About Sales Quotations

Here is a true story. (All my stories are true. If I made them up in a novel you would not believe them.)

My new client, Dave (not his real name) sells a product that we all need. It is a high-value item. We each buy one every 10 years or so. Dave wants some help finding clients. That’s what we do, so we dive into action.

Within 10 days Dave has received more than 50 leads, some of which are worth about R250,000 if the deals come through. (Hotels need this product en masse.)

Dave calls up. He is not a happy camper. Turns out that the leads are not turning into sales. We hear this often so we start at Dave’s coalface: How does he respond when an inquiry arrives in his email inbox. (Or in the boxes of his office slaves.)

That’s easy. The prospect either gets a quotation or a price list. We ask to look at the covering email.

The covering email is a problem:

No mention of Dave’s firm.
No gentle thank you for the request.
Not even a phone number for the prospect to call to place the order.

In other words, he sends a standard SA quotation. Even if a prospect wanted to buy, she could not.

“Dave, please tell me that you at least called that fellow looking for 500 units last week?” (No chance, that prospect got the ‘standard’ email.)

So, no sales, and it’s not the leads that are bad, it’s Dave’s process.

I told this story on Tuesday night to 100 SA business owners. I asked them how many of them had a simple response process in place. (In other words, how many had taken some time to think through the process by which a stranger becomes a client.) Just one in five!

It’s not just a prepared response for a possible big sale. (In which case an instant phone call is crucial, in my humble view.)
It’s also a response to a possible small sale.
And it’s even a response for a NO sale. (That might be someone looking for a job, or for help to do it himself. In this case, a polite email response is useful to say that Dave cannot help, but which offers links to a few sites like the industry association, or Dave’s biggest competitor who might have the time to get involved.)

We’re finding more than 11,000 sales inquiries each month, and many of our clients treat each one as if it’s the first they have ever seen. Hint: An ounce of routine is worth a ton of inspiration. (Not sure who said that but I heard it somewhere.)

We call the document we send to a person (to persuade them to give us money) a quotation. It isn’t. A quotation is something clever a famous person like Errol Flynn once said: “My problem lies in reconciling my gross habits with my net income.”

I think of it more as a sales proposal. A proposal should come after some dialogue. For instance, you and a stranger snuggling up on the couch to discuss your future. As you find common ground, and find that this person likes your jokes, you get comfortable together. After a while you make a proposal – based on what you know about the other person. And you indicate how much you really, really want to spend the next 200 years in her (in my case) arms.

A sales proposal is not quite so personal, but it also should not be like walking up a stranger on the street and suggesting a quickie – which is the way most small business sales quotations appear.

“Here is our price list.

If you want to buy one of these you must deposit 80% of the purchase price into our bank account within 3 days of ordering, as long as it is a day starting with a ‘T’.

We don’t have time to include any nice words from our clients about how great we are, because, well, you’re not important enough to us. So we’ll just tell you that we offer a unique service and that excellence is our motto.

We know that you wanted this for your children, but we don’t have time to tell you how our children’s product differs from our office product or garden product because, well, you’re not important to us. And besides, we’re too busy making the blerry things.

Our order process is so obvious that we’re not going to waste time detailing it here. Just remember that all orders need to be lodged in triplicate, with an official order number, between 3:30pm and 4:30pm. As long as the day does not start with a ‘T’.”

The good news is that the service bar in SA is so low that my pet earthworm can jump over it. It’s like scuba diving. When a shark appears you don’t have to be an Olympic swimmer. You just need to swim a little faster than Dave.