When preparing complex quotes involving multiple stakeholders, ensuring a complete flow of information between everyone involved and maintaining consistency in decision-making can be a major challenge. In this article, we explore how to move beyond group emails and manually completed and distributed Word documents when preparing complex quotes.
What do we mean by a complex quote?
Any quote whose preparation spans multiple departments, contains extensive information, and requires numerous consultations and approvals. These quotes involve the following main steps, which may be repeated in various ways: ● Assessment ● Pricing calculation ● Compilation and editing ● Approval ● Distribution ● Follow-up What causes problems in these seemingly straightforward steps?
The main problem: decentralized operations
When multiple platforms and file formats are involved, participants are often unsure whether a status has been updated, while issuing quotes in bulk can lead to important details being overlooked. The last thing we want is to clarify the same information repeatedly with managers from different departments—or, worse still, with clients. Resolving these challenges requires a robust, centralized solution that uses standardized formats and data fields, ensuring the right data is available in the right places.
Functionality covering the entire process
It is important to choose a system with features that eliminate the need to use other, external solutions alongside it. This means employees only need to become familiar with one system, while also benefiting from centralized information storage and automation opportunities.
Validation
A suitable system can check the key parameters of individual data fields and display a warning if they differ from predefined expectations. This can be particularly useful when listing numerous items, ensuring that no amount or comment is accidentally omitted. The software also alerts users if a phone number is incorrectly formatted or a proper name has accidentally been entered in lowercase, preventing many potentially awkward situations.
Tracking in-person discussions
Before a complex quote can be issued, numerous discussions must take place, generating a wealth of new information. It is important to track meeting dates and participants’ contact details as well. Because information shared during meetings will be needed at some unspecified point in the future, it must be organized clearly and remain easy to search and retrieve at any time.
Recurring tasks
If we can successfully keep track of all incoming and outgoing information, patterns and recurring subtasks soon become apparent. Fortunately, automating these recurring tasks is possible in most cases—and is particularly important. With xFLOWer, we can automate the following tasks, among others:
Automatic document generation
When creating documents, maintaining a consistent and appropriate format across all outgoing documents can be challenging. Compared with a conventional application for filling out documents in bulk, xFLOWer offers a much simpler and more efficient approach: it already has all the relevant information, so no data imports or additional data processing are required.
Automatic approvals
If an approval can be governed by an algorithm, the software can immediately check the data provided and approve the quote without any waiting time. Even if the approval process cannot be handled by an algorithm, significant time savings can still be achieved through faster communication and precise follow-up using notifications.
Automatic distribution
Once approved, any document can be sent immediately to any number of recipients using predefined email templates. Templates ensure that each email is sent without typos, includes all necessary details, follows a consistent design, and goes out at the specified time.
Summary
If a company has relied on inefficient habits in its quoting process for many years, overhauling everything at once and moving it into a unified system can be difficult.
At Click On, we have already helped numerous businesses take their process automation to the next level, not only improving their efficiency but also significantly reducing their costs.
