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Should you use a SaaS sales proposal or a SaaS quote to close deals?
Pricing is the element that can make or break a deal. There’s no room for SaaS pricing to be the grey-zone in your deal –– for your prospects, the experience they have with your pricing is the difference between a mediocre sales process and the beginning of an excellent relationship.
Giving them this experience involves understanding their needs: do they need a breakdown of all the details, or are they seeking the quick, hard-hitting facts about price? These mindsets require different presentations to make your prospect feel like you can fulfil their needs. That means that proposals and quotes are both essentials to closing deals… there’s just a time and place for each.
So the question becomes: when is creating a SaaS sales proposal the best option versus a SaaS pricing quote?
When to Use a SaaS Sales Proposal
A SaaS sales proposal is a great tool to use during complex enterprise deals when your prospect needs extensive details about your company, offer and potential for growth.
It typically includes the following elements:
- Cover Page
- About Us
- Problem (outlining the prospect’s problem or challenges)
- Solution (how your company fits into the prospect’s future, including product offerings and service breakdowns)
- Case Studies & Testimonials
- Team Overview (key executives and team members)
- Contract Value (including terms and agreements, scope of work, timeline and pricing)
The content of a SaaS sales proposal should not be a surprise to your prospect. However, it ensures that no detail is left behind in the decision making process.
Factors you should consider when deciding to use a proposal include:
- How much information has already been covered with the prospect?
- What new information needs to be communicated?
- What is the most efficient way for my prospect to understand the new/detailed information?
- Are there new/other stakeholders who will be reviewing this information before the deal closes?
Depending on your answers to these questions, you may decide a proposal is needed to ensure the details are transparent to all involved. However, sometimes adding a document of this length to your process will add unnecessary time to the process before the deal closes.
When to Use a SaaS Sales Quote
SaaS sales quotes make your pricing conversation seamless for all involved. They provide a transparent breakdown of your pricing and include key details of the deal, which can then be effectively circulated amongst stakeholders.
Quotes can be interactive when developed with pricing software. Interaction has proven to assist the SaaS sales process, helping accelerate deals to close by providing prospects with a similar buying experience when buying public-facing packages from a website.
Factors you should consider when deciding to use a quote include:
- Are the details of my pricing displayed clearly?
- Have I provided a clear summary of the key needs indicated by the prospect?
- Can the prospect engage or interact with any of the documentation I’ve sent?
Depending on your answers to these questions, you may determine that a quote can clearly display all of the information you need to close. However, you should make sure your quote is developed and sent in a format that is clear, transparent and built to support the complexities of SaaS pricing — otherwise, you may sacrifice the quality of the document.
How to Use a SaaS Sales Quote to Close Deals Faster
You can use a quote without a proposal, but you can’t have a proposal without a quote. Whether you’re selling a basic or enterprise package, quotes are crucial to your sales process and should be used 100% of the time.
Just like your team likely has a proposal template, software or building process in place, it is important to have a streamlined quotes creation process in your sales funnel. Quickly building and iterating on custom pricing is a key way of accelerating deals to close.
There is software that you can use that will handle this piece of the process for you, while aligning your sales team and providing your prospects with an interactive experience. FastSpring Interactive Quotes is the perfect compliment, or replacement, to your SaaS sales proposals and sales process. With FastSpring’s Interactive Quotes, you will:
- Save 10+ hours a month in your deal pipeline
- Provide a sales-psychology backed buying experience for prospects
- Accelerate SaaS deals to close
Take a look at this Live Sample Quote and see for yourself how Interactive Quotes can help you close deals faster.
For more information on Interactive Quotes, click here.
