A VAR’s Guide to Efficient Quoting: Why You Should Make the Switch from Spreadsheets to CPQ

If you’re a VAR in the technology space struggling with quoting, you aren’t alone. Quoting projects for your clients means navigating a lot of complex variables and, more often than not, conquering a beast of a spreadsheet lurking in your sales quoting process. Complicated costing formulas, manual upkeep, and a lack of standardization of output for clients makes spreadsheet quoting a menace to your business. Initially, you may say the spreadsheet is ‘working fine’, but in the long run it’s causing a painful, drawn-out sales process full of human error and inaccurate data. Even if a spreadsheet can get a quote out the door, it’s still a disconnected island of information with no automatic, auditable flow to key internal systems. What would it mean to you if you could save a few hours on quoting, and at the same time streamline the process for procurement and service delivery? You may be overlooking one of the greatest improvements that you could make to your sales operations. With shrinking margins on technology hardware, it’s more important than ever to practice efficiency as a value-added reseller. In the next few chapters, we will explore the pitfalls of quoting with antiquated, internally developed, or custom quoting tools—like spreadsheets—and introduce the benefits of implementing a cloud-based configure-price-quote (CPQ) solution. If you’re ready to speed up your fulfillment process and boost sales rep productivity and effectiveness, read on.

 Software Development

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