Can Your Quoting Processes Actually Be Hurting Your Business?
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"Many organizations rely on a spreadsheet-based quoting process, quoting software that is not built for our industry, or applications that stand alone and do not support the flow of information across the organization. The challenge with these approaches is that there are few, if any, controls in place to validate that pricing on quotes generated are based on accurate pricing and that quoted information is quickly and accurately moved through to operations.
When your quoting process does not ensure that accurate pricing information is carried throughout your business processes the result is quotes being submitting based on incorrect margins. This often leads to order fulfillment fire drills and costly credits and rebills. Rebills can cost companies up to 5% of the value of the original transaction, according to the Aberdeen Group. This means that your bottom line suffers a direct hit of up to 5% on all transactions that had any inaccuracies during the sales process.
It is also a very manual and time-consuming to roll-up individual sales reps forecasts into one master sales funnel spreadsheet and to keep the CRM/opportunity management software up-to-date. If this information is updated manually, it's immediately out-of-date as soon as the very next quote revision or new customer quote goes out. This makes it very hard for management to be able to rely on the sales funnel for accurate revenue, margin and resource forecasting so they can make informed operational and strategic decisions.
Many salespeople love their current manual or isolated quoting processes because they are, easy and have very few constraints. It's the rest of the organization that often suffers from the headaches resulting from the lack of visibility or audit trails inherent to these processes, which ultimately negatively impact your organizations operational stability and growth plans.
MOBILEsales is an industry-specific solution that caters to the real day-to-day needs of the ready mix and bulk sales person as well as the strategic needs of owners, Sales managers, and General managers. HaulIt is a quoting, billing, and dispatch solution designed specifically for the heavy building materials short-haul operations. Both solutions eliminate the inaccuracies of manual quoting processes and enable the flow of information across your organization in a timely manner, allowing you to sell, deliver, invoice, and receive payments quicker and with greater accuracy.
When all departments are smoothly working together, the results that can be achieved are amazing.
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