By guest blogger, Don Grubor who has been working with the SageCRM for over 10 years. In his role at Effective Solutions, Don spends his days implementing and supporting Sage CRM systems integrated with the Sage 100 accounting system across North America. 

The Business Challenge

Existing Quotes are created by the salesperson in Word or Excel with formats they have come up with. Each salesperson’s quote templates can look different. When a quote becomes an order a customer service person then needs to re-enter the information into Sage 100 as an order. There is no simple way for the salesperson to pull up all of their open quotes and follow-up on them. The company would like to go with a standard quote process and template that all salespeople use, and that gives them the ability to convert the quote to order without having to re-enter the information.

The Business Solution

The solution was to implement a Sage CRM system integrated with their Sage 100 ERP/Accounting system. This gave them integrated quoting, so the salesperson now created an opportunity in Sage CRM and then created a quote within the Opportunity. This quote is integrated with Sage 100. A custom quote template was created in SageCRM so the sales user could simply click on a SEND QUOTE button and email a PDF version of the quote to the customer/prospect. When the customer decided to move forward with the quote the customer service person could pull up the Quote in Sage CRM and promote it to an Order. Data re-entry was eliminated. Scripts were put in place to automatically mark the Opportunity as Sold/Won after a quote was converted to an order

Business Benefits

• Standardized quoting system, all quotes coming out of their systems look the same
• With Opportunities in CRM being created for each quote, the sales team could now quickly review open quotes and prepare sales forecasting reports for quotes expected to close in the current month or quarter
• Salespeople had a list of open opportunities/quotes displayed on their dashboard for follow-up until they were marked Won or Lost
• Key Quoting metrics (Quotes Created, Quotes Open/Won/Lost) could be generated from Opportunity Data
• Data re-entry time was reduced for the Customer Service staff
• Because Salespeople needed to create Company and Person records first in CRM before creating the Opportunity and Quote, the company’s CRM database quickly grew into a beneficial marketing list

This article was originally written for The CRM Connect Magazine