channelcentral Blog

How do Quotation Tools on Vendor Portals fit in today’s connected world? When we designed iQuote we went with a MultiTenant approach allowing iQuote to accept variable data from its host and sit in Channel or End User as a separate system. There were many reasons for this but one of the main reasons was that we felt that Channel Sales often handled many vendors and would prefer something that was closer to their business.

If I’m in Sales and I’m selling 50 vendors the chances are that I touch 5 or 10 of them daily. To manage that number of vendor portals daily is going to be an overhead on my productivity. Most people are managing 20+ user names and passwords already – all with different rules. Vendor portals have their uses for sure, but we’re not sure Quote generation is a good or practical use. Move quotation INto the channel not present it TO the channel. That way you can improve the level of integration and proximity to Sales – and achieve greater utilisation and ease of business.

Applications that are better suited to Vendor Portals: pricing, bid pricing, MDF and soft margin handling, deal registration, forecasting, marketing plans – all the things that are handled by organisations such as the Foundation Network. Just not Sales Quotations.

iQuote will carry ProLiant G6 Power Supply Options. When the G6 ProLiants were launched by HP we took a decision to suppress some of the options including the Power Supply Units (PSUs). At the time we felt that technical validation was needed to ensure that the PSU was correctly specified against the server build. That is still the case however feedback has been that we should at least show the options. So we’ve added them and will validate them on quantity (so physical constraints) and rules in terms of mixing (or in this case NOT mixing wattage).

HP does have a Power Advisor application that can be downloaded from this URL:

http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/servers/power-advisor/index.html

We recommend that iQuote users take advice on PSUs from the HP tool. Over the next few weeks we will be enabling some currently disabled options such as 2nd Memory Banks and Drive Cages.

In the long-term we are working on a PSU Sizer that resides within iQuote. This will provide indicative power draw based on your precise configuration and make recommendations on PSU sizing and redundancy. We have that methodology in place we just need to populate and build it over the next few weeks.

The iQuote Excel Export now carries your Logo and Terms and Conditions. We had some feedback from iQuote users that they would prefer just to be able to email out the Excel spreadsheet that iQuote generates. Previously they had to copy and paste line items into a standard template or add terms & conditions plus a logo to iQuote’s export.

Each Distributor or Reseller has a unique logo and terms & conditions – iQuote handles this so the variables are set at Host level. We hope that our several hundred users benefit from this timesaver.

More on the cost of quotation. In the previous article I raised a question: is the creation of quotations actually selling? This seemed to me to be a good use of the LinkedIn Q&A so I asked the question. I got seven responses and most of them were consistent. Consistent in saying ‘it depends’.

In the opinion of a number of experts from around the Globe if Sales are merely pricing up a specification that is handed to them from a customer it’s administration, if they are adding value by offering more (or even less) than the customer request, offering lateral solutions, price bundles and alternatives then it’s selling. Interesting views and who am I to argue?

To put all this in context (in iQuote context of course) this research sets a challenge: how can we minimise the time it takes to perform administrative (non value add) quotations while also decreasing the number of quotations that add no value? I firmly believe that we are most of the way to achieving this. More on quotations soon but in the meantime here’s what the team is working on to add value:

1. The management portal only reports Saved Quotes today however for every Saved Quote we get about 3 New Quotes (for verbal quotes and information queries). Look out soon for New Quote stats too.
2. End User Cashback has been applied to the vast majority of PSG products where they apply. Nearly there.
3. We are starting to use some iQuote power to make adverts more context-sensitive.
4. The export now contains Bid Letter reference and Bundle code. We are also working on a Bid Letter uploader to make this process automatic (and open up a load of pricing possibilities).
5. A Model ProLiants are being added.
6. Something that we think users will find extremely useful and relevant to the early part of this post: a form that allows a sales person to enter a shopping list to validate (in case of error) but also to customise and add value to.
7. It would be useful to stitch more than one quotation together (we call this quote concatenation) so this is being worked on too.

Apart from that we are doing some work with quote versioning, power sizing and a quotation health check system….it’s all go here.

XML offers a number of possibilities for iQuote. Dan, our Technical Solutions Director, has been looking at ways that iQuote could be improved and extended by using XML. Through this work we have already achieved Quote Versioning:

• If a user has a quote but exports it in different versions a number of times we are capturing that. Soon users will not only see saved quotes, they’ll also see exported quotes linked to their saved quotes. This is a strong step forward for re-quoting and quality recording.

Looking ahead Dan is looking at whether XML could be a good way to import customer-specific pricing including Bid Letters (OPG in the case of HP). As always we’ll keep you posted.