New Proposal Management Solution Increases Sales Effectiveness and Reduces Corporate Risk

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. - Nextance Inc. has introduced its latest solution, Nextance Proposal Management. Designed to increase sales effectiveness, the all-new solution helps companies to enhance their first impression with customers as well as reduce risk by managing what is often a frenzied proposal-creation process. It also extends Nextance’s focus from managing the contract lifecycle to managing the broader customer lifecycle, making it the industry’s first solution to manage all relationship-defining documents across the entire proposal-to-revenue process.

Nextance Proposal Management offers standardization, visibility, and control over a typically chaotic process so that companies can deliver tailored, professional proposals to win more deals and reduce risk. For companies offering complex products and services – in such industries as high tech, services, heavy equipment, aerospace, defense, and consulting – a well-crafted proposal that best positions the company to meet the customer’s needs is pivotal to winning business. Despite its importance, coordinating employees in different departments and locations, all working under tight deadlines to create a complex, collaborative and highly-tailored proposal, remains a challenge.

The lack of automation or operational control in creating complex proposals distracts from what is really important: ensuring that the company best proposes how it can create value for the customer, while being careful to avoid creating any unwanted and unnecessary liabilities. The usual problems, including “fire drills”, poor coordination, and an inability to quickly retrieve the latest approved content such as product and service descriptions, often lead to poorly-articulated solutions in disjointed and unpolished proposals that are difficult to understand – and therefore difficult to accept – by the customer. Further, issues which put the company at risk of losing the business or worse include rushed or inadequate internal reviews that lead to over-commitments, unreachable goals, and missing standard terms/disclaimers, exposing the company to litigation and other risk.

Explaining the market need, an analyst report from Forrester Research, Inc. titled “Niche Technologies Enhance Sales Effectiveness” (August 10, 2006) found: “As buyers rely more and more on the Internet and word-of-mouth social networking for information on products and services, sales organizations face tougher challenges in trying to win customers and close deals. While technology can’t fix broken sales processes or substitute for quality salespeople and training, it can help firms standardize sales best practices and automate repetitive, time-consuming tasks like creating proposals, giving sales reps more time to spend interacting with customers and prospects.”

Nextance’s new solution is not only a welcomed, robust alternative to inefficient manual processes and basic solutions that generate template or cookie-cutter proposals, but it also exclusively offers a path to manage the other pieces of the customer relationship, such as automatically converting the proposal into a contract, which then can be seamlessly managed by Nextance’s Contract Management solution. Because contracts are the source of truth for the customer relationship, impacting financial performance and risk of the relationship, the value of the integrated Nextance solutions lies in the unique ability to manage the entire customer relationship from the very start.

The two solutions together – Nextance’s complete Proposal-to-Revenue offering – help companies maximize the revenue and minimize the risk across every deal in their pipeline, each customer relationship they have in place, and all the customer relationships across the enterprise.

Solution Details: Establishing Best Practices to Proposal Management

Scheduled to be released this Spring, Nextance’s new Proposal Management solution can help give companies an extra competitive edge and increase sales effectiveness by focusing on three key areas:

1. Standardization: Starting the proposal process is easy with standard, pre-approved initial content from legal, finance, marketing, sales, technical, and other departments in a central repository. Intelligent proposal assembly automatically tailors the proposal for each deal, instantly generating a comprehensive, customer-centric first draft. Varying levels of standardization can be set to achieve the desired balance between control and user flexibility. And security rules ensure that the latest information, including appropriate disclaimers, terms and conditions, are in place for each proposal.

2. Visibility: With visibility into content collaboration, responsibilities, key deadlines as well as how the proposal is shaping up across organizations, the new solution enables the proposal coordinator to drive and manage all of the groups (product, service, delivery, etc.) working on the proposal – proactively keeping even the most complex process moving forward quickly and efficiently through creation, review, and approval. Visibility early in the process also gives sales management the insights they need to keep sales representatives working on qualified prospects and into whether proposals may turn into deals.

3. Control: Sales and proposal groups will have a newfound level of control over the final deliverable, ensuring approvals are secured from every department needed. And with a unique One-Click Publishing function, companies can turn all the moving pieces (docs, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics that may exist in different file formats) into a single, seamless, professional proposal with a consistent look and feel throughout.

“Our new Nextance Proposal Management is a great complement to our customers’ existing CRM and sales effectiveness efforts,” said Kyle Bowker, president and chief executive officer for Nextance. “Given Nextance’s deep roots in contract management, it makes sense that we move up the value stream and optimize the proposal stage in order to offer the first complete proposal-to-revenue solution in our industry.”