Quoting a product or service is perhaps one of the most frequent and cross-cutting actions, in personal life when we need to make a repair at home or in an appliance, or professionally to hire a service.
This means that there will always be someone who needs a quote. To respond to that need and whatever the size of your company, you must have a fast and efficient mechanism to deliver the quotes that your audience requires.
In MasterBase®, you can automate the sending and tracking of your existing quotes, which you could create from a template. Each creator can customize the template to suit their objectives. Let's review one of the many options below.
One way to configure it in MasterBase®.
The first thing to keep in mind is that MasterBase® has interfaces called Wizards, which facilitate the configuration of form views, tables and access points, and make it possible to use tools in automated processes. In this way, it is not necessary to be a digital expert to configure your Solutions. For this example, we will assume that we already have our quote in PDF format and what we need to do is to send it to customers and follow up. So, what we need is:- Using the FormBuilder wizard set up an input form that allows us to upload the quotation and the data of the recipient customers. The form can include, for example, fields such as quotation number, detail, ship date, name, recipient emails, etc.
- Connect the form with a database to store each transaction. The connection is made through the apikey or password of the database.
- Set up in the GridForm wizard a table to display all transactions, i.e. quotes with the fields we defined in the form. With the help of the wizard you can decide which fields you want to see and in which order. To keep everything connected, the table also uses the apikey of the same database that was entered in the form.
- Create access points to visualize the entry form and the table with all the transactions, which we do in the icon wizard, which allows us to choose the colors, the image and establish the relationship between the form view of point 1 and the table of point 3. Then we can give access to the people we want to use this Solution to send quotations. For example, to all the sales team of a company.
Let's automate the process
We already have the necessary elements to configure the process, in detail, so that the automatons can do the work for us. - The process must start with the identification of the user account, its domain and the apikey of the database where all transactions will be stored. This is achieved thanks to the SmartData tool.
- Then we must configure the reception of a new record, that is to say, of a quote submission uploaded in our form. For this we use the RDS tool, specially designed for MasterBase® databases.
- Now that we have the record, we need to send it with a custom email body and the quote as an attachment. To do this we need to use two tools. First, with Download, we will find the HTML that we will use as the email body, and, with UniqueMail, we will customize it and send it with the quote attached in PDF format.
How can this Solution grow?
Thanks to the flexibility of MasterBase® and Configware, processes and Solutions can grow, be improved or modified without having to start from scratch. With all of the above, we are able to send an existing quote to a customer. But we could go even deeper and automate even more by creating the quotation in the same process and triggering a resend if we detect that our email has not been opened.Quotation preparation and follow-up
- We can ask a web designer to create an HTML template with the design of our quotation. With that, the only thing left to do is to enter in the template the paths with the form fields so that the automatons do the work of completing the quotation. The same fields of the form: quotation number, detail, shipping date, name, recipient's e-mails, etc.
- We can configure a specific process so that the automatons assign a correlative number to each new quotation.
- To ensure adequate follow-up, we can configure a process so that the automatons resend the quotation on the third day, provided that it has not been opened by the recipient. The resending can be configured as many times as we deem necessary, even with a different HTML than the first sending, so we can achieve a better result.
