Summary
Introducing Quote-to-Cash and Hosts
Steve introduces the Quote-to-Cash (Q2C) topic and podcast co-host Sam. They joke briefly about healthcare customer service issues from Sam’s experience that morning. Steve postulates that Q2C may mean ‘Quote-to-Crypto’ some day.
Quote-to-Cash Use Cases and Benefits
Generating quotes faster can increase win rates. Use cases include field sales, mobile teams, engineered and custom products, healthcare, grocery/CPG, and managed IT services. Benefits are higher sales productivity, quote accuracy, and customer satisfaction.
Components of Quote-to-Cash Solutions
Components include CPQ configuration engines, ERP integration for pricing/inventory, eSignature, portals, rules on product relationships, and mobile access. Solutions can replace time-consuming engineering team loops and paperwork.
Industry Scenarios for Quote-to-Cash
Well-suited industries include medical devices, MSPs, solar installation, regulated sectors, and distribution models with private label products based on frequent pricing changes, onsite services, and compliance requirements.
Vendor Solutions and Evaluation Criteria
They discuss vendor quote-to-cash solutions from Conga, ConnectWise, Salesforce, and MobileForce based on factors like CRM integration, industry specialization, and startup agility.
Episode Transcript
Steve
Welcome to CRM Talk, the show that brings you the latest in CRM and CRM related news and information. This is Steve Chipman along with my co-host, Sam Biardo. And Sam, how’s your Quote-to-Cash going today?
Sam
Not good. I’ve been basically sitting in doctor’s offices this morning. No quoting for you today. No quoting yet today. Yes. No, it was a fun experience. I had to navigate a giant car accident, which made me exactly 17 minutes late for the appointment.
And they said, well, the doctor probably is going to have to reschedule. And I’m thinking, how many times has the doctor been 17 minutes late?
Steve
At least. I was going to say that’s a minimum unless you’re the first appointment of the day. Right.
Sam
And so they said, well, just wait here and we’ll go talk to him. And they said, 15, 20 minutes later, we’ve texted him. And then half hour later, she goes back. And she says, well, he must be in with patients because we don’t see him.
And then I find out he’s out to lunch.
Steve
Sounds like they’ve got a CRM workflow issue.
Sam
I’m literally like I’ve been sitting in in here for like 45 minutes.
Steve
Well, the healthcare system, that’s a much bigger topic that I think we have time for today, but. Maybe we should cover healthcare CRM at some point.
Sam
Right. Well, the funny part was I tried to call them, but then you got to wait like 25 minutes to actually talk to a person. It’s like a double whammy, you know. Yes, healthcare and customer service. Oxymoron.
Steve
Although I have to say, I always give kudos to Kaiser out here for the most part, because they’re this big self-contained system, they’re pretty good at the customer service stuff. It’s got its pros and cons, but an HMO definitely has a lot of integrated systems, which is great.
Sam
Well, we’re going to talk today about quoting and cash to quote. So let’s talk a little bit about cash to quote.
Steve
If our listeners who don’t quote, I’d listen anyway, because we always go off on tangent, so it’s not going to be 100% about quoting. But let’s talk. OK, so first thing I want to talk about is there are all these different labels for quoting.
There’s quote to cash. There’s quote to close. There’s quote to contract. I thought maybe quote to crypto is going to be on the horizon. And then there’s CPQ. But generally what we’re talking about here is from the moment you generate a quote from your CRM system or from a third party add on to the time you not just get the order but get payment for the order.
So now you can onboard the customer or schedule the onsite delivery. Is that is that the right way to look at it?
Sam
That’s the way I look at it. And then there’s all different models. You can be, business to consumer typically has a slightly different model than business to business. And field service and field sales going out to visit customers at their house like tradesmen do this.
That is a whole different process as well. So there’s a lot of different variations of cash to quote.
Steve
So whether you’re a B2B buyer or B2C buyer, one of your biggest pain points is likely how long it takes to get a quote. From the time you have the conversation and the person does the site survey, there’s always this moment where the salesperson or whoever comes on site says, yeah, “we’ll get you a quote” and then you think, well, is this going to be two hours, two days, two weeks?
So that’s a huge pain point, correct?
Sam
Correct. In fact, the faster you get the quote in their hands, the more likely you are to close the sale. The people who take the time to try to put together a good solution and accurate quote are actually less likely to win a deal.
So you really want to try to have the fastest quote possible with the most potentially the most accuracy. That’s sort of the two variables that come into play when you want to close a deal.
Steve
So these slow quoters, what’s behind their slow quoting? Is it process? Is it technology? Is it all of the above?
Sam
A lot of them are engineered products, right? So, you know, the sales people go out, they talk to the customer, they get a bunch of data, they go back to an engineer, you know, they send it to a back office who does engineering work who has to sort of, you know, whatever you’re building has to come out and quote materials and assembly.
And particularly if it’s a custom product, you know, they’re gonna have to put together sort of like a project plan. So those products tend to take a long time. And that’s why we’re seeing the quote-to-cash solutions that are coming out there today, particularly quoting modules, have some intelligence in them so that they can help the salespeople close custom solutions without having to involve an engineer, an engineering team or an estimator of some type.
Steve
So you can take that role completely out of the loop if you’ve got the right system in place?
Sam
Correct, yeah. And it’s not for all cases, but for a lot of cases. And that’s really the big value to the sales department and the customer is the fact that you can have a system that closes a sale considerably faster because the configuration tool, we talked about CPQ in the past, the configuration tool and the AI can work together to assemble a engineered solution.
Steve
And what are the components of that solution without talking about a specific vendor? We’ll cover some of the vendors, but what are the components to going from all that manual interaction, maybe using a document plus a spreadsheet?
What are the technological components, including the interfaces and the integrations you need?
Sam
Well, depending on obviously the solution, you’d have to have an integration to your ERP or your to basically pull in inventory and product data and pricing. And then you’d have to have a series of rules around product that says, you know, if you have product a you also must have product B.
It’s, you know, it’s the what Amazon does you buy a TV and then it says, do you want things, here’s a cable you can buy for $30 and here’s a, here’s something to mount around the wall for 100, right?
It’s, it’s, it’s those intelligent add ons that are really important. And so you have rules that say if you have A, you must have B or if you have A, you cannot have B or if you have A, you want to suggest B.
Steve
The suggestions, that’s a big one.
Sam
Yeah. And then substitution is also big. If I’m selling Post-it notes, but we’re out in inventory, it’s going to recommend Highland.
Steve
So I’m the salesperson. Well, let’s talk about the industries where this is applicable. Obviously, quoting happens in a lot of different industries. Some of the ones that come to mind, I think you’ve got a big client who does commercial painting.
I know I had a recent experience with a managed service provider that was using Salesforce and Conga, but they went to ConnectWise, which is an industry standard for managed service providers. And there’s a product called ConnectWise Sell, which was an acquisition.
But in managed services, you’ve got a lot of different components and dependencies in terms of network components. The other one that comes to mind are medical devices, because those can have rules and those can have lots of different SKUs.
What are some other industries that you know of that could really benefit from this type of solution as a big improvement over how they’re doing things today?
Sam
Well, any trade, first of all, those field sales, we had a customer years ago who would send a SWAT team into an area that had like hail damage or had a tornado come through and did wind damage to replace roofs.
And they literally could walk up, input the policy number of their home insurance, immediately determine exactly how much they were getting from the insurance company, and then could use an aerial photograph of their roof to figure out the square footage and literally do a quote on the spot.
Steve
So they had integrations to out to the carriers. They had some sort of. Wow.
Sam
So their back office server had integration in the major insurance carriers. It was really an interesting project. But it would then come back and say, this is the cost for this one customer. This is what you’re gonna get in insurance. Out of pocket, you’re gonna spend a thousand or whatever. And if the person said, yeah, that’s great. They sign right there. And they even then, they pick out the tiles from images, colors and stuff.
And they have, when they pick out a particular, I’d like this beige tile say, or a bit beige roofing. They would give you a date on when it would be delivered by. So you could make decisions on color based on delivery.
And at that point then, it would, once it’s done, they would say this so-and-so is gonna be delivered on this date. Truck would come up and drop all the roofing materials on your front lawn and the crew would come like two days later.
Steve
Very efficient.
Sam
Yeah.
Steve
Now, so this could be done, so you’re talking about a scenario where you could generate the quote off of a tablet. You’re talking to the customer, or in this case, the victim of a natural disaster, and you can settle everything right in front of the customer, right down to the quote and the order.
Sam
Right, and this was early tablet days, so this was done at least 10 years ago. And so now, with all the great technology around tablets, this is a much easier problem to solve.
Steve
And then the other integration is eSignature, of course. So no matter what platform you’re using for your quote to cash, you can possibly have a selection as to whether to send it out through DocuSign or some other eSignature app.
Sam
In this case, they signed the tablet, but yeah, you’re right. You immediately do an e-signature, it shows up in their email. Once they sign it, it hits their credit card right away.
Steve
And then the other component, if we’re talking about a B2B quote or more, not a face-to-face quote, but someone calls up, there’s a conversation, there might be meetings. The other interesting piece is the collaboration.
So when you send a quote to someone, typically they’re not just going to say great, accepted, here it is, and turn it around in a day. They’re going to have some internal discussions. They’re going to come back to you asking for adjustments.
The quantities might change. If you’re in a business like the MSP I mentioned earlier, your number of users goes up. So from what I understand, these systems allow for that seller to buyer collaboration all within the platform.
Sam
Correct. Some of these systems will put the quote on a portal so that they can have a quote history. Some of them will email you the quotes that you can socialize it and make changes to. Lots of different ways of doing it.
The portal one I think is the most interesting because it literally lets you make changes to the quote on quantities and stuff and then reconfigures the quote on the fly.
Steve
Great. Now, in a recent webinar, I noticed you had a slide that said, are you a candidate for CPQ/quote-to-cash? And so one of your first item was, do you have a mobile sales team? So this isn’t only for mobile sales teams, but that’s certainly a huge use case.
Sam
Yeah, so for this product, because it’s a mobile sales team, was just a very interesting component. There’s a lot of companies out there that, we have a customer that sells ice cream. And how they sell it is they go into little stores, Mom & Pop stores in a city, and they leave them with samples.
And then they come back in say a week and ask them how the samples were going. These guys, they would taste, the owners would taste it. And they would literally take an order on the fly, right? On a mobile solution.
Years ago, we did a company that dropped off chips at grocery stores. So what they would do is they were representing a chip corn chip and a chip manufacturer, I don’t want to say their name, but they would go in and in the grocery store, they would face up the product they had there and realize that they’re short of so many of a particular corn chip or a particular potato chip.
And they would then talk to the store manager and immediately put a quote together for an order. And then the store manager would sign it, now, in this case, they had the stuff on the truck. So they would just bring it in and complete their inventory.
But that’s all completely mobile, the signature of everything, the quoting, the acceptance, everything was part of the package. Now, there was no contracts assigned because it was a master contract that was signed a while ago, you know, it was between say, Albertson’s and this chip manufacturer. But, you know, it was a very interesting quoting tool because it was quoting on the spot.
Steve
You know that there’s a huge growing segment in the grocery store business, which are the store brands, which are supplied by these white label providers. And because they don’t have all the marketing involved, the retailers can offer those at a significantly discounted cost.
And that industry is evolved to the point of these large trade shows, where the interaction is now on these big trade show floors, where these private label providers talk to the representatives of the chains.
And of course, they have to go through a quoting process as well. So that’s probably another use case. So the other one you mentioned was, do you provide onsite support? So often when you’re supporting, it could be a med device.
It could be something to do with a person’s home. A lot of times there are quotes associated with onsite services and support.
Sam
Absolutely. Yeah, we had a company that did services for CAT scan and MRI equipment and they would go on site and they had, at that time, there was some intelligent diagnostics. So it would say we, you know, we think it’s these parts that are failing.
But what would happen is you don’t never want them to fail. So it was more like a preventive solution. The actual device would phone our client who would then send somebody out with the appropriate parts that were not in the behaving in the tolerance levels that they needed to.
And they would replace them. But while they were there, a lot of times they would find other issues. And because they don’t want to take this machine down, what they would do is they would overnight a particular part and the repairman would literally stay in a hotel for one night.
And then they would put that part in because these machines cost, you know, million, couple million dollars. And they want to keep them running 24 -7 to pay for them. It was all worth it to the, it was all built in as the simple support contracts that they had, which were basically, they got penalized if the system actually went down.
And so outside of the maintenance. So, you know, the whole thing was they could do that all mobily now.
Steve
Yep, again, very efficient. The other thing is, the other thing you mentioned is, do you have frequent pricing changes? So if the ERP is a single source of truth, and that’s been continually updated, then that can be reflected very quickly in the CTC or C2C system.
Sam
Yeah, that’s exactly true. Yeah, so you have every one of these solutions had an ERP integration with it. And typically, you wanna pull over product and inventory information and product pricing. At a minimum, you may also bring over contracts because certain companies may have contract-based pricing.
So that would be something that would also would go into the configuration tool. And then it would certainly look at all of those things and start doing the assembly work and creating the quote. And again, it also understand that behind the scenes, there’s just a ton of business rules on what you can sell, what you must sell when you sell product A or B, and what are the reasonable substitutions.
Steve
Yes, there are substitutions and then there are whole new product lines as well. So if a company that’s a reseller or distributor has an entire new line, that goes into the ERP system. Then there has to be coordination between ERP system management and CRM or quote system management to ensure that those new line items are accurately updated and the rules are set.
So managing a system like this is really an ongoing process. And from what I understand, it used to be more code based, but now it’s very much no code, low code, right?
Sam
That’s exactly true. The interesting story is this has got to be like 20 years ago, but we had a customer that had a couple million SKUs, and they were a chip manufacturer. So if you were building a particular, if you bought a particular chip, you had to have certain types of resistors, and you couldn’t use these other types of resistors.
And because the chip technology was changing all the time, they were adding and building up the old-fashioned rule-based CPQ. And they actually had a small company in Brazil of about six people who did nothing but put products in and figure out tolerances for electricity and what types of chips they can work with and what types of chips they can’t work with.
So someone couldn’t place an order that would never work or would burn out the chips. It was really interesting. And now that’s all would be done by AI.
Steve
Now, given the fact that AI is not perfect, there’s got to be some sort of human check.
Sam
I’m sure there is, but in this other, this chip manufacturers, it was literally pulling in things like different types of amperage that it could take, different types of other components, what kind of boards it can run on.
So all that was in a document that was delivered as part of it, but when someone tried to order one and tried to order incompatible parts with it, that’s when all these rules would kick in and say, no, you can’t do that.
Wouldn’t even make the parts available to the sales people because the problem they had was it’s easy to sell a solution to somebody, but because it literally should be engineered, you could literally sell them a solution that wouldn’t work by adding the wrong add-ons.
Right. Now, that type of solution, the AI would be reading that spec information and just making sure that it’s fitting within the rules.
Steve
So the one that just came to mind too is solar installation. So whether that’s residential or commercial, there are lots of different options, things that go together. Is that something you’ve been involved with or?
Sam
We haven’t been involved with it, but I know of people who have, and that is, again, another great use for the field sales and for intelligent quoting.
Steve
Now, how about compliance and regulations? You mentioned that as another factor in being a candidate for quote-to-cash.
Sam
True, if you’re a highly regulated industry, you certainly don’t wanna sell something that doesn’t meet those regulations. And so the intelligent quoting tools can, when trained, can actually manage that for you.
And ensure, like particularly if you’re selling something like Offshore, there’s all these roles around moving Offshore technology. The quoting system could jump in and say, no, by the address you can’t sell it.
Steve
Right, right. So let’s talk about some specific vendor solutions. So the webinar I’ve alluded to, that was a joint webinar you did with Mobileforce. And as the name implies, that is primarily mobile, or can that be just as easily used by someone sitting at a desk in an office at home?
Sam
They can use it, the AI configuration tool can be used anywhere. So they have a nice mobile component, which is how we got introduced to them because there’s very few products that are field sales tools out there.
If you look at the marketplace, I mean, there’s probably 20 or 30, but that’s for our industry really low when you’re thinking there’s like 3, 400 CRMs out there. Their tool worked really well for field sales and that’s how we got in service and that’s how we got introduced to them, but now they have this AI quoting tool that you can use pretty much anywhere.
Steve
Now, other players, I know Apptus was acquired by Conga. SteelBrick years ago was acquired by Salesforce. I don’t know, Salesforce really doesn’t seem to talk about CPQ much anymore unless I’m missing something.
Sam
No, they don’t. And if you really look, every major player has a CPQ at this point. I can’t remember the Microsoft’s, but Microsoft bought one a couple of years ago and you’ve got SAP and Oracle both have their own versions of those tools.
So, you know, the big CRM implementation companies that they all have, even Infor has their own CPQ, Intelligent CPQ tool. So everybody’s out there, you know, working hard to get that fill in that space because that is an area, if you do a lot of quoting, particularly if you do transactional quoting where you have to do quite a few of them in a day, and you have complex problems or complex rules or engineered products, this is gonna save you time because the one thing people really hate is when you give them a quote and then have to come back and say, oops, we forgot something, the price just went up, right?
Steve
Yeah. So these standalone ones tend to last too long as standalone. They get acquired. And then once they’re acquired, they become very specific to one system. Mobileforce right now, they integrate with a number of different systems. Is that right?
Sam
Yeah, their specialty is they’re independent, but they’re integrating into pretty much, well, a ton of different products, including, well, we sell it with Creatio, but they work with HubSpot, they work with Salesforce, and so on.
Steve
So where this fits into the CRM process, and I wrote a recent post about this, which is the CRM process used to be a fairly short segment of the entire end-to-end awareness to customer loyalty chain or spectrum.
And now CRM with a lot more baked-in marketing automation really can start with awareness so the marketers can be using CRM to find people and create awareness about a product or service. And now a CRM process within one system can take someone all the way through to a loyal customer.
And then for the quoting with something like Mobileforce, you’re really just stepping out of the system to do the quoting, but then you’re stepping right back in to update the opportunity, to close the opportunity when the quote’s accepted.
So it seems to me that this is a critical part of the CRM process. Now, just like marketing automation has gotten a lot more sophisticated, and a lot of companies really need to be thinking in terms of that whole end-to-end process, and what all the pieces are, there’s not always going to be one vendor.
Hopefully it will always be one vendor. But now you really have to think about these third-party products and how they’re going to fit in. So do you advise people on what the best combination of components is?
Sam
We do, but we sort of have favorites as well. So, you know, what we’re better at doing is saying, does your particular quoting fit any of the tools in the toolbox that we have? Right, and so that’s literally how we look at the problem.
We associate ourselves with one or two tools in each space and we try to pick the one that fits the best, but sometimes none of them fit your needs. And in that case, we let you know.
Steve
Yeah, so you might have someone who they’ve chosen a CRM vendor, they’re considering their proprietary quote to cash, but Mobileforce ends up being a better solution, even though it’s not native to the application or even though it’s not owned by the CRM vendor.
Because they’re a nimble startup, they’ve got a solution that can just handle processes and requirements that these older systems can’t handle.
Sam
Yeah, that’s correct. Yeah. And what I’m finding really interesting, and this is we’re finding this from our Starfish company. But what we’re seeing a lot of is where before integration was, I’m going to push my data from my CRM to my ERP, do the quoting in the ERP, and then push the actual quote back.
And the reason why they did that was all the quoting tools were designed to work inside the ERP. Now we’re seeing that move to the quote to the CRM. So what we’re seeing a lot of companies do is pushing a lot of the product pricing inventory information into the CRM and then using quoting tools inside the CRM.
And we’re seeing that, you know, pretty much across the board, across every product, but some products more than others. For example, we’re seeing a lot of HubSpot now. They added a limited CPQ tool to their quoting.
And now we’re seeing people who were once doing quoting in their back office do their quoting in their front office.
Steve
Yeah, there’s always a problem with, you know, if you’ve got a cloud CRM that’s so easily accessible by your sales users from the field, and then you have situations where, oh, you got to quote from the ERP, but that’s the client server application.
So we’ve got to stick that on a private cloud and give someone a thin interface in the field, and you’ve got all this stuff that goes along with that. So it’s always a much better solution if you can integrate the quoting function into the web-based environment that salespeople are using these days.
Sam
Yeah, and the challenges with their and I will say that I’m seeing more cloud ERP these days than I have ever. But the challenge with with having salespeople use the ERP to quote, is that they’re paying for an ERP license, right?
And if I already have a CRM license, if I can, if I can add something to it, that’s a fraction of the cost of the ERP license and move the data over, that’s the best path.
Steve
Yep, absolutely. Well, Sam, we stayed on topic for an entire episode, which might be the first time we’ve done that in 10 years.
Sam
Yeah, I think so.
Steve
We both have the same affliction, the attention deficit affliction.
Sam
Yeah, rabbit. Squirrel. Squirrel. Sorry, that’s sorry.
Steve
But anyway, I hope our audience members, especially the ones who do quoting, got something, got to take away from this.
Steve
And for those who don’t do quoting, you’re kind of low entertainment level. It’s not the most stimulating topic, but we’re going to have a very, very exciting next episode with a really special guest.
Steve
So make sure you look for our next month’s episode. Take care, Steve. You too, Sam.