Chapter Four: Money
Introduction:
Once we have prepared the infrastructure and applied the trust cycle to leads and prospects to build trust and create opportunities, some leads become opportunities—that is, they request prices. At this stage, respond as follows.
A quotation request sent by a prospective customer
Or lead to buy a product, by telephone or email
Here, they usually ask specifically about the price or sales terms for one of your products or goods.
Sometimes customers send an LOI, or a formal quotation request. Often, however, they send only a request that specifies neither quantity nor purchase terms, meaning you lack sufficient information to respond.
The best suggestion in these circumstances is to send the buyer a questionnaire, effectively a sample LOI, for them to complete, or ask your questions over the telephone.
In some cases, the person asking for your price may be an intermediary who does not know the answers to your questions and needs to correspond with the principal or other intermediaries.
Where the buyer cannot answer your questions adequately, try to use your prior experience in the field to establish reasonable assumptions.
Present an FCO
In the infrastructure section, we explained how to prepare an FCO. At this stage, issue an appropriate one for the buyer. In my view, even if the buyer asks you for a price a thousand times, you should respond with the same quality as the first time. Discard the assumption that they only want a quotation from you to buy elsewhere. Anyone may run into problems with a previous seller, and that day creates an opportunity for you to sell to them.
Issue the FCO and send it as an image or PDF.
Pro forma invoice
If they approve the FCO, prepare a pro forma invoice. If not, revise the FCO according to the buyer’s request and send it again. In some cases, buyers also need a contract alongside the pro forma invoice, so prepare your contracts in advance rather than making the buyer wait for one to be drafted at this stage.
Execution
The next stages naturally concern receiving payment and carrying out the work. We will not enter into the practical and operational details for now.