Salesforce is a great tool. However, if you haven’t used it to automate your quote-to-order process yet, you’re doing your sales team a disservice. It’s a major key to getting your team to adopt Salesforce. Streamlining the process will reduce the chance of errors and empower your sales and finance teams to use their time on more productive things than data entry.
This article will guide you through how we use data integration to carry out the quote-to-order process in Salesforce and provide 3 examples of how we’ve automated Q2O (Quote-to-Order) for our clients.
About Rapidi
We’ve helped several businesses streamline their quote-to-order process using the Rapidi data integration platform. As a result, these companies have reduced wasted time on data entry, increased data accuracy, and even discovered new opportunities that didn't exist before. Florian Nicolai, IT consultant for ZSK, can attest:
I was astonished with what could be done with the Rapidi interface. I never believed it could be this powerful. I never want to work without Rapidi again.
Never! Never! Never!
Florian Nicolai, IT Consultant for ZSK
What is Quote-to-Order? (Q2O)
The quote-to-order process is the workflow companies use to manage the sales quote through its journey to becoming a customer order.
The process usually looks something like this:
- The sales team identifies a qualified lead or opportunity and adds it to the CRM. This creates an account, contact, and opportunity/quote within the CRM.
- Over time, a sales rep works with the prospect to understand their requirements.
- Based on these requirements, they outline the products and services the prospect needs, applying appropriate pricing and discounts.
- Next, the sales team presents the customer with a formal quote, including all product details, prices, terms, and other conditions, which are usually sourced from the ERP.
- The quote goes through any required internal approval processes, usually with the finance team.
- The approved quote is presented to the customer for review.
- The customer agrees to the quote and signs off on it.
- The signed quote is converted to a sales order in the ERP system, so that your team can begin preparing the order.
The main questions here are:
- How much do you automate each process? Organizations will traditionally start by handling these processes manually, but it ends up taking them hours when it could take minutes.
- Which systems do you choose to manage the customer relationship (CRM) and plan your resources (ERP)?
- Which data will you transfer from the quote to the order record? Try to transfer only what you need.
Your choices will dictate how you decide to automate the process. For our purposes, we will use Salesforce as an example of the CRM.
The 2 main approaches to automating Q2O in Salesforce
So, given that you’re automating your Q2O process and you’ve chosen Salesforce for at least one part of your business, there are two paths you can take:
- You become a “Salesforce Maximalist” – you have decided to use Salesforce as your configure-price-quote (CPQ), which helps facilitate the quote-to-order process.
- You don’t want to use Salesforce CPQ because you already have your order flows configured on your ERP, or you don’t want to pay extra.
The “Salesforce Maximalist” approach
The idea of “putting everything on Salesforce” is tempting for several reasons. To some businesses, it seems natural to keep as much of the sales process on Salesforce as possible.
In this case, converting a quote into an order would look something like this:
- Choose the Salesforce CPQ
- Configure your product catalog
- Create a quoting process that matches your business’
- Configure order generation based on which data points you want to transfer from the quote.
- Create a workflow for processing orders using activation triggers.
This process would eliminate all manual calculations. The main issue is that you become even more dependent on Salesforce than before.
Consequently, you pay more for Salesforce and need to spend time integrating your current order processes into Salesforce.
So, unless you were handling all those order processes manually, this can cause more upheaval in your organization than it’s worth. After all, you’re trying to benefit from the efficiencies of reducing quote-to-order time, but you’re now adding an implementation and potentially a cost burden on top of that.
What to do when you already have your own order processes
If you’re like most companies and already have established order-handling processes, you probably don’t want to force your team to conform to Salesforce’s model. Migration could take up to 2 months.
Instead, you should just try to get data in the right place at the right time from Salesforce to your ERP and vice versa. In that case, you can use data integration.
At Rapidi, we have a specific methodology for handling quote-to-order with data integration. It allows you to automatically turn quote data from Salesforce into an order in your ERP.
Here is how it works in Rapidi:
Step 1: Create the connection
First, you need to create a connection to synchronize data between your two sources: Salesforce and your ERP. We allow you to integrate data bidirectionally.
Step 2: Map the order data between Salesforce and your ERP
You must select the order table from the source (e.g., Salesforce) and create a table in the destination (e.g., Microsoft Dynamics). This will allow you to map the quotes table from Salesforce to become Sales Order data in your ERP.
Note that we have created template connections for Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365, as well as a few other ERPs. This makes it easy for you to map your data, including quote-to-order data, automatically without needing to select each table and map the fields yourself. That said, you should still run a test at this point to ensure that you have all the data you need.
Step 3: Schedule the synchronization
Once you’re satisfied that you are mapping the correct fields between your systems, you can create a schedule for each group of data that you plan to sync. So, for instance, the order data can form one of the groups that you’re syncing, customer data can form another.
You would synchronize those groups at different times because you might not need them right away. Invoices might only need to be synced once per day, while order data could be synced once every 10 minutes, so that your team can process and deliver orders promptly.
Step 4: Run tests
Before your quote-to-order integration goes live, you must run several tests. This will help you understand whether your data is of sufficient quality and whether your data shows up where you need it.
Step 5: Go live with the integration
Finally, you can begin running the schedules and watch your Salesforce quote data show up as orders in your ERP.
As a result, you get to keep all the same quote generation and order fields you currently have. No need for sales teams to waste time manually transferring data or opening two different software programs several times over the day. Plus, you don’t get upsold on a CPQ solution from Salesforce that might come with price increases over time.
Besides, solving the Q2O problem with a CPQ still doesn’t eliminate all manual operations. You’ll still need to sync order data to your ERP even if your customer and sales team have what they need. Your back office will appreciate receiving the sales data reliably and on time.
Image: The Quote to Order (QTO) Process in Rapidi
We Help Companies Convert Quotes to Orders in Salesforce
We’re quite familiar with the benefits of the quote-to-order process. Here are 3 example use cases where we’ve helped businesses optimize it and gain new efficiencies.
Kimberley Kampers – Quote to Order in Dynamics Nav & Salesforce
Kimberley Kampers is an Australian manufacturer of campers, caravans, and other camping equipment. Given that they operate 9 dealerships throughout Australia, they needed a way to manage their sales process more efficiently between dealerships and coordinate with their back office team.
A camper van is a major life purchase. Understandably, it will take time for the order to be fulfilled. However, Kimberley Kampers still wanted to offer the best possible customer experience. Before using Rapidi, 75% of purchases required a phone call between the sales team and the back office. Worse yet, every dealership had its own special manual process for entering sales data and creating quotes. They didn’t even have Salesforce yet!
We did some research on various integration providers. After that research and talking to the company we had a high degree of confidence that Rapidi could deliver the solution
Bruce Loxton, Managing Director at Kimberley Group
How we improved Kimberley Kampers’ Processes
The main goal was to get all the dealerships to use the same system. Kimberley Kampers was already using Microsoft Dynamics NAV as their ERP. All their manufacturing processes and order registration were located there.
Kimberley Kampers chose Salesforce to upgrade its customer management process. Now, whenever a salesperson at a dealership creates a new quote, they enter it into Salesforce. With the help of Rapidi, they can then automatically convert these opportunities into quotes on Dynamics NAV. Not to mention, the sales team can see the status of these orders, such as when the camper will get delivered immediately within Salesforce instead of having to use Dynamics.
They projected that there might be one issue, though, that was getting the dealers to adopt the Salesforce system.
Luckily, Rapidi enabled them to have all their data in the right places. “They absolutely love it,” said Bruce Loxton, their managing director. They now have all their information in one place. So far, user adoption of this new system is 100%, which is the goal of any successful Salesforce implementation.
Kofax – Quote to Order in Dynamics AX
Kofax (formerly ReadSoft) is a great example of a company that already had Salesforce as its CRM and Microsoft Dynamics as its ERP. They are a Swedish accounting company that helps automate accounts payable and document processing.
In this case, the issue was getting over the hurdle of transferring all the quote and order information manually between the two systems. Despite being an automation-focused company, they hadn’t streamlined their sales process yet.
Rapidi's ability to understand the clients needs and challenges is what sets them apart from competitors.
Jani Kettula, IT Project Manager at Kofax (formerly ReadSoft AB Sweden)
READ THE CASE STUDY
How Kofax got a Q2O system up and running quickly
Kofax’s IT team was under a lot of pressure because they needed to have a better sales process ready to deploy in the next quarter.
Once they found Rapidi, they realized it was incredibly easy to get up and running quickly. Many companies require you to use APIs and custom coding to synchronize data.
With Rapidi’s connection templates, Kofax said it was only about checking that the right data was synced between them. In an industry where clients care a lot about accuracy, this integration has made client data far more reliable than it was before.
ZSK – Quote to Order Automation
“Salespeople don’t have any time to learn something new.” Those are the words straight from Florian Nicolai’s mouth. He’s an IT consultant for ZSK, a leading embroidery machine manufacturer.
ZSK’s main weakness was that they would not allow their sales team to access their Microsoft Dynamics NAV. Whenever ZSK’s sales team wanted to get data on orders, they would need to contact their finance team directly. The finance team would spend hours on creating new quotes, sending over invoices, and performing a bunch of other annoying manual tasks.
Getting more information than ever before
Like Kimberley Kampers, they decided to implement Salesforce to make their sales team more efficient. To them, using Salesforce without Rapidi is non-negotiable.
With their new Q2O process, Salespeople would go to a trade show and get a stack of business cards as well as notes. Then, they sift through the leads and add their data to contacts in Salesforce. Simultaneously, the data syncs to their NAV instance.
One advantage of this is that when a salesperson learns new facts about a lead at a trade show, they can note their preferences down and enter them into Salesforce. On the finance team’s end, those notes show up in NAV, and when the customer places an order, they can immediately use those notes to craft a custom quote. What might have previously been a 30-minute conversation between a sales rep and a member of the finance team is now eliminated. Many miscommunications are avoided in this case, too.
As a result, the stubborn 20% of salespeople who didn’t want to learn a new system were convinced.
Salesforce is a great tool, but we couldn’t have sold it to all of our Sales team without the up to date data that Rapidi produced.
Florian Nicolai, IT Consultant for ZSK
Read the case study
Simplify the Quote to Order Process with Rapidi
We’ve been in the data integration game for 30 years. We’ve learned that when you create quote-to-order processes in Salesforce, you can either take the long way or the short way.
The short way:
- Using Rapidi, you can connect 2 of your systems on the first day. We count time to go-live in days, not weeks or months.
- Everything from pricing to error handling is transparent. You get exactly what you pay for.
- Rapidi is no-code and low-maintenance; the quote-to-order process takes center stage. And whenever you encounter an issue, our support team will proactively assist you in resolving it.
Reach out to us for a demo to see how you can speed up your quote-to-order process with Rapidi.
