Renowned for innovative furniture design and for a focus on creating educational spaces that are engaging for students and teachers alike, Abax Kingfisher Pty LTD (Abax) has quickly moved from being “a humble start up to one of Australia’s best suppliers in education furniture.”

As is often the case when a company flourishes, there were growing pains. Abax needed to onboard more reps, which takes time and costs money. They also needed to send out more RFP responses more quickly (i.e., spend less time on things that would make them money).

And Abax needed to make the most of their business systems, such as Zoho CRM, which they were using to more effectively track customer relationships, but not really to create, send, and track customer sales quotes — all of which was still being done manually.

With his sales quoting process unable to keep up with the pace of his growing business, Abax Sales Manager James Moore knew it was time to for a change. And in the same way that turning to Zoho CRM solved many of Abax’s customer relationship management challenges, James turned to iQuoteXpress (IQX) — a single sign-on extension to Zoho — for help solving their sales proposal challenges.

An abundance of errors (and a time-consuming one, too)

Just like that old joke with two elderly women at a restaurant, where one says, “Boy, the food at this place is terrible,” and the other one says, “Yeah, I know; and such small portions,” Abax had a problem with both quality and quantity.

It was taking over an hour to complete a single sales proposal — which, for most businesses in the space, should be enough time to get it more-than-right — and “the number of errors on quotes (pricing, spelling etc.) was high,” said James. He added that “tracking the number of quotes generated weekly was also hard due to the fact that sales reps had to manually input data into a spreadsheet, which they regularly forgot to do.”

So James was facing challenges with 1) the content in his team’s sales proposals, 2) the speed in which proposals were being created, and 3) the overall tracking of proposals. He sought a solution to his challenges, and found that they could all be solved by one technology: IQX.

A CPQ that worked with Abax Kingfisher’s CRM (Zoho)

While IQX works as a standalone solution, it can also be used as an extension to a CRM system. Not only does this mean reps using the CRM will be sending more professional proposals more quickly, but IQX can even improve overall CRM adoption, as reps have to “go through” the CRM to check on the status of their sales proposals (and they’re always checking the status).

After extensive online research, James chose IQX as it integrates seamlessly and as a single sign-on with Zoho CRM, and it would address his three major business challenges. But it wasn’t just the three challenges listed above that James was trying to solve with a CPQ/CRM solution. He also needed to able able to:

• Build and use a visual product library

• Add images easily to proposals for each product

• Export proposals as PDF or Word docs

With IQX, James and Abax were able to do all of the above, and so much more.

Dramatic results in only two months

After implementing IQX with help from the IQX support team, James and Abax saw the results they wanted, and then some. When asked about “quantifiable changes” that Abax has experienced, James responded with three key data points. Abax saw:

James said that adding IQX’s CPQ power to his Zoho CRM impacted his overall sales processes by “reducing the amount of pricing errors, resulting in higher profits… [and] it has directly assisted with the reduction in time sales staff are sitting at their desks, meaning they are out on the road generating more business.”

The third benefit (reduced onboarding time of new sales reps) James attributes to the core of IQX — its centralized product and pricing configuration engine. Because rather than have each new rep become individually acclimated with the entire Abax line of products, a rep could instead get right down to selling: “[IQX] reduced the onboarding time for a new sales rep considerably as all our products and pricing are in one central and easily navigated location.”

As an experienced sales manager, James realized that while he wanted more sales quotes in circulation, he did not want to sacrifice his reps’ time to make that happen. He got the results he wanted, saying that IQX “made quoting the least time consuming part of their job; meaning they now have more time to meet with clients face to face.”

Supporting and reporting

IQX includes free support through implementation and beyond, and when James was asked about additional factors that drove his decision to choose IQX from other available solutions, he referred to the “assistance promised in getting our database up and running on IQX.”

Because, as every sales professional knows, getting a new business technology is one thing — getting it up and running is another thing entirely. The IQX team delivered on its promise and made sure that implementation (including adding products, contacts, etc.) was entirely handled. Abax reps needed only to sit back and sell.

Abax now also enjoys widespread improvements in their ability to forecast. Whereas a manual, dispersed sales proposal process often means that whatever comes next is anyone’s guess, Abax now enjoys an automated, centralized sales proposal process that James says is “accurate, measurable and provides enough data to accurately forecast months in advance.”

Parting words from a satisfied customer

Finally, when asked if there was anything else he would tell others about his experience with IQX as part of his overall workflow, James simply said:

Contact iQuoteXpress today about adding CPQ power to your CRM system, ERP system, and overall sales process.