Glossary of Terms

Playbooks
Collections of content, tools, messages, and strategies that help reps close business at each stage of the buying process. Using Kadient’s Sales Assistant, you can create as many playbooks as your team needs to address the different types of buyers they encounter, whether distinguished by role, industry, geography, product line, etc.

Proposal Software
Proposal automation software solutions enable sales and proposal teams with the capabilities they need to consistently and quickly create winning sales proposals.

With Kadient’s inciteKnowledge on-demand solution, sales teams can use several different approaches to access a central library of sales knowledge resources that help them easily create a proposal that speaks to each prospect.

And with Kadient’s Pragmatech Proposal Automation Suite, you can create proposal templates with built-in wizards that guide sales and proposal teams through the process of creating a deliverable tailored to each prospect’s needs.

Both solutions provide sales and proposal teams with outstanding capabilities, and make it easy to load best-practice proposal content into a central repository where it can be readily accessed and put to work in meeting buyer needs. They also help you to keep that content current and relevant as the selling climate evolves.

Kadient solutions make it easy to put winning proposals into the hands of your buyers.

Request for Proposal (RFP)
Questionnaires submitted by a buyer to vendors under consideration to provide a product or service. The responses to the questionnaire helps the buyer evaluate each vendor’s offering; however, responding to RFPs is typically time-consuming and labor-intensive for vendors, resulting in materials that are completed, but may not be as targeted to the buyer’s needs as the vendor desires. By collecting the answers to frequently asked questions and making them immediately available to RFP responders, Kadient’s RFP response solutions can help bid and proposal teams dramatically cut down the time it takes to create response documents, so they can apply their craft as proposal professionals and create truly customer-focused responses.

RFP Automation Software
Software solutions used to respond to RFPs, such as The RFP Machine™, RFP Express® and The RFP Tracking System®. These solutions simplify the process of responding to RFPs by helping customers keep their RFP content up to date and making it easily accessible to the users who need to access it in order to respond to RFPs. Responding to RFPs is typically time-consuming and labor-intensive, resulting in materials that are completed, but may not be as targeted to the buyer’s needs as the vendor desires. By collecting the answers to frequently asked questions and making them immediately available to RFP responders, Kadient’s RFP automation solutions can help bid and proposal teams dramatically cut down the time it takes to create response documents, so they can apply their craft as proposal professionals and create truly customer-focused responses.

Sales Effectiveness
Every executive talks about improving sales effectiveness, but what is it? Sales Effectiveness is a sales team’s ability to achieve targeted goals and results, such as higher win rates, shorter sales cycles, increased revenue, or better profit margins. The term sales effectiveness is often used more specifically to refer to the ability of a company’s sales professionals to “win” at each stage of the customer’s buying process, and ultimately earn the business on the right terms and in the right timeframe.

Improving sales effectiveness is not just a sales function issue; it’s a company issue, as it requires deep collaboration between sales and marketing to understand what’s working and not working, and continuous improvement of the knowledge, messages, skills, and strategies that sales people apply as they work sales opportunities.

Sales effectiveness has historically been used to describe a category of technologies and consulting services aimed at helping companies improve their sales results. Many Kadient customers have created sales effectiveness functions and have even given people titles such as VP of Sales Effectiveness.

One of the biggest benefits that companies receive from using Kadient’s inciteKnowledge application is improvements in sales effectiveness. Test drive inciteKnowledge today.

Sales Presentations
Sales presentations are materials, typically created in Microsoft PowerPoint, that are used to accompany a seller's verbal delivery of information to a buyer. A sales presentation that will advance a deal is one with messaging tailored to the prospect’s unique goals and needs. Creating a deliverable like this means of finding the most appropriate messages, combining them to tell a compelling story, and then personalizing the content so that it speaks directly to the buyer.

With Kadient, your sales people can create killer sales presentations by searching through your library of slides and presentation templates, dynamically assembling the best slides to use for the current opportunity, and personalizing the presentation to reflect the unique needs of that prospect.

Sales Proposals
A sales proposal is a written document that outlines a seller's understanding of the buyer's needs and recommends an appropriately matched solution, pricing, and expected benefits. A winning proposal typically includes messaging tailored to the prospect’s unique goals and needs. Pulling this together usually presents the proposal creator with challenges in finding the most appropriate messages, combining them into a compelling story for the buyer, and then personalizing the message so that the proposal speaks directly to the buyer’s needs. Proposal automation software can be employed to make this process more efficient and effective.