3 HUGE Reasons Your Sales Team Needs Proposal Management Software

Jennifer Tomlinson
Written by Jennifer Tomlinson / Mar 15, 2022

As Executive VP of Marketing, I work to identify business needs and help QorusDocs’ clients generate revenue more effectively and efficiently. I spearhead efforts to increase brand awareness through digital marketing and client engagement.

Sales teams spend countless hours establishing and nurturing relationships with prospects. Yet too many sales organizations needlessly compromise the investment in those relationships with a sales response process that fumbles the ball on the one yard line.  

If the response process is clunky, inefficient, and rife with stakeholder collaboration headaches, sales suffer; if sales proposals aren’t designed with personalized, branded, customized content and quality images, win rates fall; if content is sloppy, inaccurate, or out-of-date, revenue declines.  

Don’t let your sales team throw the game. By giving them the tools and technology—specifically, AI-powered proposal management software—to level up the critical sales response process, they’ll be able to quickly and easily create stunning proposals that win business. And by simplifying and automating the response process, sales professionals will waste less time hunting down content and following up with subject matter experts (SMEs), while gaining more time to spend in front of prospects and clients. Win-win. 

Benefits of proposal management software for sales professionals 

In a survey QorusDocs conducted last year, we uncovered companies’ biggest proposal challenges: 

  1. Developing new content
  2. Updating old content
  3. Getting stakeholders to collaborate in a timely manner
  4. Lack of resources
  5. Design and templates


What do these challenges have in common? Lost time and wasted effort. On a similar note, a recent sales productivity survey found that sales reps are spending as little as 30% of their time actually selling. Instead, the picture is a sluggish mix of meetings and admin: 

  • 37% of salespeople spend 6-10% of their time in internal meetings 
  • 32% spend 11-20% of their time doing paperwork 
  • 31% spend 11-20% of their time servicing current customers 
  • 31% spend 20-25% of their time in discovery meetings 
  • 41% spend 6-10% of their time in sales training 
  • 32% spend 6-10% of their time in meetings to close business 

The goal is to help your sales team free up time and energy to engage and nurture prospects through the funnel. By automating a major portion of the document creation process, proposal management software empowers sales teams, saving them time and effort across the sales response process—from proposal creation to close. Plus, they’re able to win more business with well-designed, accurate sales proposals that clearly articulate the value proposition and stand out from the competition. 

Let’s break it down: 

  1. Save serious time & money

    To increase the efficiency of the response process, proposal management software unites team members and projects with a centralized content hub, slashing the manual hours your sales team is spending creating proposals, while reducing errors and maintaining consistency. 

    With branded, pre-approved templates, proposal management software helps you get to the first draft faster. AI-powered technology accelerates the response process by searching your content library for the most relevant elements and inserting them into your document automatically to quickly create a first draft.

    Indeed, a recent survey of proposal management software users found that 76% of respondents believed that the software helped them decrease time spent on completing a response, with an average improvement in deal velocity of 50%.

    If you’re curious about how much wasted time is costing your sales organization, check out our ROI calculator; see how much you could save with software that automates much of the proposal process, eliminates inefficiencies, and shrinks the time it takes to complete sales documents.
     
  2. Collaborate more effectively

    Hybrid workforces—a mix of in-office and remote employees—is becoming the norm, with some sales professionals preferring to stick with the work-from-home model after pandemic restrictions eased, while others opted to return to the office. Proposal management software streamlines collaboration for distributed workforces, enabling you to instantly get the accurate and relevant proposal content you need from Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and other stakeholders, no matter where you’re working.

    Plus, when you’ve got QorusDocs proposal automation software in your tech stack, your sales team can collaboratively create professional-looking proposals without leaving the Microsoft Office applications or CRM system they use every day. 
     
  3. Win more deals with proven content

    Modern AI-driven proposal management technology provides in-depth engagement insights that manual proposal processes simply can’t offer. With built-in measurement tools, proposal management software can track how long a reader stays on each page, what they click on, and what they share. These insights are invaluable for informing future proposal creation and business decisions.

    Did you know QorusDocs gets smarter with each use? With data-driven content recommendations that suggest content with the highest engagement level, you can feel confident you’re creating an optimized proposal every time. 

In a nutshell 

With sales reps spending, on average, only 36% of their time on revenue-generating activities, they need tools and technology to increase their efficiency and boost productivity, with the aim of speeding up the sales cycle and closing more deals. Proposal management software is the secret weapon for sales teams, simplifying and accelerating the critical response process to deliver stand-out sales proposals that consistently win business.  

Read our discussion with ManpowerGroup about how they used QorusDocs + Highspot to streamline content management and automate the sales response process to build a scalable and predictable revenue engine. Or watch the full conversation here!