Maintain Offer List and Monitor Offer Success
Keep an eye on all offers for your potential customers with an Excel template. It can show you which offer you made and when and how much the offer is. It allows you to see the success of your suggestions when the customer orders. In this way, you optimize your success rate (hit rate).
Importance of Bid Tracking
Writing an offer is a critical milestone in the sales process. With the offer, you tell your (potential) customer what services you want to provide, under what conditions, and for what price. With offer tracking, you can check how successful your offers are. It would be best if you had a constant overview of:
- Offers that you have created and submitted
- Status in which the offer is
- Order or order that the customer has placed for your offer
- Comparison of your offer with the customer’s order in terms of scope and price
You must always monitor your offer’s success. Does the order match what you have offered, or has the price been reduced, for example? You also need to know which offers are successful and which have led to the order. The ratio of successful offers to all submitted offers corresponds to the hit rate in sales.
Finally, it would help if you kept an eye on whether there are differences in the success of offers within your company. It would be best to recognize which departments are successful and which are less successful. To keep this overview, you must do the following steps as part of the offer tracking using the Excel template presented here.
Departments and cost centers have a number, a name, and a person responsible. The customers also have a number and a reputation as well as a contact person at the customer. This information is stored.
Record and Track Offer
In the acquisition phase, offers should become orders and, thus, projects. Each offer has a number assigned to a customer from the customer table in the offer tracking table. Then, it is recorded for each offer:
- Status: in progress, submitted, in negotiation, hanging, granted, rejected
- Offer date
- Sum of the offer (price at which your company offered the project)
- Order amount
- Order date
- Order number
Monitoring Offer Success
Use the different reports in the Excel template to monitor your success with your offers. Check which departments or people in your company are particularly successful and which are less: Offers by department and offers by cost center. Also, monitor which customers have submitted which or how many offers. You can filter and check:
- Time or period of submission of the offer
- Offer status
- Offer amount (potential sales in the sales funnel)
- Order amount (shows whether the offer matched the customer request or which discounts were granted)
- Deviations
Offer to Track
Use the following Excel template to manage your list of offers and check the success of your submissions. Enter the master data and the relevant offer data and evaluate the reports.
If you successfully accept your offer and the customer places the order, your project can start processing the order. Then it depends on the project management: You always must check up-to-date and keep an eye on whether the schedule and the budget are met. You can also monitor this with the Excel tool. You can read how to do this in the following section of this manual chapter.
Core Project Management Software
Selecting the best project management software is quite challenging. It helps you to drive a smooth and better accounting company. Let us have a look at customer-friendly task management software.
- Asana
- Basecamp
- Zoho Projects
- ClickUp
- Monday.com
- Wrike
- Trello
- Jetpack Workflow
Conclusion
In conclusion, effective offer tracking through an organized Excel template is crucial for optimizing the success rate in the sales process. It facilitates comprehensive record-keeping of offers, their status, and subsequent orders, offering valuable insights into departmental and cost center performance. Bid tracking is a critical milestone, enabling businesses to adjust strategies based on offer success.
The reports allow granular analysis, comparing success by department, cost center, and customer, providing a data-driven approach for future sales strategies. Beyond offer tracking, the importance of core project management software is emphasized for smooth project execution, schedule adherence, and effective budget management, contributing to overall business success.
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