One of the major quoting pain points that our customers tell us about involves the act of pricing itself. The pricing process needs to be fast… and accurate. Slow, manual pricing leads to
lost deals, while inaccuracies could lead to significant losses. What’s behind this?
A variety of vendors and product categories. Each vendor has its own discount rates, which may be different for hardware, software, and services. Cisco VIP rebates add further
complexity to the calculations. Care must be taken to ensure that all discounts are applied properly.
Huge quotes. Today’s ICT quotes are longer than ever, sometimes involving thousands of Excel-sheet line items, with individual line items characterized by multiple parameters.
These quotes are challenging to build, and difficult to verify. Many current solutions don’t provide the scalability required to generate quotes of this size.
Possibility of Errors. When pricing thousands of items, maintaining accuracy becomes increasingly difficult and time-consuming. Errors may affect profit margins, or lead to lost business. In order to ensure accuracy, VARs may need to increase staffing, while delaying quote submissions by hours or even days.
Complex Solution When Subscriptions and co-terminations of Maintenance (SMARTnet) are involved things get more dubious. Different billing models and uneven SMARTnet
periods further increase the risk of inaccuracies and major mistakes.
Customers are Revision-happy. If creating the first is painful, consider the many changes end-customers ask during the technical back and forth and financial negotiation. It’s not uncanny for a quote to cycle thorough 3-7 revisions, involving changes in vendor configurations from CCW or Disti, significantly increasing the cycle time and error probability of invalid configurations wrong quantities that result in monetary damage and customer dissatisfaction.
StrataVAR’s PqW (Partner Quoting Workspace) was designed to address these challenges.
PqW’s pricing capabilities help ICT VARs submit their quotes quickly and accurately. Its tight integration with Cisco CCW and other vendors and distributors allows VARs to fully automate their pricing processes, with zero reliance on manual, Excel-based calculations. Seamless integration means spending less time
crunching numbers and checking for errors – while freeing manpower for other critical tasks, reducing response times gaining competitive advantage and customer trust.
StrataVAR PqW scales to handle the largest pricing projects, allowing you to handle more quotes in less time, and to free up
resources for your core business activities.
