Sales quoting software is a great way of speeding up your company’s quotation process, simplifying sales admin, and potentially shortening your sales cycle, and there are several applications available that claim to help with this. However, not all quote making software applications can be tailored to the needs of your business, requiring a lot of manual input to generate quotes, and opening up the possibility of errors and delays. This is why, when investing in quote proposal software, you should look for a platform that can be tailored to your unique business model and sales strategy.
There are also several other important benefits of opting for customisable quoting software:
1) Better integration between your CRM, Accounts, and Quoting software
A customisable quoting platform will allow greater and better levels of integration between your quoting software and your CRM and accounting packages. Allowing these applications to talk to each other, whether through an in-built API or a custom API (such as our QuoteWerks API) allows you to streamline all of your business processes, and brings several immediate savings.
The most important benefit is not having to update each application separately, increasing transparency and collaboration across your company. Greater automation reduces the chance of human error, which saves both time and money, while also increasing your professional credibility with customers. Integration also enables you to create accurate quotes quickly and easily, and follow them up when required, by giving your sales team instant access to customer data and inventory levels from the same user dashboard.
2) Customise the appearance of your quotations and proposals to match your branding
All quoting software comes with a selection of templates, but these aren’t guaranteed to meet your brand identity, or even the needs of your products and services. A tailored quoting application will enable you to customise your quotes to fit in with your colours, messages and brand identity, and to personalise your quotes to make them easy to understand for your customers. This increases the professionalism of your quotes and makes it easier to convert customers.
3) Improve your productivity
Creating quotes and proposals is not a time-neutral task, especially for non-standard products and services. In using a standard quotation package, or manual processes, you would have to physically look up various products and services, calculate prices, customise the descriptions, and often type it manually into the quote, before formatting it for email. You then have the all-important follow-up with the prospect, which is often forgotten and is a leading source of missed sales. A customisable quote making application centralises all the information you need to create fast and accurate quotes, allowing you to tweak the information, input the required services, and apply any discounts or special offers, all in a matter of minutes.
4) Streamline communication between team members, vendors, and customers
A tailored quoting application helps streamline and facilitate communication between your sales, marketing, and customer service teams on the one hand, and with your vendors, sub-contractors, prospects, and customers on the other, with an audit trail of communications that provides full visibility throughout the process. This speeds up the quotation and review process, and lets you check whether emailed quotes have been opened, clicked, or viewed – and if so, how many times. This provides the cues you need to follow up quotes and prevents important leads slipping through the net.
Next steps
As leading software resellers for QuoteWerks and IT Quoter – two of the most customisable CPQ platforms on the market – Quintadena provides installation, configuration, customisation, and training support, so that you get the software build that matches the needs of your business. For more information about what differentiates us from other CPQ software providers, or to request a free quote, please get in touch today.
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