Whose Quote is it anyway? A New Evolution in CPQ Collaboration.
May 8, 2019If you are doing a quote for a customer, is it your quote to them, or their quote from you? Actually it’s both, but traditional workflows don’t manage this well.
Many communication tools (Slack, Teams, Basecamp) are designed around collaboration. CPQ solutions generally aren’t: Sales send a quote to a customer via email, customer reviews the quote offline, requests changes via email, re-quotes, moves to final version and then purchases. It’s email. It’s disjointed. It’s the sort of experience that some of the communications tools listed try to displace.
channelcentral is interested in the concept of quote sharing. It’s not just about the application and the infrastructure; a key enablement ingredient is how the tool is integrated into a customer’s eCommerce environment.
We’re part way there:
- Our applications support quote versioning.
- We’ve added workflows to allow quote recipients to launch quotes from emails, even if that quote didn’t originate from your supplier.
- Hosts can quote in the context of their customers already.
- We have web services available to query our “quote store” and open quotes.
So it’s within touching distance to send a quote to a prospect as a link, mutually comment and edit the quote spawning new versions (within the same CPQ application), and then select a final quote to proceed to the procurement workflow. It subtly changes the dynamic between Sales and Customer: you’re a team working to achieve the best outcome. Subtly? Substantially in fact.
If this evolution of CPQ is of interest to you, please contact us: marketing@channelcentral.net
Watch the video summary here:
channelcentral Blog 
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