Adding Focus to Open Bids and Quotes

Many distributors struggle with late or even no customer follow up. This is usually because they also have issues with data visibility into their accounts and quotes and also they lack processes and technology to keep their sales team accountable for bids and quotes.

In fact, ninety percent (90%) of the distribution executives we surveyed indicated that closing more open bids and quotes is a top sales priority for their teams. It makes sense when you think about how much time it takes just to get involved with a bid or quote. There is a lot of low-hanging fruit in those open bids and quotes that you can get to with better follow up.

Our users asked us to create an automated process to help them close more quotes, and users are reporting that SMP’s bid and quote follow up is resulting in up to 30% more closed bids.

Here’s a quick peek at how it could work for you.

Automatically Create Opportunities

SMP’s Bid and Quote Closer automatically creates a dynamic, track-able opportunity when a bid or quote is created above a threshold you define. Follow up activities are automatically assigned to the appropriate reps, and the bid or quote is immediately visible. You can easily see activities, make notes and share communications. Your team can manage the opportunity from creation to close with instant visibility, and generate more accurate pipeline reports.

Always Up-to-Date

SMP also imports active bids and quotes on a daily basis. This offers your team a way to complete the picture of a customer’s buying and bidding habits. Are there certain customers who ask you to quote items regularly, but never pull the trigger on the order? Have you been promoting a certain product or product line to a customer or company-wide and need an easy way to monitor if they’ve been quoted and when, and for how much?  By bringing in bids and quotes from your ERP into SMP, these processes can be easy.

Total Visibility into Bids and Quotes

SMP helps your team easily see what customers are being quoted, when, and the value of those quotes.  You can see this on an aggregated basis or on an individual customer level. All data can be filtered, grouped or sorted in SMP, and can be exported to excel for easy review outside of SMP when needed.

Close 30% More Bids and Quotes

Most importantly, our work with distribution companies shows that actively tracking and following up on open bids and quotes results in up to 30% more closed bids than those that don’t.