channelcentral Blog

iQuote – according to the Users. So on Thursday I had a very interesting day. I spent the best part of it interviewing iQuote users on a one to one basis. So a potentially dangerous activity but actually a hugely rewarding one.

Seeing Distribution sales people work close up is very enlightening – or should I say lightening. The sheer pace (and it was in August!) has to be seen to be believed. Sales flick between browser, spreadsheet and order systems using every keyboard shortcut known to Man and Microsoft.

So how did iQuote stack up in this frantic sales environment? Really well. In terms of web-based systems the performance was deemed to be best in class. We’ve made iQuote very light to use and this pays off when you see sluggish databases in web sites hammering the egg timer.

Complaints? Really few and where we have had support calls in the past we got plenty of positive feedback about how quickly we reacted and solved issues. I genuinely didn’t take a beating.

Suggestions? Yes and some really good ones that we will certainly look to implement where practical and in our control.

Missing a trick? Very few of them were aware of the really powerful quote re-pricing tool so we’ll be doing some development to make this more obvious to people.

For me the biggest thing was that iQuote has a process, but on the front line not only is the pace different but also people work in different ways. Sales people take different things out of iQuote and that’s OK as long as they maximise the sale for the Distributor. Most people used iQuote for reference (especially HP Care Pack) or for complex quotes. If fully utilised iQuote does have the capability to save Sales time in the long-term even on simple quotations.

We’ve got some more tricks up our sleeve to come!