Quotes Tips and Tricks

Did you know you can import bids/quotes from your business system into SMP? This offers your team a way to complete the picture of a customer’s buying and bidding habits.  Is your organization having trouble finding ways to follow-up on large-dollar quotes on a consistent basis?  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/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/quotes from your ERP into SMP, these processes can be easy!

With the SMP Quotes tracker subject area, your team can easily see what customers are being quoted, when, and the value of those quotes.  You can see this on an aggregated basis in the “Quotes” subject area, or on an individual customer level in the Customer screen – Quotes tab.  All data can be filtered, grouped and/or sorted in SMP, and can be exported to excel for easy review outside of SMP when needed.

If you’re considering bringing bids/quotes into SMP, or even if you’ve already implemented the bid/quote importing, consider these additional features.

• You can trigger the auto-creation of SMP Projects from imported bids/quotes data – simply set a sales threshold via SMP Administrative tools, and all bids/quotes meeting or exceeding this amount will automatically trigger the creation of a new SMP Project – noting the customer, quote expire date, products quoted and pricing quoted.SMP will even link the quote to the SMP Project itself, so you can easily reference it as needed.
• You can manually create SMP Projects from any quote, or link a quote to an existing project – regardless of dollar amount using the “Existing Project” or “New Project” buttons when you’re reviewing a quote within SMP.The same data noted above is brought in – the customer, quote expire date, products quoted and pricing quoted.
• You can even set up SMP Tasks to be added to SMP Projects that are linked to your ERP bids/quotes as well! Make sure your team has a set of assigned tasks so they get flagged regarding who to follow-up with and when, as it relates to quotes.  This is a great way to close the follow-up gap when it comes to high-dollar or critical bids/quotes.

Bringing in bids/quotes from your ERP requires an extract of the data in a specified format, and transmission of that data to SMP as part of your scheduled data transmission process.  This process can vary by customer, so please contact your SMP Account Manager or SMP Support at support@gosmp.com for more information as well as pricing.

If your company has already implemented Quote import, but you’d like to take advantage of some of the additional functionality available – such as auto-project-creation or auto-task-add, please contact your SMP Account Manager for best practices on implementing each!