#quoting tool

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When it comes to creating sales quotes, using a sales quoting software is the best option. Today, organizations big and small are highly dependent on these software tools for their quoting process. The popularity of quoting software has resulted in the death of manual quoting.

Here’s how quoting tools will help you to follow the best practices required to create winning quotes:

You Deliver Quotes on Time

In order to create winning quotes, it is important that you create and send the quote at the earliest. Sending quotes quickly is the key to win the deal. However, if you are quoting manually, there is a high probability that you will not be able to deliver quotes on time. Manual quoting is tedious, and time-consuming, hence delay in delivery is likely to occur. For instance, you may take hours to fulfill a request for a complex quote.

Sales quoting software gives you the opportunity to create quotes in minutes no matter how complex they are. The software tool automates the quoting process, which allows you to quickly create and send the quote. You don’t allow your customers to wait to receive a quote. Your response time for any RFQ is instant, which substantially increases your chances of converting the quote into a sale.

You Create Attractive Quotes

Creating a quote that grabs the customer’s attention can help you to win a sale. This is what you can do by using a quoting system. An Online sales quoting tool comes with a range of attractive, professional quoting templates. This enables you to create slick, beautiful and gorgeous quotes that stand out from your competitors’ quotes. When trying to seal a deal, it is important to create a good impression. An attractive quote can give that impression needed to win the deal.

You Send Interactive Quotes

Web quoting software has the provision to create interactive quotes in which the customer can modify product quantity, shipping options, etc. while accepting a quote. Thus, you give your customers multiple options while accepting a quote. Your customers no longer have to look to your competitors since you are providing a quote with customizable content. An interactive quote allows your customers to customize quote content the way they want. This can go a long way in winning the sale.

Customers Receive Quotes on Mobile Devices

Most quoting tools have their own Mobile sales quoting app, which will enable you to create quotes on mobile devices. Customers no longer have to depend on office pc or laptop. They can now use their smartphones and tablets to open a quote. Thus, mobile quoting apps allow you to create mobile-friendly quotes that your customers can open from any mobile device. This can certainly work in your favor as far as accepting quotes is concerned.

E-Signatures

Sales quoting software brings efficiency along with accuracy by automating time-consuming and manual tasks. If you have ever lost a deal because of following up or had spent a whole lot of time digging through your customer's file, you need sales quoting software. Although, sales quoting is a good thing but it’s not great to automate everything. The robotic and soulless way of business hinders your sale because it’s important to add the critical element of humanity.

1.    Reporting and lead rotation

Leading a sales team is not an easy task and you might be spending hours for manually creating reports and attaching emails to it. Moreover, assigning leads to each and every rep takes up precious time and bandwidth. Sales automation software saves a lot of time by assigning leads to everyone based on company size, geographical territory. It also helps in creating automated email reports which can be used to send daily reports to your salespeople.

2.    Lead enrichment

The more knowledge you have about the prospect’s company’s size, industries, clients and customers, it will be easier to manage and earn their trust.  The lead enrichment tool helps to gather hundreds of information and gives you up-to-date data from your clients and customers.

3.    Contact and deal creation

This software makes adding new contacts and opportunities to your CRM in a much better way as compared to one done manually.  Sales quoting helps you to set up workflows. It automatically allows you to create and record a lead based on certain criteria. Make sure to integrate your various lead sources with CRM.

4.    Personalization

Personalization plays an important role in increasing response rates, but personalizing more than 30-50 might have a negative impact on these response rates. Sales quoting software stops you from copying and pasting data and even saves time by avoiding typing out the same basic data in every quote. Personalization tokens also help to insert the client’s name, company title automatically to your quote.

5.    Aggregated catalog

The feature of aggregating catalog from different distributors and bringing them together in one single platform gives you entire information about distributors inventory and pricing. This saves you a lot of time as you don’t need to go for each and every distributor individually. You can directly compare and chose the product from the catalog which gives you maximum profit.

6.    Proposals

Sales quoting software integrates with your CRM and stops you from drafting a quote by copying and pasting information from your mail and CRM. Customer information, product details, and price automatically get transferred to your quote when you use sales quoting software. Automating internal workflows allows the sales manager and others to review the quote before it’s been sent to the customer.

Sales quoting software, as we know, help to automate the quoting process and speed up the sales process. For quite some time, we have been hearing that the quoting tool eliminates delays from manual errors, helps sales reps to create quotes quickly, in turn boosting their productivity. It simplifies the quoting process and subsequently the entire sales process. From calculating taxes to determining the freight charges, an online quoting tool computes everything while you are creating a quote for your customer.

However, there are still lesser known facts about sales quoting software that you might be unware of. They are discussed below

 Create Complex Quotations Effortlessly

Resellers who have complex products catalogs are doubtful about the usage of sales quoting software. These resellers are primary involved in creating complex configuration products as per customer requirements. However with the tool, these resellers can easily create quotations for some of the most complex products that they are offering.  So no matter how complex your quoting process is, a sales quoting tool will help to make it easier and faster.

 Mobile Friendly Solution

Apart from laptops and desktops, sales quoting software that are available in the cloud can also be accessed via mobile devices. So now smartphones and tablets that you carry along with yourself can be helpful for quote creation. A mobile application of sales quoting tools is now readily available. Just install the mobile app through Apple app store or Google Play store and create and send quotations, receive effortlessly on your smartphones.

So whether you are sitting in the car or standing on the airport, you can easily browse your aggregated catalog, create quotes and accept orders with mobile quoting apps. You get complete visibility of your business anytime, anywhere through these mobile quoting apps. This will help you to accelerate your sales cycle with quicker turnaround time.

Built-in Upsell/Cross Sell Functionality

As you know, displaying upsell and cross-sell suggestions on ecommerce store has shown to improve sales. Upselling and cross-selling techniques can also be implemented using sales quoting software. So while you are creating a sales quote, the quoting tool displays upsell and cross-sell suggestions that are related to the products added in the quote. The functionality is beneficial from the economical point of view as sending a quote along with upsell and cross-sell suggestions can work wonders to increase order size.

Create Pricing as Per your Requirement

When it comes to creating and sending quotations to customers, quite a few companies prefer traditional approach which involves use of Excel Sheets. In today’s times where information is available at a click of a mouse, it is surprising that companies continue to use this conventional method of quote creation. To be honest, manual quoting is passé due to its several disadvantages and it is time that companies go for sales quoting software.

Companies investing in a sales quoting software can reap several benefits, some of which are given below:

 Send Quotes in a Matter of Minutes

When you are using a sales quoting tool, dealing with complex quotations is no longer an issue. Creating quotation is no longer a complicated task, irrespective of RFQ requirements. You no longer have to spend hours in generating sales quotations as with a sales quoting tool it can be done in minutes. The speed at which you can generate quotes will indeed astonish you. All the product related information required for creating quotes is stored in aggregated catalog, which can be accessed easily. So no sooner you get a request for quote, you are in a position to quickly prepare and send quotes.

 Accuracy

Accuracy is a casualty in manual quoting. Errors associated with product pricing and customer details are common when using Excel Spreadsheets to create quotations Entering data manually in your Excel Sheets makes you vulnerable to human mistakes. In case of quoting software, errors are unlikely as the software come with a point and click interface. The activity of typing values from keyword is minimum. Hence the usage of quoting tool helps to eliminate quotation errors. So you not only make sales quotes faster but more accurate.

 Present Quotes in the most Professional Manner

When you use a sales quoting tool, you are able to present the quote to your customer in the most professional way. Sending such attractive, professional quotations helps to increase your win rate. With just a few clicks and in a matter of minutes, you are able to send a quote that is complete with rich content, images and technical specifications. Therefore there is a high probability that a quote generated using a quoting software will get accepted

 Ease of Use and Flexibility

Most sale quoting tools available are web-based, so all you require is an Internet connection and a web browser to access the tool. Web quoting Software eliminates the need for hard drive space and installation. You can send as well as find out whether the quote has been accepted online. As long as you have an internet connection, you can use your computer to create quotes anytime from anywhere.

Also some of the quoting tools come with their own mobile apps or mobile quoting software. You have to simply download the app on your mobile devices, which allows you to quote on the go.

Enhance Productivity

This is one of the most important reasons why companies should discard the process of manual quoting and use sales quoting software. Sales quoting tools that are proven to help make sales quotes easier, faster and more accurate are bound to improve the performance of your sales team tremendously. A sales team’s primary task is to search for potentially suitable business targets, sell more and increase profits. A sales quoting software makes quoting easier, thereby allowing your sales team to engage more in selling. All this will contribute in boosting the performance of your sales team. So if you want your sales team to be more productive, you simply cannot afford to ignore sales quoting software.

 On the whole, putting together a quote and sending it to the customer is an easy process when you use a sales quoting tool. It will help in saving valuable time and allow your sales team to win deals faster.

Following are the keys feature a proposal software should offer so that it helps transform your business into a roaring success.

Cloud-based Software

A cloud-based solution means you can use the software without installing it on your computer. You don’t have to load the copy of the software application to access and use the software. It is a web-based application, so all you need is an internet connection to get the software working on your computer.

Delivers Proposal Automation

Well, this is one of the main reasons why you have decided to incorporate proposal software into your business process. Isn’t it? As we all know, manually creating proposals is tedious, time consuming, and error-prone, which can negatively affect productivity of sales reps. So if you want your sales reps to spend minimum amount of time in creating proposals and focus more on converting those proposals into sales, then you need to choose a software that automates the creation and delivery of sales proposal.

Easy to Implement

Deployment or implementation of software comprises activities that get your software program ready for use. Opting for an online proposal software that is cumbersome and tedious to implement can become your biggest business headache. So ensure that the software you choose can be deployed with little effort and in minimum amount of time. In other words, you shouldn’t waste time in making the software run properly in your existing environment. Using fast-to-deploy proposal software solution can go a long way in achieving your business goals and minimizing operational cost.

Provides a Range of Professional Proposal Templates

The software should provide a slew of professional proposal templates so that you spend minimum time and effort in designing the template. Moreover, the templates have to be fully customizable so that you can fine tune the design of your proposal as per the nature of services and solutions being offered. When you use pre-built proposal templates that are specific to client needs, your proposals look professional, which works in attracting the prospect.

Ease of Use

Having a tough time in creating proposals using the software defeats its purpose as you have purchased it to save your time, reduce sale cycle and create proposals in minutes. So make sure that the software you select does not require a vast amount of training effort to get familiar with it. The software should be easy to understand and have a simple interface so that least amount of effort is needed to successfully incorporate it into your business.

Offers Advanced Editor

The job of customizing the pre-built templates is possible using an editor. So whether it is about customizing the style sheets in the proposal or setting up the margin, color, header, footer or adjusting the layout of the proposal, it can be easily done using the editor. An advanced editor will allow you add images and even audio and video in the proposal, thereby making it more appealing to the customer.

Flexible Tables

Whatever you want to include in the tables, be it pricing grids or payment schedules should be possible. The pricing tables in the software should have the functionality to auto-calculate taxes, discounts, and the final pricing. Pricing tables that calculate values help to skip the task of manually calculating the total cost.

Easy to Maintain Library

A library that keeps records of past and present proposal and moreover is easy to maintain and organize is a key feature of a proposal software. The library should be searchable according to the specified criteria so that you easily get the proposal that you are looking for. The library should allow you to organize and store the content the way you want.

Integrates Seamlessly

Quite a few companies use account systems such as QuickBooks, ERP software such as Microsoft Dynamics and CRM software such as SalesForce to manage their various business processes. So ensure that the proposal software in which you are investing, integrates seamlessly with the aforementioned software applications. This can work wonders to streamline your business operations and prevent duplicate entry of data.

Provides Convenient Payment Options

Keeping the customer’s convenience in mind, the proposal should also integrate with ePayment getaway systems such as PayPal, which accepts credit cards. This will allow the customer to make payment online once he has approved the proposal.

As far as approving the proposal is concerned, the less paperwork the better. So the proposal software should have a built-in e-signature functionality, which can save a lot of time of both the sales rep and the end customer.

Printing Feature

The proposal software should allow you to print and preview the proposal created as well as export the proposal to the client in any format including PDF and HTML.

Quote creation is often considered to be a time consuming process. However, if you have access to VARStreet aggregated product catalog, creating a sales quote can become a breeze. The catalog is specifically designed to ease your quoting process. To be more specific, the catalog can save your time in accessing the inventory and product pricing available from multiple distributors.

As we all know when a customer requests for a quote, we check which distributor that we are connected to, is offering the requested products.  This itself is a tedious job as one has to get inventory and pricing information from multiple distributors. You have to either access their websites or call them personally in order to get the desired information for quote creation. Also there is no guarantee that the information is up-to-date, which is crucial to create accurate quotes. You wish if all this product related information from multiple distributors was available at one place. Well, this is exactly what VARStreet aggregated catalog does.

Here are the reasons why you should choose VARStreet aggregated catalog to boost your sales quoting process:

Information Available at One Place

As the name suggests, the catalog combines products coming from all major IT distributors to form one catalog. So if you are connected to 5 distributors, your aggregated catalog will contain products coming from 5 distributors. So from one place you can access product related data from multiple distributors.

Well-Structured Information

The aggregated catalog combines data from multiple distributors and stores it in a well-structured format. This is what makes information from aggregated catalog easily accessible. To be more precise, you get to see in one single view a range of information including inventory and product pricing from multiple distributors. This allows you to compare products coming from different distributors. You can then finally choose one that helps you to get maximum margin.

Access Product Data the Way you Want

VARStreet aggregated catalog gives you the flexibility to access product information using different parameters such as category, mfr part # and distributors SKU. In case you are unaware of any of these parameters related to the product that you are looking for, you can simply type the keyword (say for instance Dell laptop (the actual product itself)) to know its pricing and related information coming from different distributors.

Catalog Updated Daily

What is use of the catalog if its content is not up-to-date. For instance, if the catalog is displaying old price which is far less than the current price of the product, it can result in a major loss for the reseller. In order to prevent such errors from occurring altogether, the VARStreet aggregated catalog is updated on a daily basis. However, your aggregated catalog is updated in real time, if it is connected to major distributors like Ingram Micro, TechData, Synnex, and D&H. VARStreet has XML integration with these distributors that enables you to place order electronically as well as know price and inventory in real time. So with VARStreet aggregated catalog at your disposal, you are 100% sure of entering correct product information in the quote.

Get Rich Product Content

VARStreet has partnered with Etilize, the world’s #1 supplier of rich product data. So apart from giving correct up-to-date information related to product, the aggregated catalog also provides actual product images, technical specs, long and short description, which can always be added in your quote to make it more attractive and informative.

Connected to Sales Quoting Software

VARStreet aggregated catalog is connected to sales quoting software that will help you to create quotes quickly. So the products that are selected from the catalog directly go into the quote. The VARStreet online quoting software is something that you can trust completely when it comes to creating, sending and managing quotes easily.