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There’s a couple of different perspectives for you depending on your journey with Salesforce.
You are already using Salesforce but not Salesforce Quoting
First and foremost if you are already invested in Salesforce, congratulations! The reason we developed Quote.ly for Salesforce and haven’t on any other platform is its ease of use and the fact you can pretty much do anything with Salesforce. Salesforce keeps innovating and optimizing their product three times a year with updates. It’s nice to see the constant improvements every four months. We participate in the hunt for the new features as they release the new pre-release organizations before they put the new release notes out. It’s a fun thing to do for a company that works so closely with Salesforce.
Let’s explain why Quote.ly is so beneficial for VARs, Resellers. If you haven’t already read what is Quote.ly or the About Us I recommend it. From what we have seen most Resellers use Salesforce primarily as a CRM only. Very few have implemented anything custom or added any other third party packages to quote in Salesforce. You really should. If you don’t think Quote.ly is for you, that’s fine. But you’re missing out on the benefit of seeing absolutely everything your business depends on from one single pane of glass. If a customer calls a sales rep today and asks for an order status update how many systems do they have to log into and how quickly can they get that information? How up to date is that information and how accurate is it? Our Resellers use a Sales Manager dashboard that shows the Margins, Revenue, Win Rate, Avg Margin %, Avg Margin Amount, Top Accounts, ETC from one pane of glass. This is only possible when you have all your data in one system. Further expanding on this your order management team has a dashboard showing orders, Expected Delivery Dates vs Actual Delivery Dates, Orders Need Billed, etc. If there is any data you need to manage your team, it’s there for you to write a report and create a dashboard. Our Quote.ly database was structured so you can get lots of data very easily out of the system. If there’s something you need that you can’t figure out, just open a case and we will look at it and point you in the right direction.
When the pandemic hit, our Resellers using Quote.ly had less problems to worry about because they were already a paperless office. Any employees working out of the office, who are now working at home, could still keep in touch with their coworkers using Chatter in Salesforce directly on Quote.ly Sales Orders, Quotes, POs, etc. It’s a quick way to ask someone else what the status of something is. Our solution can handle Opportunities all the way to Invoices and Commissions. It’s one less thing your business needs to worry about. We like to keep your sales team focused on sales and not order processing or doing data entry. That’s why we do so much integration into third party systems to pull data.
I am not Currently Using Salesforce
It’s easy to say, “Well you should be using Salesforce”. The truth is, as I outlined in What is Quote.ly, Salesforce isn’t exactly meant for Resellers or VARs to use. You hear all the time all these great features of Salesforce, but you rightfully ignored it. It’s just not for you. The problem with this thought process is you likely hired some sales people who have lots of experience with Salesforce. They are used to it, it has endless features that is meant to better enable you to achieve or track that next sale. Not to mention all the artificial intelligence in Salesforce now with even more on the horizon. If you don’t know anything about Salesforce, do a search for High Velocity Sales. It’s amazing! Now imagine all these bells and whistles in your CRM managing your customer relationships. You could be certain that none of your customers are going to churn and go to another Reseller. Regular contact with people who have already purchased from you is the best source of future sales.
Maybe you are interested in Salesforce but you don’t want to have to figure out how to install it and migrate your existing data to it. We are happy to help! You would be surprised how quickly we can do it. If this is something you are seriously considering, we don’t make any money selling Salesforce licenses. We just want to help you with the best possible solution. We can help you get a quote from Salesforce for your licenses and consult with you about which licenses you need.
I built a custom quoting capability and I don’t need Quote.ly, but I’m curious
Kudos to you! We’ve been there, done that. That’s how we got started. I don’t want to talk you out of your solution. I do have one question for you, “How much does it cost to maintain that custom code?”. The reason I ask, this is what we did. We had nearly a million dollars invested in custom development and it was starting to become difficult to maintain. Every time we added a new feature, it started to break existing things. It created lots of technical debt. What we found is after a certain point you need to recode a lot of things to simplify it. What I suggest you do is look at Quote.ly and see if the cost for user licenses is cheaper than maintaining what you built. I would be shocked if what you built is as intuitive as Quote.ly. If it is, you should be in the market to sell it! The Commission Plan feature alone saves you time and money to manage your team commissions. Before you even contemplate taking that idea and adding it to your custom solution, ask yourself, How much money in custom development is that going to cost me? You’re going to find that just buying the user licenses is cheaper.