October 16, 2022
"For us the speed of creating offers is a huge improvement compared to earlier. The possiblity to use a project template and adjust the dates and quantity makes the offer process fast – I would say less than 10 minutes"
ANNAMARIA OLOFSSON
COO, HACKHOLMSSUND
Sales templates serve as an effective guide for your team when it comes to creating proposals or offers to send out to customers. Templates provide an outline of which information, options, even products, or services to include in a proposal. Thus, the salesperson simply needs to copy and amend or add details as necessary to deliver a proposal to a customer quickly.
Structured sales templates and the use of them are the key to sales success as it contributes to a better sales process and a better purchasing process. Read on for why and how sales leaders should set up and implement templates into their sales processes for sales success.
To keep up with an evolving market, sales teams must find ways to be more effective to stand out from competitors and close sales. You might recognise that creating proposals from scratch over and over is becoming an ineffective use of time, especially when the same products or services are being offered each time. Without predetermined and shareable content, sales teams are at a disadvantage.
Being able to use templates to create proposals will save a lot of time for sales teams. For instance, if templates have been created for multiple destinations, the seller can duplicate the relevant template or content for a request for a particular location, reducing manual input. If for example, the destination for an annual company kick-off is London, the descriptions, relevant products, services and suppliers, (such as hotels/accommodation, activities and restaurants) can already be included in the template.
Secondly, when it comes to training new employees, it may take longer for them to get acquainted with the sales processes as there are no clear guidelines to demonstrate and follow. Our onboarding experience shows that standardising work processes in Qondor shortens time to value as it gets users up to speed faster (something we discuss more in point 2). This is great for getting new sales employees trained effectively.
As we train new users on the Qondor platform, we strongly encourage you to focus on templates right away. Our experience shows that there are many who make their own offers as they think it is best themselves, and then they are happy to copy from this on new offers. It is not uncommon for us to see completely different offer designs for the same service from different people in the sales team. Much is left to the seller himself to think of the best way to do it, and not everyone has the same eye for design and aesthetics.
By using templates, the presentation of the content is standardized and accessible, and it can be based on best practice, experience, promotional products, meeting facilities, location, seasonal packages, etc. By standardizing the content, you also set the standard for how all salespeople in the team make offers. . This makes it easier to transfer experience between each other, and it becomes much easier to take over sales processes from colleagues. It ensures good quality in the sales work and reduces sources of error and misleading information.
In many cases, however, a tailor-made approach is required, so the templates should be flexible enough to update the actual offer according to the customer's needs. The important thing is that you can take the starting point in a template so that you ensure that the design is as comprehensive as possible. If you have made an offer you are really happy with, then you can easily make a template of it so that it can be reused by more people later.
We recommend that proposals are always quality checked and tested before sending to a customer as they are a vital sales document. If employees in the same team are using different methods or templates, and these have not been approved this will leave more room for error.
With predefined templates, sales teams save time on creating the proposal and get to spend more time on the customer. For instance, a lot of time can be saved by using a common set of general terms and conditions across proposals and adding these to the template. By using templates and defining content, the sales output will be consistent across the sales team and for all customers.
Changes can come about at any point, and therefore Sales leaders may need to update templates. Qondor allows templates to be immediately updated as and when required. Along with this, templates are protected from accidental changes, as editing rights can be restricted to certain team members only. When updating the template, there is no risk of changing proposals already created from the template. Likewise, a proposal that is based on the template can be amended by the seller and will have no effect on the original template.
Need help? Our Customer Success Team can set up your templates in no time!
Not convinced yet? Read more about using templates in Qondor in our help center
Creating templates in Qondor prove to be a real timesaver for our customers and users. The additional advantages of creating sales templates in Qondor is that they are simple to set up, are protected, and can be accessed, edited, viewed and copied from in the same place. Furthermore, users can create a database of products or services, so when duplicating a general template, the seller is able to provide a more tailored interactive proposal, and quickly add these from a shared database. We highly recommend sales templates and to make this part of your sales team’s routine to ensure a more effective, collaborative and quality assuring sales process. This will result in more time and more sales.