AND THE COMPETITION WAS ONCE AGAIN FASTER...

This is something you’ll have experienced! You work on a quotation with several colleagues from different departments for days on end, only to call the interested party and learn that the order had already been placed days earlier. Your quotation was simply too late.

What would you say if you could create all quotations on your own, within the briefest time and without involving many departments? You’d be the first to submit the quotation and have a great competitive edge.

The following blog shows you how this is possible by referring to a practical example.

Nowadays, customers demand products that are tailored to their wishes. A lot size of 1 unit is no longer a rarity. This is nothing new in the machine-manufacturing sector where it is ‘standard’ practice for a machine to be individually designed and tailored to customer needs. Many different departments have to be involved in formulating a quotation. The customer request comes directly to the head office or through dealers at home and abroad. After a visual check, it will then be forwarded to the Key Account Manager who, after review, usually finds that his technical understanding is insufficient to generate the quotation. He forwards the request to Engineering, the technical division. After resolving any queries, it goes to Development or Design for further examination. Finally, everything ends up at Order Management and the quotation is generated. The request also passes through many IT systems, including e-mail, CRM, CAD and ERP. At Scansonic in Berlin, the process used to take up to 10 days.

How did Scansonic manage to reduce the time from 10 days to 30 minutes?

Of course, you can immediately think of several possibilities: more employees, tighter processes, fewer variants, a modular structure of the products or even estimated quotations based on experience. The solution in the actual case sounds trivial and straightforward; simply centralise the knowledge of all departments and guide the sales employee through a quotation-driven approach. We call it the Guided Selling Approach, which we model in our standard software. If you want to know how Scansonic did it, click here to read the customer story.

If you’d like to be the first to submit a quotation and thereby set the bar for others, you can plan an initial meeting now by calling +31 (0) 40 26 77 199 or sending an e-mail to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

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