From our CRM Connect Magazine:
Our partner Don Grubor of Effective Solutions kindly shared his advice on handling Sage CRM quotes.
The Business Challenge
Existing Quotes are created by the salesperson in Word or Excel with formats they have come up with.
Each salesperson’s quote templates can look very different, when a quote becomes an order, a customer service person then needs to re-enter the information into Sage 100 as an order.
There is no simple way for the salesperson to pull up all of their open quotes and follow up on them.
The company would like to go with a standard quote process and template that all salespeople use, and that gives them the ability to convert the quote to order without having to re-enter the information.
The Business Solution
The solution was to implement a SageCRM system integrated with their Sage 100 ERP/Accounting system. This gave them integrated quoting, so the salesperson now created an opportunity in SageCRM and then created a quote within the Opportunity. This quote is integrated with Sage 100.
A custom quote template was created in SageCRM so the sales user could simply click on a SEND QUOTE button and email a PDF version of the quote to the customer/prospect. When the customer decided to move forward with the quote the customer service person could pull up the Quote in SageCRM and promote it to an Order.
Data re-entry was eliminated. Scripts were put in place to automatically mark the Opportunity as Sold/Won after a quote was converted to an order
Business Benefits
- A standardized quoting system, all quotes coming out of their systems look the same
- With Opportunities in CRM being created for each quote, the sales team could now quickly review open quotes and prepare sales forecasting reports for quotes expected to close in the current month or quarter
- Salespeople had a list of open opportunities/quotes displayed on their dashboard for follow-up until they were marked Won or Lost
- Key Quoting metrics (Quotes Created, Quotes Open/Won/Lost) could be generated from Opportunity Data
- Data re-entry time was reduced for the Customer Service staff
- Because Salespeople needed to create Company and Person records first in CRM before creating the Opportunity and Quote, the company’s CRM database quickly grew into a beneficial marketing list
Software used: Sage CRM, Sage 100
Industry: Distribution