Generating Quotes? 10 New Cloud Quote Features

Over the past three years, we’ve been blessed with phenomenal growth and support from various industries within Southern Africa. Therefore, we felt it only fitting for our corporate identity to evolve as well, with the development of our logo design – and a new website to boot. We’ve also added a new set of features to our system, making it easier for busy people to send out professional quotes fast, and spend their time closing more sales.

Our newest value-added features

Have you discovered our feature updates? We’ve been working hard to bring you bigger and better user-experiences which make it easier to generate professional quotes.

1. Create and maintain Monthly and Once-off pricing

To handle connectivity solutions more effectively, we’ve added two additional price fields into the database. “Once off” for line installation costs charged by the supplier and “Monthly” for the rental of the proposed connectivity solution. These costs do not add to the capital cost/base price in Cloud Quote where your hardware costs are calculated. This means the rental value, based on factor is not skewed, providing the correct finance amount to the Finance House.

2.  Product Catalogue Subscriptions

This feature allows distributors to load their products onto their own Cloud Quote platform. They can then push the product catalogue down to their dealer channel. New product catalogues are instantly available for your reps to quote on the moment they log in, speeding up the process and getting your professional quotes out faster.

3. Additional Properties Editor

Cost per copies, minimum billings, volumes and other pertinent product info stored in “Additional Properties” of a product, can now be viewed and edited as a collective rather than individual product clicks and changes.

4. Reassign quotes for improved project management

This is an easy way to stay on top of any reps that might leave your employment. Easily manage the project processes – from requesting a quote via product specialists through to assigning the quoted job to a new rep. This feature ensures the project appears in the rep’s pipeline, ready for printing and presentation.

Managers with security rights can reassign quotes to other team members. This is done by opening “All Quotes” and choosing a rep from the dropdown list. New quotes will appear in the pipeline of the newly assigned rep. Older quotes will appear in the “My Quote” section.

5. Transfer Files – Speed up Product and Pricing Updates

Reduce your admin and increase productivity. This feature simplifies the way you capture and maintain products and pricing.

If you control multiple company profiles with identical products, you can choose to export via “Transfer File” and select the products you want to export. You can create an exact copy of the product, images, stock level and additional properties and then re-import this file into another company profile, saving time.

6. Native-integrated Payment Option for easy Factors Setup

Would your admin users love to create new payment levels and payment options without requiring Cloud Quote support? Of course.

Factors can now be updated and maintained in Cloud Quote itself, rather than making use of an Excel-based factor table and formulas. Simplicity is your best friend.

7. Closure Percentage (Rating) for improved statistic scorekeeping

Keep track of your stats without relying on the vague “Draft” and “Active” quotes that are going out.

Instead, reps can now provide a rating with 5 being 100% likely and 0 stars being 0% likely. This, in turn, can be filtered in their call sheets when doing customer follow-ups and is also available in the GP and Turnover reports for management. Better predictability creates accurate statistics and anticipated closed deals within a selected period.

8. Margin Percentage to Determine your GP Value

Previously “Mark-up Percentage” or “Additional GP” was the only way for a rep to increase the profitability of a quote. We have added “Margin Percentage” and a rep can use this or “Mark-up” to determine the GP value.

9. Monthly / Once Off pricing for quotes

To handle connectivity solutions more effectively in Cloud Quote, it became necessary to include 2 additional price fields into the database.

“Once Off” costs are for line installation costs charged by the supplier. “Monthly” is the predefined monthly rental of the actual connectivity solution proposed.

● These costs do not add to the capital cost, or, “Base Price” in Cloud Quote where your hardware costs are calculated. This means the rental value based on factor is not skewed and the correct finance amount is provided to the Finance House.

● Hardware + Connectivity solutions can be quoted together and separated in the Quote Template/MRA/Connectivity Rental Agreement.

● Managers with authority to do so can “Override” these prices on a deal-by-deal basis, and these are then tracked in the “Override Report”.

*The Monthly/Once-off feature is available in Cloud Quote. This can be found in package Admin/Package Editor / Pricing Calculation, tick on the Monthly and Once Off checkboxes. We will need to do template scripting to correctly pull the info from Cloud Quote into your desired output on the quote template or rental agreements.

This will mean a time/labour cost which depends on the complexity of the output required. It’s all about streamlining your experience to enable you to create the quotes your business needs.

10. Product Catalogue Subscriptions

Cloud Quote has recently been adopted by distributors including MIA Telecoms and Bitco (with others potentially following soon) to streamline their internal and channel sales processes.

  • Typically, distributors will send out their product and price lists/configurators in Excel via mail or on a portal of sorts to their dealer network. With ROE fluctuations occurring more rapidly, these can become quite frequent, often resulting in older pricelists being utilised and only at ordering stage is the problem identified.
  • Your admin users are then tasked with bringing in these product updates or price changes internally every time. This new feature allows the distributor to load their products onto their own Cloud Quote platform and to push down the product catalogue to their dealer channel. The moment a dealer logs into their own Cloud Quote company any new product catalogues will be instantly available to your reps for creating professional quotes.
  • Management can decide on a percentage increase on the base costs if required, and assuming you have been given access by the distributors, you can subscribe to multiple product catalogues. It does not matter whether you host with Cloud Quote, with the distributor, or on your own server. Permissions are granted for the servers to push and receive these catalogues. Speak to your distributors and let them know that there is a better way to do it!

Simplified professional quotes your clients will want to approve

Online quoting needn’t be complicated. Our system aims to make professional quotes easy to set up, track, invoice, and process.

Learn more, or view our packages.

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