Advanced Snow Proposal Generator
Company Profile
Advanced Snow and Ice Solutions is a nationwide provider of commercial snow and ice control management services specializing in multi-location, geographically dispersed businesses.
Challenge
As part of its marketing and sales effort, Advanced Snow sends out proposals for snow and ice removal services to its leads. With a lead count in the thousands, the number of proposals to be generated and sent out is extremely large. Advanced Snow staff was limited in the number of proposals it could create and send out each day because it was using off-the-shelf tools such as Microsoft Word and Excel. To be more efficient at issuing proposals and improving its marketing campaign success, Advanced Snow approached us to automate its proposal generation and delivery processes.
Solution
We built a tool for Advanced Snow that generates proposals in pdf format and distributes them via Internet fax or email. The tool is integrated with Advanced Snow’s Salesforce CRM so that staff users can conduct all tasks from within Salesforce. Users have the option of bulk emailing proposals or sending them out individually. Using Vertical Response software, our tool sends out bulk emails to leads with each email, thereby providing a customized view of the proposal specific to the lead.
An advantage of the application is that it informs Advanced Snow’s staff if an emailed proposal has been reviewed by the lead. To make this possible we added custom fields to Salesforce’s lead management screen that shows staff users if a proposal has been sent to a lead and if it has been reviewed.
Using this tool has greatly simplified the entire proposal generation process. Advanced Snow staff creates a list of predefined pricing schedules and proposal formats. They can also define a default mapping of pricing schedules to use for the leads. To bulk email or send out a proposal manually, a user simply has to import the leads into the tool, select a predefined pricing schedule and proposal format, and at the click of a button send out the proposal to the leads. Any pricing rates specific to the lead are automatically computed before the proposal is sent out. A preview feature allows the staff to view and verify the proposal before sending it out.
Our solution has freed up Advanced Snow staff to conduct other important business operations in the same time it took to generate proposals manually. It has enabled them to reach out to a significantly more leads and close more sales.
