Online quoting software: The solution to the website pricing dilemma?
Most B2B and service or solutions-oriented companies rely on sales quoting to do business. It’s a tedious part of the sales process, but unfortunately, a necessary evil. We’re all too familiar with grinding out Excel spreadsheet calculations and manually sending out PDF sales quotations to dozens or even hundreds of prospective customers on a monthly basis. Quoter, our recently launched online quoting software app, aims to ease the pain by automating the calculation, PDF generation, e-mailing, tracking, and CRM insertion of sales quotations.
Should I display pricing on my website?
Quoter also addresses the age-old dilemma of whether to display pricing on your website. Displaying pricing information on your website in a simple format understandable by the layperson (i.e. your customer!) is not easy. For most, there are two choices: display the pricing of your core product or service only, leaving out ancillary products or customizable options, or don’t display pricing at all (“Hey, you want pricing? Give us a call!”). The sad truth is, unless prospective customers can easily get access to the information that usually matters the most to them (ahem, pricing), they’ll go elsewhere. Quoter’s customer-facing, online quote system solves this problem by letting your customers build their own instant price quotes directly via your website.
What if I don’t want to display pricing for all of my products/services?
Life is all about compromises! By offering a simple, user-friendly way of obtaining pricing for your products/services, you receive the prospect’s contact information. You get a lead, the customer gets what they came for. And best of all, there are no phone calls, no waiting while you put together and e-mail the sales quote, and no time spent on your part.
What if I still don’t want to give away pricing for all of my products/services, you ask? We understand that sometimes it’s just not possible to disclose pricing for all of your products/services. We thought of that, and so our quoting software also allows your employees to share the same simple, automated quoting system your customers have access to. In Quoter, you can easily create internal-use only quote forms that allow your sales people to save up to 90% of their time spent on the sales quoting process.
How does it work?
Using Quoter’s online quoting software, companies build their own quote forms which specify the pricing rules for their products and services. With a simple drag-and-drop interface, setting Quoter up to automatically calculate and produce sales quotations takes only a few minutes. Once the setup process is complete, there is no further work to automate quote calculation.
Once the pricing is defined and quote forms are built, Quoter allows companies to embed their quote forms directly into web pages on their own site. For companies with products/services that have complex pricing and configurability, Quoter’s customer-facing, instant online quoting system offers a great way to disclose pricing in a convenient, simple way.
Sales people can also use Quoter’s quoting software internally to generate accurate, professional sales quotations incredibly quickly. With its auto-complete features and the automatic calculation, generation, and e-mailing of sales quotes, Quoter makes the traditionally painful process of quoting simple and fast.