Problem
For small and medium sized businesses, most quoting solutions on the market were incredibly manual and not integrated with other sales tools. Additionally, we discovered:
- Our smaller users were making and emailing their own Word or Excel.
- This did not scale with the growth of a business.
Discovery
Starting with competitive analysis, we discovered most high-end quoting tools were point solutions that either did not, or were difficult to integrate with other sales tools. Additionally we were able to see a wide variety of formats to help formulate our own point-of-view.
We made sure to test early wireframes to discover which elements of our design to emphasize, and which ones to curtail.
Solution
From the research we knew that our solution had to:
- Have smart defaults to limit friction.
- Be accessible and responsive, so our customers’ customers won’t miss a thing.
Our product’s main competitive edge was it’s ability to horizontally integrate with the complete marketing-to-buying journey. As a result we looked for instances to tie into existing functionality, such as:
- Integrating meeting schedulers with an online quote
- Reusable product libraries to reduce friction when creating quotes
Results
After about two iterations we were ready to come out of beta. We went on to include a Stripe integration to process payments, a quote approval flow for managers, and the ability to eSign quotes.
The quarter after the initial release saw double-digit revenue growth in the Sales automation product, and the following quarter we were able to enrich product quotes to be included in the newly minted enterprise version of the Sales automation product.
