Authored by Mark Harrington - Consultant - Wipfli's Microsoft Dynamics CRM Team
In the summer of 2006, I was challenged to improve the Sales Quotations for a company that had recently implemented Microsoft Dynamics CRM as their Contact Management, Sales Forecasting, and Sales Quoting system.
This company faced several challenges with their initial forays into using CRM’s core Quote functionality to manage their complicated Quoting needs. One of this company’s chief concerns was a lack of consistency in the Sales Quotations that their Sales Account Managers were generating. Products that were required for their solutions to work correctly were routinely missed and product quotes were frequently being sent out with incorrect pricing or discounts.
The out of the box Microsoft Dynamics CRM Quote functionality did not meet the complex requirements of this company to manage their Sales Quotations in the way that their Sales force wanted. It was at this time that I first learned of the Experlogix Configurator.
Soon after viewing the Experlogix demos for the first time and going through training to implement and configure/customize the Experlogix Configurator, I was able to help this company implement Experlogix as a key cornerstone of their Sales Quoting initiative and Quotation process. I was able to easily import the company’s Product Catalog from CRM and build a wizard to guide users through the selection and configuration of products to build a solution for their customers. We went live with Experlogix in just weeks after this initial analysis, design and configuration.
The Configurator immediately allowed this company’s sales force to develop consistent quotations for their customers in far less time and with far more accuracy.
One of the most popular features of Experlogix is the ability to set dependencies, or business logic/rules, based on the selection of a product or bundle of products. If, for example, you always need to ship a power supply if a customer orders a Computer Monitor, you may setup the Computer Monitor product so that either a pop-up message will remind a user to also select the related power supply, or set it so that the power supply is automatically added to the quote without user intervention. Maybe you even enable your sales folks with the ability to upsell to a few other versions of power supplies with some pop-ups or reminders.
Image from www.experlogix.com
In addition to the improved quotation accuracy, Sales Account Managers were pleased to see how much time they were saving by using Experlogix integrated with MCRM to help them build their Quotes. Experlogix allows a user to select from example configurations and past configurations to start their next Quote, and also uses a simple point and click interface to add or remove products from the CRM Quote records. The Configurator application itself can be installed directly into Dynamics CRM so that an end user may not even know they are using a different application. I remember hearing one Sales Manager in particular that raved that it had been taking him literally hundreds of mouse clicks to build a typical 30-40 line item Product Quotation and that this number could now be reduced to 10 total clicks to select the products he needed.
I now have been working with Experlogix with various companies for nearly three years, and customers are continuously impressed by the solution’s potential, capabilities, ease of setup and process improvement.