What’s your school of thought when it comes to customer relationship management solutions?
Old school like Salesforce — the big dog with a nearly 25% market share… and a nearly impenetrable UI.
New school like HubSpot — the quasi-humble marketing automation tool that has transmogrified into a full-blown (more like mostly blown) CRM.
“Stack school” like Dynamics — the choice for most businesses on the Microsoft Stack… or at least the one being suggested by every Microsoft Partner selling said stack.
No school — using Outlook, Gmail, and spreadsheets to fuel and foster customer relationships (not recommended).
No matter what CRM you prefer, it almost always doesn’t have every single tool a business needs, and that’s especially true when it comes to sales quoting tools, often called configure, price, quote (CPQ) solutions.
Because while there are some features in leading CRMs that can help you create quotes, said features are often lacking in any ability to help you create professional-looking, compelling, on-brand quotes, not to mention the ability to granularly track each sales quote.
In this article, we’re going to show you how to leverage quoting tools inside your CRM system. And if you’re not using a CRM system, we’re going to show you how to leverage these tools to kinda/sorta have a CRM system using the right kind of CPQ solution alone.
Seek single sign-on solutions
Most important in ensuring adoption of any quoting tool you add to your CRM system is ensuring single sign on. Standard SSO benefits include a more secure solution, and removing one more opportunity for the time-suck that is “I lost my password; please send me a code to reset.”
But what we have seen when clients add our CPQ solution to their CRMs is near-immediate adoption of the new quoting functionality as it appears as just another feature to users, rather than a new solution or system. iQuoteXpress currently has SSO CPQ for Dynamics, Salesforce, Zoho CRM, and Zoho Books, as well as an open API that enables SSO with most any enterprise CRM or ERP solution.
Centralize pricing and discounts
Salespeople will try almost anything to close a deal, as they should. However, that sometimes mean using outdated product pricing (quickly going off a spreadsheet they have locally stored rather than taking the time to ensure accuracy) or delivering drastic discounts.
With the right sale quote tool, however, you can centrally administer and control pricing and discount structures–remotely, no less! It’s all done via CPQ’s “backbone,” the product and pricing configurator.
Not only does the configurator give managers more control, it also empowers sales reps to more quickly put quotes together. Where they once had to pull product and pricing information from a separate database or Excel file, they now simply drag and drop configurations right from within the CPQ app embedded in your CRM system.
Leveraging CRM inside your quoting tool
See what we did there? Flipped this article’s title on its head! Because for small businesses that don’t see the need for–or simply can’t afford–a CRM system, there are tools and features in your quoting solution that can make for a “quasi CRM.”
You can create and manage accounts, create and manage contacts, track sales, track productivity, and even forecast revenue based on sales quotes in circulation. Additionally, there are analytics tools that help you get a clearer view of your pipeline and optimize processes, sales quote templates, and more to increase closing rates.
From once simply being little more than a collection of sales proposal templates to functioning as a mini customer relationship management solution, quoting tools have come a long way in a short time. And we’re just getting started.
