Blog Post
Advances in technology have radically reshaped customer expectations, and buyers want responses in hours, not days or weeks. Legacy manual quoting processes are slow and inaccurate, causing deals to fall through and making it harder to stay competitive. Quote automation enables you to generate accurate, professional quotes in minutes. Without spending days writing up project quotes, your sales team is free to focus on higher-value tasks like customer relationship building and upselling initiatives. Read on to discover the 8 ways embracing quote automation can improve your business.
What Is Quote Automation?
Quote automation uses advanced software to automatically capture customer inputs, apply pricing rules, and generate detailed quotes within minutes. These software solutions integrate with product catalogs, pricing databases, and CRM systems. They can rapidly respond to RFQs from potential customers by dynamically generating quotes based on accurate, up-to-date deal data and pre-defined business rules.
Why Is Quote Automation Important?
Quote automation enables the streamlining of the entire quote-to-cash (Q2C) process, leading to faster deal closure and improved cash flow. Quote automation also ensures that quotes are error-free and consistent, thereby reducing the likelihood of disputes and delays in the invoicing and payment stages, boosting sales efficiency and effectiveness.
Manual quoting, by contrast, faces a number of challenges:
Slow and Error-Prone
Relying on manual processing of quotes increases the risk of pricing and configuration errors. Double-checking everything can result in delayed responses to customer inquiries. The risk of errors is even more significant when attempting to meet tighter deadlines, where the temptation to cut corners or simply bid high can result in lost deals.
Low Adaptability To Changes
Shifting market dynamics often call for a rapid response, but pricing updates, product changes, and discounts can be cumbersome to implement when relying on manual quoting. Each employee needs to be informed of the latest changes, and new processes are frequently required, making your business slow to react.
Low Scalability and Increased Costs
When your business grows, it typically faces an increase in deal volume. Organizations that still rely on outdated, manual quoting processes often find themselves overwhelmed, dedicating more time to processing quotes and less to high-value activities. This imbalance can lead to decreased productivity and potentially force companies to hire additional staff, thereby increasing labor costs.
Limited Data Impedes Decision-Making
Without quote automation, product, pricing, and customer data are typically locked away in silos, making it harder for teams to create accurate quotes and leaders to make accurate sales decisions.
Embracing advanced automation solution s, such as automated quote management, invoice automation, or sales order automation, is key to overcoming these challenges and maintaining a competitive edge as your business expands.
How Quote Automation Functions
Quote automation, like other digital transformation processes, uses advanced technology to bring unprecedented speed and efficiency to the Q2C process. With automation, companies can close deals faster and provide a better experience for their customers.
Quote automation specifically improves your operations in the following ways:
- Integration Across Systems: From CRM to CPQ and ERP systems, quote automation solutions combine data from disparate sources across your organization to generate highly accurate, dynamic quotes.
- Rule-Based Engine: Automatically configure product bundles, apply pricing rules, discounts, and approval workflows based on predefined business logic.
- Automated Document Generation: Accurately configured quotes are automatically generated as professional, branded documents ready for delivery to customers.
- Omnichannel Delivery: Once generated, quotes can be easily delivered to prospective customers using whichever channel they prefer, including email, CRM, e-signature, or customer portals.
- Pipeline Management: With all data centralized, quote automation systems provide full visibility into the sales pipeline, enabling forecasting and the identification of bottlenecks and opportunities.
- Version Control & Audit Trail: Another key function of quote automation systems is the maintenance of a complete audit trail of all revisions. This simplifies compliance and enables easy retrieval of historical quote versions.
What Are the Top 8 Benefits of Quote Automation?
Eliminating manual labor by implementing quote automation can slash the overall time of your quote-to-cash process and deliver tangible gains to your business. Here are the top 8 benefits of quote automation:
1. Accelerates Quote Delivery
No more need to spend hours doing research to ensure an accurate quote. Quote automation rapidly generates and accurately configures quotes, shortening your sales cycles.
2. Ensures Pricing Accuracy and Compliance
Manual pricing errors can cost organizations thousands of dollars. Quote automation, which automatically applies approved pricing and discounts based on centralized rules, can eliminate these errors.
3. Boosts Sales Productivity
Tedious quoting tasks can detract from sales engineers’ ability to focus on initiatives that deliver more value to your business. Quote automation eliminates this manual labor, freeing up your team to manage more deals and boost sales.
4. Enables Scalability
Higher deal volume should be an optimistic marker of growth, not a business risk. Quote automation can efficiently handle increasing quote volumes without the need for any more resources and enables you to scale with confidence.
5. Provides Data Governance
It’s difficult to manage and restrict access to data that is floating in different departments throughout your organization. Quote automation consolidates all your data into one easily accessible location, creating a single source of truth for product, pricing, and customer data with built-in approval workflows.
6. Elevates Customer Experience
Your customers will appreciate having rapid access to quotes that are accurate, professional, and branded. Plus, by delivering these quotes through customers’ preferred communication channels, your business can offer a customer experience a cut above the rest.
7. Increases Operational Efficiency
With disparate sources and manual input, duplicate data entry and other operational inefficiencies are all too common in organizations relying on legacy quoting processes. Once again, quote automation turns this around thanks to its strong integrations across CPQ, ERP, and CRM systems, streamlining data access.
8. Unlocks Data-Driven Insights
Quote automation doesn’t just take data into a black box and produce quotes. It provides a complete view of your pipeline with detailed metrics so that you can identify the patterns, bottlenecks, and windows of opportunity.
The advantages to be gained from quote automation are complemented by the similar upsides of invoice automation and sales order automation, which significantly accelerate the order-to-cash (O2C) process through automated data entry and order fulfillment.
8 Steps to Implementing Quote Automation in Your Organization
Embracing automation is not always an easy or simple transition, and to effectively implement quote automation, it’s crucial to take a strategic approach. The following steps can help you maximize the positive impact on your sales operations:
1. Assess Your Current State
Take stock of your existing quoting processes, systems, and pain points to identify the eras that are ripe for automation. At the beginning, it’s best to move in small increments rather than embarking on broad-ranging initiatives.
2. Define Your Requirements
In order to build out your new processes, policies, and technology, you must clearly identify your goals, must-have features, integration needs, and more. Defining your requirements early will help when it comes to choosing your quote automation platform.
3. Select The Right Solution
With your needs defined, you can now compare the features and functionality of multiple quote automation platforms against your requirements. Thorough research and testing of different technologies will help you find the best fit for your tech stack and budget.
4. Map Your Workflow
Automation is never as simple as switching a tool on and letting it run. It’s important to document your desired future-state workflow, defining process steps, decision rules, and roles for each of your team members.
5. Implement and Integrate
In this phase, you will work closely with your selected vendor to configure the solution, integrate with other systems, and establish governance and security policies.
6. Test and Refine
Even with perfect preparation, there are still likely to be some surprises with your initial configuration. Thoroughly test the solution, identify gaps, and iteratively refine the platform until it meets your requirements.
7. Train your Team
Don’t underestimate the importance of employee training and communication. Change management support is critical to driving user adoption across sales and other teams.
8. Rollout & Monitor
Finally, you can launch your quote automation solution. Start with a pilot group first and then scale company-wide while monitoring KPIs and optimizing as needed.
The Digital Transformation Beyond Quote Automation
Manual processes such as quotes are slow, prone to human error, and can be frustrating for customers expecting fast turnaround times. Quote automation can enhance your Q2C processes by providing greater speed, superior accuracy, and a more pleasurable customer experience. With Conexiom, these automation benefits can be leveraged in other business processes.
Conexiom is an innovative platform that uses AI to eliminate manual business document processes such as sales order processing and AP invoice processing.
Streamline your O2C process with the following Conexiom capabilities:
- AI and machine learning for end-to-end emailed order processing
- Process complex, PO-backed emailed orders with 100% accuracy
- Integrate seamlessly with existing ERP, accounting, and procurement systems
- Rapid order processing of under 2 minutes
- Improved On-Time, In-Full rates with 22% fewer late deliveries,
- Cost savings through 49% fewer order errors
- Accurately pre-fill order records with key details from various documents.
- Process 3x more invoices
- Cut invoice processing costs by 50%
- Access 5x as many early payment discounts
- Cut out duplicate payments
Learn more about how to take advantage of digital transformation with Conexiom by requesting a personalized demo.