The Accenture
Approach to Quote
to Order
Orchestrating the sales spectrum
for excellence
By the time your customers speak
with a salesperson, there’s a
strong chance that the prospect’s
homework is done. They’ve
evaluated various vendors and are
ready for a quote. Welcome to
today’s new reality of educated
buyers that are far along in their
selection process. Regardless of
how complex the purchase is,
your customers don’t want to wait
a few days for the price quote.
They want it yesterday.
That’s a real challenge for companies that sell
thousands of products that can be configured
in millions of possible combinations. For their
salespeople, configuring the right product mix,
applying all the right bundle discounts and
preparing a quote can be difficult and timeconsuming. As a result, salespeople often fall
back on the same old song. They use familiar
combinations and pricings that they’ve sold
before, instead of arranging something that’s
finely tuned to the customer’s exact needs. And
oftentimes, sales reps are quick to provide a
discount off a list price, instead of considering
the profitability the deal.
Taking this path to proposals and quotes can
derail revenue opportunities, causing:
• Lost sales productivity (time spent working on
quotes vs. selling)
• Less profitable quotes and contracts
• Lower lead-to-contract conversion and win
rates
• Longer sales cycles
• Drawn-out approval processes
• Increased re-work and/or error costs
• Reduced customer satisfaction
To quickly deliver a quote that’s accurate
and includes the right upsell and cross-sell
opportunities, businesses are orchestrating sales
processes around a “configure, price and quote”
(CPQ) system. These businesses enjoy significant
improvement: salespeople meet quotas, average
deal size goes up, proposal volume improves and
more leads are converted to contracts.
Sales organizations are also implementing
advanced price management tools that work
in concert with CPQ to optimize prices and
ensure profitability. These quote to order (QTO)
systems capture vital data–such as a customer’s
willingness to pay–helping salespeople propose
winning deals that are most beneficial to a
business’s bottom line.
Accenture’s approach:
Delivering QTO systems with
pace and certainty
Exceptional Customer
Relationship Management
leadership brings it all together
A holistic approach and an integrated, end-toend QTO system can create quotes that provide
optimal profit margins, while reducing human
error and improving time-to-value. Accenture
developed a unique QTO framework that helps
salespeople create the perfect quote. We bring
functional, technical and program delivery
and management skills that support large
enterprise QTO project implementations. We
help customers improve sales representative
productivity by 25 percent to 30 percent and
operating profit by 7 percent to 15 percent.
Accenture can greatly reduce the time required
to get a new QTO system up and running. We
have been implementing Customer Relationship
Management (CRM) solutions for more than
30 years. Along the way, we’ve developed
global QTO expertise to help our clients sustain
and extend business improvements. We have
proven methodologies in catalog and pricing
management and product configuration. Our
team includes more than 100 QTO specialists
around the world, which enables us to work on
client projects 24/7.
Our team has the experience and expertise
required to fully integrate QTO with front-office
(customer relationship management) and back
office (enterprise resource planning) systems for
true end-to-end solutions. We have extensive
knowledge of all best-of-breed QTO software
packages and we have particular strengths in
integrating external systems with Salesforce.com.
Our 27,000 skilled CRM personnel operating in
54 countries help hundreds of clients each year
achieve high performance in their marketing,
sales and service operations. For example, we
help clients pursue a growth strategy across a
variety of dimensions:
Our approach to QTO is a phased one. Each phase
is composed of activities, grouped logically into
activity groups. Before implementation begins,
we help clients develop a complete QTO business
case that accurately demonstrates the value the
company will receive.
• Re-inventing traditional approaches to improve
their effectiveness.
• Harness the power of emerging markets and
technologies.
• Improve internal capabilities to get more
with less.
In addition to installing and configuring
software, Accenture’s business experts help
clients simplify product catalogs by reducing
rules, tiers and variants. We also help with
catalog rationalization, which involves removing
low-volume and low-revenue products. In
addition, we help clients create product lines
that are clear to customers and easy to sell,
with simple product comparisons, standardized
negotiation, quoting and contracting, order to
bill clarity and consistency across channels.
Phase
Description
Target & Deliver
Value
Working hand-in-hand with clients, we gain an in-depth understanding
of the client’s market, business, opportunities and sales performance
challenges to understand and validate sales processes, list process
objectives and build a formal contract and project plan.
Diagnose & Explore
Our team of experts analyzes the dynamics of clients’ existing sales processes
by gathering data and identifying deficiencies and gaps. We then develop
guidelines and descriptions for go-to processes to drive sales performance.
Blueprint
We bring clarity, order, and shape to our clients’ objectives by creating new
processes and associated key performance indicators. We chart the road
map for the journey and describe the transformation program(s) required.
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All rights reserved.
Accenture, its logo, and
High Performance Delivered are
trademarks of Accenture
Accenture’s approach to QTO
case study: Moving a leading
technology provider from issue
to outcome
The challenge
An Accenture client in the technology industry
was using a macro based spread sheet to
create a quote. The process of creating a quote
was time consuming and error prone due to
limitations of the spreadsheet and manual
errors. The users needed to look up information
in multiple systems and documents in order to
calculate the correct price to quote to customer.
Accenture delivers
Accenture helped the company define business
process map and streamline processes. Our
team of QTO professionals implemented an
end-to-end solution to reduce new product
quote creation time from four hours to 15
minutes. We also improved quote-to-contract
time from over a week to a few days. We
helped the company to optimize price and
eliminate unprofitable products from its
portfolio. We also redefined performance
metrics and developed a comprehensive
waterfall model through a sequential design
process to help them realize their true profit.
Contact us
Let us help you orchestrate an exceptional QTO
solution. For more information please contact:
Anthony Milani
Managing Director,
Accenture Quote to Order Practice
[email protected]
About Accenture
Accenture is a global management consulting,
technology services and outsourcing company,
with approximately 275,000 people serving
clients in more than 120 countries. Combining
unparalleled experience, comprehensive
capabilities across all industries and business
functions, and extensive research on the
world’s most successful companies, Accenture
collaborates with clients to help them become
high-performance businesses and governments.
The company generated net revenues of
US$28.6 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug.
31, 2013. Its home page is www.accenture.com.