As a professional services provider, how would you rate your Quote to Order process? Is it time for an overhaul?
Speaking to engineering consulting services, it was quite evident that 90% of the enquiries came through referrals and word of mouth, despite various initiatives in marketing.
Most business owners themselves handled sales and therefore the Quote to Order process, and the majority felt that a lot of improvement can be achieved in this area.
While sales tools such as CPQ (Configure Price Quote) software serves to automate the Quote to Order process; few service providers were able to take advantage owing to challenges faced with setting up and managing the tool. As a result, the business owner or principal consultant continues to be directly involved with getting every quote out to a prospect.
The manual approach eats up the time of the most valuable resource in the organization.
Here’s the story of one organization that innovatively tackled this problem, using a cloud-based tool and virtual teamwork, to ratchet up the firm’s Quote to Order process by a few notches. The results are already showing with increased conversions of targeted segments.
Here is an infographic showing how well an organization tackled this issue.
The results have validated some very tangible and measurable benefits such as :
Significant time saving for the senior most resource – often the most valuable one. In the first month of the engagement itself, up to 60% of effort and time involvement of this resource was replaced by the new combination of the tool and virtual talent engagement.
Cost efficiency – Virtual teamwork meant that high quality talent from lower cost locations were utilized to achieve high cost efficiency for the improved process.
Tracking and utilization of key learnings – As the process became more systemic and standardized, key learnings from previous quotes were identified and carried forward as improvement to the process. This has resulted in improving the Quote to Order conversions
Tying the Order forward to the Job management process – A seamless flow into job and project management with an automated invoicing cycle, brought in greater efficiencies.
