Knowledge is one of the most important commodities in the complex selling process. When you start your quotation management cycle for each new customer, you likely begin with those known knowns that Donald Rumsfeld talked about. You may even have some known unknowns and then some assumptions based on those and the final category of unknown unknowns. Throughout the selling process, your sales team’s goal is to discover as many of those unknowns as possible and to log them into your knowledge capture software. Is your system efficient?

Knowledge efficiency is critical. Obtaining the right information at the right time could mean the difference between saving your organization thousands of dollars and making an additional ten or twenty thousand or more. One knowledge-based error could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars that either you or a channel partner will have to eat. You cannot afford those costly mistakes.

Managing the quotation process is much easier today than it was fifty years ago. With the proper software solution you can ensure that your sales organization is getting the right knowledge at the right time and increasing your ROI at the point of sale. Close the knowledge loopholes in your quotation management process today.

Quotation management and proposal management are often linked together. In some ways, they belong together. But they are separate tasks and deserve separate mention.

The best quotation management processes are knowledge-centric. That means for effective quotation management to take place, you must first understand and develop an effective knowledge acquisition strategy. A sales and product configurator - one that is effective and efficient like Cincom Acquire - can do that for you. It makes your life much easier.

When it comes to effective and productive quotation management, the following items are essential to ensuring your organization’s success:

• Personalization
• Automation
• Accuracy
• Pricing
• Document configuration
• Workflows
• Product specifics
• Streamlined processes

Which quotation management and product configuration solution offers all of that in one package? Cincom Acquire does.

Quotation management and proposal management are often linked together, but they’re not quite the same. Trying to keep semantics out of it, when you make a proposal to a client you are offering a product or service in exchange for a fee. Sometimes the fee is known and sometimes it is just a guess. When you make a quotation you are responding to a request for a specific type of service and making a statement as to what that service’s value is. While a quotation can be a guess it is more often stated as a fixed price. It can move up or down as new requirements are added or deleted from the requested service.

Your quotation management processes, especially if they involve several departments and several people within each department, as well as partners and channels will be a complex system that needs a selection of tools to make the process simpler. A good quotation management system allows for tiered access. The people who need to access the system may do so at a level that is appropriate for their interaction with the process. And you’ll have one manager at the top who controls the access levels. This type of system makes it easy for everyone involved to participate at their level of responsibility.

Learn more about quotation management at Cincom Acquire. Make the complex simple.

Many companies are so big their quotation management sections are exploding at the seams. It can get so overwhelming that no one has control. Marketing departments find themselves trying to maintain control over a three-headed monster that just gets bigger and bigger. If left to its own devices the monster just takes over.

That’s why every company, no matter the industry, needs a quotation management system that serves the customer. That’s really what any quote system is all about. Right?

With the proper quotation management solution you can have consistency across all sales channels within your organization. You can have it integrated with manufacturing and service as well as pricing to ensure that every customer gets a fair deal at the right price.

Re-organizing your quotation management system could take a while. It might takes six months or a year, but it’s a significant investment because it could save your company thousands of dollars over the lifetime of your system and your customers will return more often because they know they are dealing with an efficient enterprise. Why delay?