Managing Quotes

User Manuals > Sales > Managing Quotes

Introduction

IT service providers many times need to prepare organized and formatted pricing quotes & estimations to their customers, as a step in opportunity negotiations, or just formalizing a sale of a computer. Traditionally, pricing quotes include information about the customer you’re preparing the quote for, what work is going into the price, what the final price is (plus tax), sales agreement disclaimer, and customer signature.

Managing Quotes

In CommitCRM you can manage quotes under Sales Opportunities in the following ways:

1. File Quotes as Documents:
   File the quotes you send to your customers as CommitCRM Documents (e.g. Excel, PDF, etc.) under the specific sales Opportunity they are related to. See more details in Storing your Quotes in CommitCRM.
2. Use Commit-QuoteWerks Link:
   Users working with QuoteWerks® as their quoting system can use Commit-QuoteWerks Link to create and manage Quotes directly in QuoteWerks®. See more details in Commit-QuoteWerks Link.

Sales Opportunities in CommitCRM are always linked to a selected Account (see more details in the Managing Prospects page). Managing the Opportunity's activity allows you to track the overall activity for this opportunity, including any Documents, Messages, Audit changes and History Notes. When managing your sales opportunities, the CommitCRM system allows you to keep information about your prospective customer, as well as your competition, influencing relationships, price bidding negotiations, and filing & management of assorted documents such as Quotes and contracts.

Storing your Quotes in CommitCRM

Note: If you are using QuoteWerks as your quoting system, see Commit-QuoteWerks Link.

You can save the quote documents in CommitCRM in various ways:

1. Save the quote as an external file (such as a Word, Excel, PDF, RTF document) and link it to the relevant Opportunity in CommitCRM by dragging the file and dropping it onto the CommitCRM application window. If the quoting software you use does not support the saving-to-file option, simply try printing it to PDF and file the PDF file under the opportunity in CommitCRM.
   
   
2. Create a new MS-Word® quote template directly from CommitCRM and edit it via the application. To create documents, click the New button found at the bottom of the opportunity's Docs tab.
   
   
3. To save time you can copy any existing quote to a new one by right-clicking the document and selecting the Copy option. You can copy quotes previously sent to other Accounts, or copy a quote document you've previously sent for this opportunity. The benefit of copying a previously sent quote for this opportunity to a new document, instead of just editing the previous document, is that in this way you will have a complete audit of all the stages and different versions of the quote you've sent your customer for this opportunity. For example, if you initially sent a quote for a new server with 1 year warranty, and then the customer wants to go with the 3 year warranty option, you can easily select the original quote, select the Copy option, and edit the newly created quote so it will include the 3 year warranty. This way you will always be able to see the quote you've originally sent to the customer and also the updated version.
   
   
4. If you send quotes by e-mail, either as an attached file or as part of the e-mail body itself, simply file the e-mail (with attachments, if any) under the opportunity in CommitCRM by dragging it from your e-mail software (Outlook®/Outlook Express®) and dropping it on the Opportunity record in CommitCRM. All these proposal documents will then be listed in the Docs and History tabs for each opportunity. Note that sale opportunities can contain as many documents as needed (for example different versions of the same proposal).
   
   
5. Using CommitCRM Document templates, you can have MS Word templates created that already have customer information inside them. The template can include a charge table, disclaimer/Terms of Service, and a place for the Customer signature, in addition to your customer info that gets applied to the document once the template has been applied to your customer Account. The document created from the template would be automatically saved in your CommitCRM documents, which would allow you to link the estimate to an Account, ticket, asset, contract, or opportunity, as well as enabling you or your customers to download the documents from the Commit Web Interface.

• For more information see CommitCRM Document Templates.

All these proposal documents will then be listed in the Docs and History tabs for each opportunity. Note that sale opportunities can contain as many documents as needed (for example different versions of the same proposal).

File:Commit sales opportunity quote.gif

• Double-clicking on a selected document row will automatically open the associated software that displays the document content—MS-Word®, Excel®, TextPad, Power Point®, Acrobat®, Outlook®, or any other application.

QuoteWerks® Link

With the Commit-QuoteWerks Link, you can easily link your Quotes from QuoteWerks® to Sales Opportunities in CommitCRM, allowing you to track the sale stages and bill your customer easily from within CommitCRM.

QuoteWerks® Quotes are managed in CommitCRM under Opportunities. Quotes are linked to Opportunities, and the Opportunity amount is a summary of all linked Quote's amounts.

The Quote itself is edited and managed solely in QuoteWerks. Any updates to the Quote can be pulled to CommitCRM, and the Opportunity amount will be updated accordingly.

>> Click to for the Commit-QuoteWerks Link user manual.

3rd Party Quoting Systems

In addition to the options listed above, CommitCRM also has an API which offers ODBC support so that any 3rd party software can pull Item & Account information from the CommitCRM database. This feature would allow 3rd party Quote Management software that also supports ODBC to automatically pull your item list and accounts list from CommitCRM. Once you’re quote is generated via the 3rd party software, you can create a PDF/XLS file for the quote within the quoting software, and drag it into CommitCRM, as mentioned above.

The ODBC driver can be downloaded, installed, and used with ccrm, and little setup is needed to get working with it; however, the ODBC connector is still regarded as an advanced option which usually takes some prior experience with ODBC orientated databases in order to get to function properly.

• For more information see Using the ODBC Connector.

See Also

• KB: Using Commit Document Templates
• Commit API Developers Guide
• Sales
• Managing Prospects