Quotelligent is a web-based sales software designed to address common challenges faced by modern sales organizations. It provides complete control of product, customer, and supplier information centralized in one system. Key features include a product configurator, quotation generator, cost estimation engine, and customer information management. The goal of Quotelligent is to allow sales teams to focus on closing deals rather than administrative tasks by handling routine processes like quotes, orders, and records intelligently.

1. Sales Director 2.0
Modern Sales Organization: Burning Challenges and Possible Solutions
Executive Summary of Quotelligent
Core Technologies
Ascar Omarov

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Sales Director in 21 Century. Where is
that migraine coming from?
If you are running the sales division of a company the following symptoms
may sound very familiar:
 You are always understaffed and don’t have enough people to sell
everything the company tasks you for.
 At most of the times you wish you had more experienced, higher-
qualified sales executives who deeply know your products and
understand the technology and industry landscape. Finding the
right people is hard and the situation with availability of personnel
“ready for the job” is getting worse year by year.
 The sales team you manage is continuously struggling with the load
and not every sales inquiry gets processed and responded to. The
mail inboxes of your sales people are filled to the brim with
unanswered product and price inquiries. This results in lost revenue
and customers walking away.
 When a sales team member quotes a prospect customer technical
errors and business mistakes often happen and this leads both to
lost revenue and customer disappointment. These days customers
are so demanding that they are not willing to accept any mistakes in
configurations, quotations and their terms. If customer accepts a
quotation and later when you fulfill the order you discover that you
sold the wrong product, underpriced the solution or set the invalid
terms the customer will in most cases hold you liable and all
rectifications will be at your expense. Result? Loss.
 “What is the current sales pipeline by product, salesman, geography
or industry segment?” is the question getting an answer to is close
to impossible.
 Sales people are not sure what product to quote or what price to set
on the proposed products. Because the price quoted is often
guessed many sales are closed to the loss. Some organizations
reserve themselves to selling only from stock and avoid any orders
on ad hoc basis because it is very difficult to estimate the cost of the
goods before you receive them.
 When selling products to both new and existing customer, sales
people spend tremendous amounts of time to educate the
Consultant’s View
Recent studies show that
although sales productivity
is the number-one business
initiative on CEO’s agendas,
the sales and marketing
practices employed today by
most organizations are too
expensive, too
unpredictable, and generally
inefficient. These studies
show that the percentage of
companies achieving their
annual revenue targets has
declined steadily since 2005
across all industries, among
companies of all sizes, and
the average number of
individual sales people who
miss their annual quota is
over 46 percent and
growing. In fact, over the
past 18 months Tafaro &
Associates interviewed over
50 presidents and CEO’s of
technology companies
ranging in sales from $3
million to $25 million. Over
82 percent of the executives
surveyed were dissatisfied
with the performance of
their sales and marketing
organizations. These
companies are typically
operating on thin margins,
and adequate cash flow is
critical. If sales and
marketing are not
performing, everything
slows down, and the
business can be placed at
risk.

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customers and explain over and over again what the right product may be for
them and why. Many customers are not learning from the past and need
more time spent on them.
 Sales executives are always on a lookout for another higher-paying job
and when they go they take the customers with them.
The list may go on for long. These are all the realities and typical problems a
sales director is tackling on daily basis.
Some other important considerations
Let us take here a look at some other important facts describing common sales practices:
Quotation is the starting point for a business transaction generating revenue to occur. In sales process
quotation is one of the most important documents – how it is made determines the chances your
company may secure the business of your customer. If it comes in a badly formatted spreadsheet or
comprised of a few lines pasted into the body of an email message there is a high risk that competition
may outsell you by crafting a professionally looking and extensive proposal and efficiently delivering it to
your prospect. Quotation is a document which your existing and prospect customers use to measure
the attractiveness of your offer as well as the level of your professionalism, reliability and commitment
to customer’s satisfaction.
Most companies rely on Microsoft Excel to prepare quotations. Quoting process is taking place outside
the boundaries of other business applications, be they ERP, accounting packages or CRM. The main
reason for generating quotations in Excel is in the indigenous functionality of quotation transactions
software companies build into their systems – they are just not flexible and functional enough and
require a lot of master information entered into the system before a quotation itself may be created.
Despite the ease of data manipulation the consequences of using Excel for quoting are frequently
negative and have adverse effect on sales process:
 There is no control of how data is entered and changed. Data all the time gets overwritten and
lost, it is very difficult to roll-back to previous values and thus keep track of changes.
 Naming files logically and organizing them into folders are becoming a major chore which alone
may invoke a requirement for a separate document management system.
 Excel files may contain hidden columns with formulas, calculations and confidential information
like purchase prices, estimated margins etc. Albeit the files are often sent to the customers by
mistake before such information gets removed from them.
 Copying and pasting values from the vendor’s price lists into quotations may be a tedious, time
consuming and error-prone activity.
Most business to
business salespeople
lack the solution
expertise to satisfy their
customers,
Harvard Business
Review.

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 When customers decide to buy products and purchase orders need to be confirmed it may
become hard to find the file containing the quotation – files often get misplaced, saved in the
wrong folders or just accidentally deleted or overwritten.
Your wishes granted
Even though companies could had invested both in high-class ERP and CRM systems they still fight the
same problems as described above. Progressively thinking top-level executives in charge of sales and
marketing think about how to close the gaps and this is when the realization of the need to implement
new sales systems happens.
Clearly understanding the complexities of the sales processes and the issues related to how sales work
in our imperfect world you could often wish there was someone restlessly working on the customers
RFQs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week without making disastrous mistakes in the proposals and capturing
all the information you need to help you close deals faster and with greater efficiency and profit.
Thinking the way you do Core Technologies designed and developed a software system whose objective
is to allow you to focus on closing sales rather than spending time on the mundane and resource sucking
tasks. Therefore we are here introducing our product Quotelligent.
Introducing Quotelligent
Quotelligent as the name suggests is ought to enable users to quote and sell intelligently. Designed
from ground up Quotelligent has the following essential features and components:
Web Architecture. To allow the users to work with the system from anywhere it had to run in a web
browser. The functionality available to users through browser constitutes the back-end of the
application. What the customers may see and access, namely the company’s website and product
catalog with customer portal are the main building blocks of the Quotelligent front-end. Development
of Quotelligent is happening with multi-browser environment in mind and that’s why the software is
tested and optimized for rendering in Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer.
Complete control of Product, Customer and Supplier Information. The system holds all the essential
information needed in the sales process, specifically in the course of quoting, booking orders and
fulfilling them thereafter. So it is apparent that users don’t want to depend on the product and
customer information stored in multiple systems like ERP, CRM, PDF and Excel files etc. Extensive
master data subsystems with integrated document management allow having all the information
required throughout the sale cycle at user’s fingertips. Master data subsystem is using the attributes to
provide detailed product description and classification. Attributes are created by users and then
grouped into Attribute Sets. Attribute Sets are attached to Product Families and this provides for
attribute-based search in the catalog and product comparison functionality. Once the product
information is entered in the system it can be published to the product catalog on the web. Website
visitors may access the product catalog and filter the products of their interest using search attributes.

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Search attributes are defined by the users and don’t require any involvement of software developers.
The whole catalog structure can also be set by the administrative users.
Depicted above you may see a screenshot of a product query window where you can search for products by their types (simple,
configurable), vendors, vendor part numbers, descriptions, product family membership or product attributes.
Depicted below you may see a screenshot of the product master.
Product configurator with Assembly Builder is another part that absolutely has to be present in an
online sales system. Product configurator allows sales executives and customers quickly and accurately
select and configure complex products and leave no room for errors. Configurator is a rule and
constrain-based software ensuring that the product selected by user in the catalog is specified correctly.

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Product managers and experts can define configuration rules without writing a single line of software
code. Once a product is configured it can be temporarily placed in the cart and then added to the
quotation engine so that a formal quote can be generated and sent to the customer.
It may be seen on the screenshot above that the server system was misconfigured and the configurator
has generated some error and warning messages. Unles the mistakes in the configuration are not
cleared the system will not allow the user to add the system to the cart for further processing and price
calculation.
Product Catalog and Configurator increase the chances of succesful sales because they provide for
higher levels of interaction with the customers visiting your website since they can see all options and
choices and realize how changes in the selections may have affect on overall configuration of the
product they are shopping for. Because the products are presented in a structured manner in the
catalog the chances for upsell and crossell are also higher.
Quotation Generator had to be built up so that all quotations would be produced and stored centrally
and thus allow analyzing quotation data and helping take critical decisions. In the course of quoting
sales people can select from which supplier to source the product and this would affect purchase prices,
lead times and overhead expenses. A workflow engine monitors each quotation as it is entered and if
the pre-set profitability or quotation value limits are exceeded then request for approval procedure will
be enforced before the document may be submitted to customer.

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Cost Estimation Engine. This was seen by us as an essential functionality set that would help sales
executives know the cost of the goods even before they are sold or arrive in the warehousing location.
Multiple packaging details of tangible products are captured so that users know the shipping weights
and dimensions of the required goods and overhead expense would be calculated by the system.
Accordingly sales person can quote the goods with the balanced markup which would not be too high or
too low. The moment products are added to the quotation subsystem their volume and physical
weights will get checked and the chargeable weight will be calculated. If the re-packaging information is
available then the system will factor that into the calculation and optimize the cost. Then based on
transaction setup Quotelligent will make a complete calculation of the expenses you incur and allow you
to know your landed cost upfront before you ever receive the goods. Because you know your cost in
advance it is easy for the sales executive to decide about what markup to apply in order to quote
competitive sales rate to the customer.
Depending on how competitive your price is you may set different markup rates for each item.
As all vendors are continuously increasing their product offerings and due to the harsh market
conditions it is merely impossible to stock a complete portfolio of a vendor. Back-to-back order
fulfillment is the prevalent modus operandi for distributors these days. The rule of thumb in ERP says
“No stock – no cost”, as simple as that, nevertheless with Quotelligent you don’t need to have goods on
the shelves to know what your cost is and hence you can always quote accurately and efficiently.
Customer Information File. While Quotelligent does not claim to substitute CRM systems an extensive
customer information management functionality is included in the core of the system, so with

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Quotelligent you know not only your products well, but also your customers. This is especially valuable
for companies which have not invested heavily in high-cost CRM solutions.
B2B eCommerce, Product Catalog. Since the chosen technology platform was web it was natural for us
to also intend developing a portal solution which would allow customers to serve themselves. So if
customers urgently need a quotation on a product during week-end they would not need to wait for you
to get back to the office. They should be able just get onto the internet and configure what they need
and get the quotation delivered by email. A sales executive would be notified by email as well and
proactively communicate with the customer if there are still things to do like applying a discount or
collecting additional information.
The product catalog is deployed to make the products logically presented to the website audience. An
unlimited number of catalog branches and sub-branches may be created and the same products may be
added to different parts of the catalog. It is not a secret for anyone that many prospect customers and
their inquiries are not solid. A good number of prospects are sending inquiries just to check your price
quotation with what someone else has quoted them out already. Unfortunately we can find out that
our prospect is essentially a time-waster only after we spent our time and money on them. Quotelligent
is capable of acting as a time-waster protection layer by enforcing the customer self-service model.
Before you decide whether a prospect is worth your time the customer will have to spend time and put
effort in engaging the relationship.

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Convenient User Interface. The user interface of Quotelligent was designed with a number of
requirements in mind. One of the main benefits is the provision to allow users to continue working on a
sales transaction without leaving the screen even if some master data is missing or needs to be updated.
This feature is controlled by the security framework and is available only to authorized users. Apart
from that it is worth mentioning that Quotelligent is tab driven so every new form opens in a new
browser tab – this helps to work simultaneously on several things without cluttering the user’s desktop
workspace.
Continuous Evolution. Quotelligent is growing and extending its capabilities and features on weekly
basis. The product is open for customization and adding functions which are not currently present.
If you found the information in this white paper interesting and some resemblances to your sales
practices and aspirations are present then contact us today and we will furnish a detailed demonstration
for you and your team.