution should provide easy access to master Word and Excel sales and estimating templates to enable the entire sales team to quickly develop quotes that can be delivered to the customer looking consistent and accurate – no matter which sales rep generates them.
3. Documents Scattered and not Organized
Typically, sales documents are often scattered across different locations—laptops, server drives, emails, and personal folders. Without a central repository or a content management system, it’s challenging for sales teams to access the correct documents quickly, leading to delays in responding to clients.
A modern software tool provides a cloud-based organized repository for all documents which allows users to search, find, create, update documents on any device anywhere. Quotes, Agreements, Pricing Pages, and other sales documents are automatically organized by customer, project, supplier or any other work type using the document’s metadata.
Sales teams deal with tons of emails. They also need a system that can organize email attachments and automatically save them to the customer, project, vendor, etc. So information doesn’t get lost in individual’s inboxes.
4. Time to Preparing and Update Quotes
Preparing quotes can take a combination of looking up product catalogs, pricing/discount agreements, and online pricing programs. The software solution keeps these documents and web links organized by vendor to allow the rep to find the pricing and product information fast.
Need to update a Quote? The software should automatically keeps previous versions of documents so sales teams can revise and always go back to a previous version if the customer changes their mind.
5. Lack of a Collaboration Tool
Sales teams frequently collaborate on proposals, quotes, and presentations. After quotes are sent and approved, managers, assistants and accounting needs to know what was quoted, approved, and ordered. Without proper document control, it’s easy to lose track of changes, leading to duplicated work, errors, and costly time loss. This issue can slow down the sales process and create confusion.
Solution: Dragonfly
Dragonfly software makes all these challenges go away by giving a centralized, secure cloud software platform that is customizable for the business. It allows the right people to search, find, create, edit, and store documents with a powerful task management system that keeps everyone working together efficiently.
Dragonfly is available as a free trial
