This article is for companies that may have a CRM in place but are still struggling to generate professional quotes efficiently, and are therefore resorting to using spreadsheets or word documents. This situation is unfortunately quite common as CRM systems just don’t offer the enriched and easy to use CPQ functionality in a purpose-built quotation and proposal management tool like Quotewerks.
The good news is that Quotewerks offers integration with many of the top CRMs, including Salesforce.com, Hubspot CRM, Zoho CRM, SugarCRM, SalesLogix and MS CRM. If you don’t have a CRM, Quotewerks can integrate with your Google Contacts, or your Outlook Address Book and also offers its very own Contact database. It even integrates with on-premise CRMs like ACT!, Goldmine and Maximizer!
To close the loop, Quotewerks integrates with popular Accounting systems like QuickBooks and Peachtree, so quotes can be converted to Orders and Invoices without duplicate entries.
In this case study, we will share some screenshots and explain the integration between Quotewerks and Zoho CRM.
In the main Quotewerks menu, under Contacts->Set Up Contact Manager, you will find all the possible integrations:
Click on Zoho SetUp and note that Quotewerks will not ask you for your CRM credentials! It will simply request you to log in to your Zoho CRM account directly, at which point Zoho will provide an access token that is used to integrate with Quotewerks.
The Deals Tab in the above screenshot has some important settings which you may wish to configure specifically for your operations. This covers what should happen when Deals are completed to ‘Won’, whether you’d like the Deals’ figures to use the Profit Amount or the Sale Amount and the mapping of items and bundles as shown below:
Once your integration is set up, you can search your Zoho CRM database to pull in Contact information for the Sold To, Ship To, and Bill To (all of which can be different) sections of your quote.
Now that your Contact Database is connected, you can set up your Product Database. This can be the native Quotewerks database, or you can link to multiple external data sources from spreadsheets to MS SQL, MS Access, your ERP, and more recently the Products module in your Zoho CRM.
So far, you’ve saved duplicating your Contact and Product databases – but what about your ERP? Surely, you don’t want the process to have gaps between your Deals and Invoicing! Well, the integration continues to flow so Quotes that are closed successfully not only update the Deal as Won in your CRM, but can also be converted to Orders and/or Invoices in your Peachtree (Sage 50), Quickbooks, Xero and other popular Accounting systems. This can be done for individual orders/invoices or by checking multiple boxes to select multiple documents.
This case study covers only the integration elements so please get in touch if you’d like a demo which would include the full functionality of Quotewerks. A couple of worthwhile points to end with!
If you need item pictures, literature, videos, specification sheets, terms and conditions, company profile to be part of your quote, these can all be catered for, but you generally end up with a very large file which can be a pain to email! Introducing QuoteValet, the hosting add-on to Quotewerks, that enables you to create an online, interactive version of your quote, so all you send is a hyperlink to your branded landing page! What’s more you can get notified every time the customer opens the quote, clicks on a link, changes an option, asks a question or digitally signs a PO! Pretty neat!
Another point worth mentioning is that Quotewerks can be installed on-premise and has concurrent licensing so you only need to buy for users that actually need to prepare quotes. And users that have access to the CRM can see the attached quotes anyway (based on security profiles), without needing access to Quotewerks!
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