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Companies looking to simplify building sales documents such as proposals will find Pragmatech Software Inc.s Proposal Automation Suite and The Savo Groups Sales Asset Manager good tools for creating standardized, customer-bound communications.
Proposal Automation Suite 6.0, which began shipping last month, and Sales Asset Manager 3.7, which was updated earlier this month, give sales and marketing teams a set of tools for creating standard descriptions of products and services and using those descriptions to build sales proposals automatically.
eWEEK Labs tests showed that using these tools will help companies standardize marketing messages and ensure sales content is up-to-date while reducing the time it takes for salespeople to create content.
Proposal Automation Suite, which runs on a PC, is part of a set of desktop and server applications that gives companies a way to build responses to RFPs (requests for proposals), presentations and other sales communications.
Pragmatech prices its components on a per-seat basis, with the suite costing $1,500 to $2,500 per seat.
Sales Asset Manager is a hosted application with several a la carte modules for developing brochures, proposals, presentations, e-mail messages and competitive intelligence. Pricing for the full suite is $700 per user per year.
Both applications provided good tools for building robust and complex sales documents. Companies that want to retain control of their sales and marketing documentation will find Proposal Automation Suite to be a powerful application, albeit one that requires considerable training. As a hosted application, Sales Asset Manager is easy to use and gets users up and running quickly, although it doesnt provide metadata management features to content creators.
Technical Analyst Michael Caton can be reached at michael_caton@ziffdavis.com.
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