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.