As someone who creates documents for a living, I can attest that it isnt easy, particularly when trying to make important points to people with limited time to read information.
This can be particularly true for sales and marketing teams, since they are often tasked with building communications tailored to show their products and services as best-suited to individual customer needs—lots of individual customers needs.
To simplify and structure this kind of work, and to make it easily reproducible, a small number of companies have introduced proposal automation suites. These products are designed to help users develop proposals, presentations and responses to RFPs (requests for proposal) using data that will be most relevant to a particular customers needs.
The applications help sales staffers consult more effectively by allowing them to focus on messages that address customer pain points and package success stories about companies of similar size in the same industry.
Im currently testing two such suites: SAVO Groups Sales Asset Manager and Sants Sant Suite. Sales Asset Manager has been available as a hosted application from its inception, while Sant has just introduced a hosted version of Sant Suite. Im also looking at a search tool from Pragmatech that helps salespeople find relevant information that resides outside of proposal automation applications.
How well these products meet their respective goals will be revealed in my reviews in the coming weeks.
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