A software platform aimed at helping companies sell faster? That’s TinderBox. “We make it easy and efficient for companies to use the information they have to create sales proposals, sales presentations, and contracts with a single click,” says Mitch Frazier, vice president of marketing at TinderBox.
With a suite of modules that you can integrate together or used as standalone programs, TinderBox gives small businesses the tools they need to create highly personalized presentations and proposals, and to close the sale with a custom contract. The system is also designed to leverage the data that already exists in many organizations’ CRM and similar programs. This gives companies even greater insight into the customer information they’ve worked so hard to gather.
The TinderBox platform provides easy reporting activity to track efficiency and effectiveness within the entire sales process.
The TinderBox Pitch Module
TinderBox Pitch brings together everything a small business needs to generate fast, customized presentations. “It creates online data-driven presentations,” Frazier says. The TinderBox platform can integrate with many popular CRM systems, such as Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics, and its open API makes integration with other solutions possible as well. That means that you can take all those insights and information residing within existing CRM systems craft them into highly targeted presentations built for specific customers.
Pitch also functions as an extremely easy way for sales people to share slides and presentations with a prospect while also gathering data on that prospect’s behavior. “Because we deliver those presentations online, we get insight into who’s doing what with the slides,” Frazier says. The platform tracks who views each slide, and if they forward the presentation to anyone else. “With the integration between CRM and TinderBox Pitch, we can actually update the opportunity status based on how many times someone interacts with that presentation,” Frazier explains.
With DocuSign embedded, TinderBox Close supports a completely online document approval process.
The TinderBox Propose Module
When the time comes to put a sales proposal in front of a prospect, TinderBox Propose stands ready to make that happen. You can move presentations that you created in Pitch into the Propose module, or you can launch Propose straightaway and craft something from scratch. And just like the other TinderBox modules, Propose knows how potential clients interact with each proposal sent their way. Frazier says the platform helps to answer many of the questions sales teams have. “Did somebody actually open that sales proposal? What did they look at with that sales proposal? And then what information can a sales team glean from that insight to help them sell smarter and actually close that deal faster?”
The TinderBox Close Module
The client has accepted the proposal and he’s ready to sign the contract. Great! But contracts can be tedious and time consuming. Tracking changes, saving them to the desktop, sending updated versions to the client and then waiting for a response—it’s a process in desperate need of an upgrade.
“You put in all this work to get to the point of a contract, and yet it is oftentimes a very manual, offline, versioning challenge,” Frazier says. The TinderBox Close contracting module brings everything together. “It actually makes redlining that contract completely track-able, and completely available online from any computer or mobile device,” says Frazier.
For resource-challenged businesses in particular, managing the back-and-forth communication inherent in most contract negotiations puts a strain on efficiency. TinderBox Close tracks who has made changes to the contract, as well as which changes each reviewer made. “The document owner can then accept those changes or provide feedback on those comments, just like we would in an offline document,” says Frazier.
Additional features round out the module. The system’s alerting capabilities can send text or email messages when a proposed change is received, which lets teams respond and act on them almost immediately. And with DocuSign embedded, Frazier says, “It’s possible to create, redline, collaborate back and forth, and close that document from any device.”
TinderBox Pricing
The software is a subscription product with per-user, per-month fees billed under an annual contract. Cost tiers for the TinderBox platform are based on volume, so small organizations can typically find a price point that suits their unique needs.
Julie Knudson is a freelance writer whose articles have appeared in technology magazines including BizTech, Processor, and For The Record. She has covered technology issues for publications in other industries, from foodservice to insurance, and she also writes a recurring column in Integrated Systems Contractor magazine.
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