Friday, August 22, 2014

SOP: Your Quoting Tool

There are two primary "quoting tools" in the I.T. business: QuoteWerks (www.quotewerks.com) and Quosal (www.quosal.com). Then there's everyone else.

A quoting tool helps you create proposals for your clients. Because you can create quotes with your CRM, your PSA, and your finance package, you don't really need a quoting tool. So what does it do for you?

When you have enough volume to justify it, a good quoting tool can be a great investment. It integrates your sales prospects and customer information from your CRM and PSA. Then it integrates information from your favorite distributor or reseller, such as Ingram Micro, SYNNEX, or D&H.

That last bit is the real selling point for a quoting tool. You can enter a part number and see real-time pricing and warehouse availability across all of your distributors. You can also download pictures and product descriptions, so your proposals look professional.

The result is that you can compare prices across distributors and buy the parts for the lowest price. Then, once you're ready to order, you can order from within your quoting tool and even track your order through their system.

Recently, the feature lists for these products have expanded considerably. You can have clients e-sign their proposals to create orders, then have the tool generate an invoice, and the client can pay you online straight from the quote.

I saw one demo in which the quoting tool integrated with the RMM system to automatically generate proposals based on events trigger in the RMM. For example, if a machine continually exceeds memory thresholds, the RMM sends a note to the quoting tool, the quoting tool looks up the memory needed and generates a proposal. Then the quoting tool creates a ticket in the sales module of the PSA and assigns it to the sales rep for that client.

As we mentioned in the last chapter, the power of integration is driving a lot of software development in the I.T. industry. These products integrate with every piece of your sales process, including Microsoft Office and online services such as Salesforce.com.

:-)

4 comments:

  1. Anonymous2:13 AM

    Hi Karl, I'm currently evaluating quoting software for my MSP. Tried both QW and CW sell (quosal) but they make me feel like I am in the 80s. Very clunky, non-intuitive, takes really long to get a proposal/quote out. Have you come across better tools in your experience? What is the most important thing I must look for while evaluating such tools?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for the question, Anon.

    I haven't used Quosal, but I did have a 3-user license for QuoteWerks about ten years ago. It was so much hassle that I couldn't anyone to use it.

    The big question is: Do you create enough quotes to really need a tool that needs to be updated and maintained? We decided, in the end, that we did not have so many quotes that we could not keep up.

    Unfortunately, I don't know of other better options. Perhaps other readers have some recommendations. If you're a member of the Small Biz Thoughts Community, you might post the question on the forums there.

    Sorry. I feel your pain.

    ReplyDelete
  3. As more of our business transitions towards cloud and SaaS based solutions, we've noticed that our profitability has increased without any increase in head count. We currently have free bandwidth to add on new clients.
    I mainly want to use a quoting and propositioning tool to convert new clients.
    I actually find myself making many more quotes now than ever before.
    Wondering what your thoughts are?

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  4. I think it's a great idea - if it works.
    I believe everyone will see that we can make more money with fewer employees with Cloud Services. After all, someone else is providing the support. All you need to do is establish the client relationship.

    ReplyDelete

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