Why B2B Merchants Should Use a Quotes Management Software 

Back-and-forth quoting can be complex and time-sensitive. The high manual effort, slow pace, and sloppy processes can cost deals. Here's how Emporix helps automate and streamline quoting.

TL;DR

• In B2B commerce, custom quotes are key - they can make or break a deal.
  

• Traditional quotes management suffers from heavy manual effort and slow, sloppy processes.
  

• Automation makes the quoting process more efficient and improves the buying experience.
  

• Emporix supports the back-and-forth quoting process online and helps reduce manual work.

Why quotes are important for B2B commerce

Quotes play a crucial role in facilitating transparent, efficient, and legally binding B2B transactions. They enable pricing clarity, negotiation, customization, decision-making, and proper documentation, ensuring smooth and mutually beneficial commerce between businesses.

To achieve this, quoting processes must be efficient, transparent, and flawless, delivering the necessary flexibility to support back-and-forth negotiations of prices and conditions as well as adjustments to requirements in the ongoing process.

The traditional quote management process hits its limits

The percentage of B2B sales made with customized offers can vary significantly depending on the industry, company size, and specific circumstances. While some B2B transactions involve standard products or services, others require customization to meet the unique needs of the buyer.

The more complex and customized the products and services are, the more complex and customized the entire quotation process becomes, from the request, through drafting the quote, to the closing of the deal. Manual processing makes quote management time-consuming and error-prone.

Drawbacks of a manual quotes management process

Like any manual business process, manual B2B quote management has a number of drawbacks that can severely limit business success. Here are the most critical:

• Time-consuming: Creating, updating, and organizing multiple documents or spreadsheets manually requires a significant amount of time and effort.

• Error-prone: Typographical mistakes, incorrect calculations, or misplacing information can lead to inaccurate quotes, resulting in customer dissatisfaction.

• Poor accessibility: Decentralized storage can lead to delays, miscommunication, and difficulty in tracking or retrieving specific quotes when needed.

• Limited scalability: Scaling the process to accommodate a growing number of quotes, customers or products becomes a complex task when processed manually.

• Difficult tracking and analyzing: Gaining meaningful insights and analyzing data from manual quotes can be tedious when dealing with many quote documents.

• Poor collaboration and communication: Sharing information, coordinating changes, and maintaining real-time communication is challenging, leading to delays or miscommunication.

The vulnerability to errors and inefficiencies caused by manual processes in quote management may vary from business to business. However, it always pays to analyze all processes for optimization and digital automation potential.

Why businesses should digitize their B2B sales with quoting software

Digitizing quotes management brings numerous benefits such as efficiency, accuracy, enhanced buying experience, analytics, integration with other systems, scalability, and cost savings. All these capabilities are essential to remain competitive in fast and highly competitive markets.

B2B sellers and buyers equally benefit from simpler, more efficient, and more reliable quote management by automating processes and centralizing quotes handling.

• Merchant: Easy quote process in regard to less phone calls and manual work, fully automated quoting process, boost customer retention.

• Customer: Easy quote process in regard to fewer phone calls and manual work, fully automated quoting process, superior buying experience.

Given these advantages, the digitization of quote management is no longer a nice to have, but a must for B2B commerce - especially since quoting automation is easier than ever to realize by using the Emporix Digital Commerce Platform.

How Emporix helps provide a superior quoting experience

The Emporix enterprise-grade Digital Commerce Platform provides a state-of-the-art quotes management system that seamlessly covers all process phases, from requirements gathering, through quote drafting and customization, to acceptance and filing.

• Speed up sales cycles with fully digitized quote management processes that significantly reduce the time and effort of back-and-forth communication. Order placement can be automated once the quote has been approved by both parties.

• Reduce manual effort for back-and-forth communication by automating the quote management process from request to close. Merchants and buyers both save time and enjoy a B2C-like shopping experience.

• Consistent quoting ensures buyers get the right prices and don't receive multiple different quotes for the same order. Maximum data consistency is guaranteed and all quotes are always available for reference and audit purposes.

• Empower buyers by enabling them to self-serve and request quotes digitally — they can just add the items to their basket and ask for a quote with a  single button click. Access to quote status, editing quote requests and accepting the received quote is possible at any time.

Key processes are automated, which saves effort for the involved personnel at the vendor's and the buyer's end, minimizes the risk of errors and significantly improves the overall quoting experience. Plus: existing quotes from CRM/ERP systems can easily be imported to Emporix by API. So there is hardly any excuse not to digitize B2B offer management.

Learn more about Emporix digital quote management.