ACT! added quoting capability to ACT! by Sage 2005, a feature best described as adequate for users with basic quoting needs. “Adequate” falls into the “damned by faint praise” category for sure but, unless you’re Microsoft, most software publishers don’t develop significantly more capability than the target-market user needs. Funny thing, though: as ACT! grew into an application that could support much larger workgroups (25, 50, 100 + users), the requirements and expectations of those users also grew. Capabilities that were sufficient for the small workgroup no longer cut it for this new market segment; this is where talented developers comes in handy!
Quotewerks
Developed by Aspire Technologies, Inc., QuoteWerks integrates with ACT! (also with Microsoft Business Contact Manager, Goldmine, salesforce.com, Maximizer, SalesLogix, SugarCRM, and other CRM/contact manager applications). It pulls data from the contact manager fields resulting in a printed quote that includes information from the contact record. That’s pretty much what happens when creating an ACT! quote, so what’s the big deal?
Using ACT! to generate a quote, the user creates a sales opportunity of products or services. The associated line items integrate into an Excel worksheet embedded in a Word document. If your organization is presently doing little more than that, but in a much more manual way, then taking advantage of this feature in ACT! could be all that’s needed to ramp up quoting capabilities. Adding a logo or some ACT! fields into the document address area is essentially the extent of customization to a customized ACT! quote. 
In today’s market quoting must be accurate, comprehesive, and fast; getting the quote into the customer’s hands quickly can mean the difference between winning – or not winning – the sale. QuoteWerks provides a comprehensive quoting capability that includes the ability to:
- Update and attach quotes to the contact database
- Schedule follow up activities in the contact manager
- Make vendor price comparisons
- Create and save quote revisions
- Create “bundles” or “kits”
- Configure a step-by-step process of building products using other products
- Create quotes with required, optional, and substitute products
- Support 9 different ways to price products and services
- Create product/price catalogs for customers (including customer-specific pricing)
- Integrate into real-time data modules
- Sync Quotes and Product/Price lists with remote users
- Generate detail reports on your sales, product lines, inventory, etc.
- Integrate into accounting applications
- and a great deal more
If I have a complaint about QuoteWerks, it’s the archaic interface for designing templates. While it gets the job done, the best description of it’s function is clunky and outdated. Creating and modifying templates takes longer than it should because of the unforgiving interface, but nice results are still possible. That said, once templates are customized to your specifications, it’s not an everyday feature, so it’s a deficiency I can live with.
Bottom line: if you have more advanced quoting needs than ACT! can support, QuoteWerks integration significantly increases productivity and can help close more sales by simplifying and speeding up the price quoting/estimating process. A full-feature demo version of QuoteWerks is available to test drive for as long as you like.
Find out more about QuoteWerks here.
In my next article we’ll take a look at how to extend ACT!’s capabilties with advanced reporting tools that create pivot tables, graphs, cross-tab reports, and more. Best of all, designing reports is wizard driven, so you don’t need a Ph.D in report writing to create them.