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There are solutions out there to do RFQ Ingest. One of the better ones we liked was called Govly. We want to do a shout out to them because it’s pretty awesome! It definitely gave us a bit of an eye opener on what the art of the possible is to RFQ Ingest. We have a slightly different approach than Govly. I wouldn’t say it’s better, just different goals and outcomes in mind.
One thing that we have seen with many different RFQ Ingest solutions is the ability to No bid something you can’t or don’t plan on responding to. That’s certainly nice. If you are a very small company and that takes a lot of your time, that would be a great feature. Why not spend the amount of time it took to develop a solution to No Bid something automatically to build you a quote automatically? Yep you read that correctly! Instead of putting an ounce of effort into automating the ability to No Bid an RFQ we are going to spend that development time and money on something to build quotes for an RFQ automatically. It’s something we have been working on for a while, we are extremely close to having a beta version of this out soon for our early adopters.
Increased Bidding Automation
Yep, we are going to spend every development effort to increase your ability to bid on something and not one single minute to No Bid something. It goes back to our design principle.
Quote.ly currently offers these features for RFQs
Quote Request - Prepopulate an email to the distributor or vendor asking them to provide you with a quote for the items in the Bill of Materials. It can also include any attachments you select from the RFQ. No need to download the attachments to your computer and make your email, cut and past the customer information, etc. The email sends from your inbox so you can track it.
Create an Opportunity from the RFQ - this doesn’t sound so important but it is. It automates the customer information pulled from the RFQ to go on the quote. It pulls down the account information and sets the forecast information and the expected close date on the Opportunity. This saves about two or three minutes for every RFQ your team works on. That adds up quickly over the course of a week. Lets say 40 RFQs is a conservative number, 3 minutes X 40 = 2hours. That’s 5% of an ISRs week. THATS HUGE!
Trend Analysis - The longer you track the RFQs in Salesforce the more data you have the more you can trend what your customers are buying and when they are buying it. One of our Resellers who use Quote.ly found a million dollar server refresh because they saw in the RFQ analysis a large server purchase, a yearly maintenance renewal year over year, and identified the equipment was due for a tech refresh. They were able to give the server manufacturer the customer information, all the serial numbers of the servers that needed to be tech refreshed and they got the deal registration.
RFQs link to the contract officers, and accounts. You can click the account or contact and see every RFQ that has ever come out for that account or contact.
Flag RFQs that use GPC or Credit Cards
Daily, or Hourly Reports to tell you if any specific RFQs with keywords have come out. Several Resellers using Quote.ly use this to keep track of any new Agency Catalogs that come out to bid on or an opportunity they have been working on.
List Views to show you the RFQs that have come out today, yesterday, for SEWP, for ITES, for GSA, for 2GIT, show you RFQs you are working on, RFQs you aren’t working on, RFQs for specific agencies or contract officers, RFQs for Small Business Set Aside, Hubzone, WOSB, VOSB, Other than Small, etc. You can create a list view for any attribute on an RFQ.
Finishing Thoughts, we have put a lot of effort into helping our Resellers manage RFQs and manage their teams working on RFQs. If there is some feature we are missing that you want to see just talk to us. We are interested in hearing your ideas! This is how we make Quote.ly better for everyone!