Quosal earlier this week announced a new feature that lets salespeople record a personal explanatory video to go with their quotes and proposals.
The company unveiled the tool at the Sales 2.0 conference held in Philadelphia.
Videos can be posted directly to Quosal’s proprietary Order Porter purchasing experience delivered to clients.
“People love to watch the small screen, and as time-challenged as we are, if the video can take the load off of having to read all of a proposal — or, more likely, explain some gray areas — then great,” said Denis Pombriant, principal at Beagle Research.
Others could emulate Quosal in the CQP — configure, price, quote — area, he told CRM Buyer.
Videos and the Law
While the feature seems cool, it may have pitfalls — chief among them the legal issues that might emerge.
A proposal is a contract with the five parts courts recognize as necessary, Pombriant pointed out — offer, acceptance, consideration, legal purpose and competent parties.
“The question that immediately leaps off the page is whether these videos constitute part of the offer, especially if they diverge materially from what’s written,” he said.
For instance, if a sales rep says in a video to disregard a particular clause about payment terms, “then the question becomes which part of the offer is real or has primacy,” Pombriant elaborated.
So quotes may now have to come with a disclaimer that only the information printed on the quotation is valid for consideration, or stating that the written document has primacy over any verbal or visual representations.
“Think of it as a safe harbor for deals,” Pombriant remarked.
Other Potential Headaches
“This could be a nice-to-have feature,” said Eric Quanstrom, CMO at Pipeliner.
Still, “There really needs to be thought put into which parts of the sales process to automate,” he told CRM Buyer.
One potential problem with putting a quote into video is that “you might lose the intimate ability to contextualize the quote on the spot,” Quanstrom suggested. Another is “the inability to see the quote on paper, which is the backbone of the software quoting and e-signature industry today.”
Quosal in Action
Sales reps can use Quosal to create sales quotes. In addition, they can create secure landing pages for each individual prospect or customer that list suggestions about what the customer should purchase.
The sales reps can attach prepared quotes to these landing pages as downloadable PDFs. Customers can execute agreements from within their specific landing pages.
In addition to recording video messages for customers, sales reps can select from a library of videos to explain different products or technologies to customers.
Quosal has integrations with ConnectWise, which put money into it through ConnectWise Capital.
Down the road, Quosal plans to offer the ability to capture digital signatures on contracts using mobile devices, in collaboration with ConnectWise.
How that’s going to play out, in light of warnings from cybersecurity companies that hackers are now beginning to focus more attention on mobile devices, remains to be seen.
Other companies Quosal has integrations with are Salesforce.com, NetSuite and Microsoft CRM.
Battling for the Quotes Market
Quosal is locked in battle with Quotewerks for the quotes and proposals software market.
Whether Quosal’s video feature might give it a competitive boost is open to question, Beagle’s Pombriant suggested, as “it represents a new employment of older technologies that can now be easily mashed up to produce a new offering, or at least a new feature.”
Loading ...
