PARTNER SPOTLIGHT:SpringCM Smoothes the Writing of Sales Proposals and Contracts

Most sales professionals don’t like writing sales proposals and sales contracts. And no wonder. Writing, even as part of a team, is a solitary activity and most sales professionals are "people oriented." To make matters worse, it’s all too easy for an otherwise dynamic sales professional to get bogged down in the mechanics of writing and the seemingly endless chain of review and approval.

Sales teams wanting a tool to help them manage the process with little hassle should take a look at SpringCM, a document management system available under AppExchange. Here’s how it works:

You put documents (like boilerplates, old proposals, correspondence, old contracts, etc.) into a central repository so that it’s easier to find the chunks you need while you’re writing. As you and your peers work on the document, you use SpringCM to collaborate by sending document chunks to the people who need to see them and need to contribute to the final document. As you assemble the final proposal or contract, SpringCM tracks the history of the writing process and the versions of the various parts, so that out-of-date material doesn’t accidentally make it into the final version. Finally, you use SpringCM to send the finished document for final approval and sign off.

As a nice bonus, SpringCM manages scanned paper documents as well as electronic files. Such documents remain with the repository and can be located based upon words that occur in the paper document. This means that you can include customer information (like the brochures they give to THEIR customers) even if you don’t have that information in a digital format.

What We Like about It:
Writing sales proposals and sales contracts is a productivity sinkhole inside most sales teams. Time spent writing (and futzing over the minutia of the writing process) is time that could be spent developing new business. What’s more, if the writing process creates a delay in the sales process, there’s a very real possibility that the deal might fold up, due to changing circumstances. We’ve even seen situations where a competitor got in the back door while the customer was waiting for the selected vendor to respond with a contract.

In other words, because SpringCM accelerates the writing of proposals and contracts (as well as sales collateral and other sales-oriented documents) it frees up resources that can be used to develop and close more business. At the same time, the faster turnaround reduces the risk that a sales cycle will get interrupted prior to closing. Providing sales representatives with an easier way to develop sales documents is thus a bottom-line issue impacting both revenue and profit.

PROFILE:
Partner: SpringCM
Application: SpringCM
Application Published: March 2007
Average User Rating: Five out of five stars
Pricing Plan: Free trial; discounts available for salesforce.com users
More Info: : www.SpringCM.com