Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1535954
14 SMT007 MAGAZINE I JUNE 2025 around you changes, you're still doing that old process, and now you're in a constant mainte- nance mode. How does working with a third-party software company, especially in quoting, bring you that value? I boil it down to speed, accuracy, and efficiency. Speed means your customer gets answers faster. Accuracy means you know what price to charge while maintaining your margins. You need the correct competitive price, but not so competitive that you're losing money. Efficiency means you do it without spending a hundred hours. Can you do it without making the quoting person work until midnight to get this one quote out? If you can help them be more efficient by using tools, that brings more value. Remember, the companies designing and selling these tools have seen it before. ere are plenty of quoting soware companies out there. Most of them have worked with enough companies to understand the quote process thoroughly. Your person doing quotes every day has experience in your company, but a company devoted to the quoting process for a hundred EMS companies has seen so much more variety. If I had to bet on who has more expertise, I would say the person implement- ing quoting soware for a living probably has seen more and understands how to adapt it more than the person doing it in their own company for 20 years. Therefore, the quoting company's integration team is a great resource for your in-house team to coordinate with. You should be leveraging their expertise— the "soware as a service." People can forget the service side, but the service relies on their expertise. Different soware companies do it differently. Some use an e-learning course, an online help article, or a video. Some ven- dors offer consultations. You can meet with the team once a month or similar. You have an account manager; they're there for more than making the sale. I can't tell you the number of times companies would choose not to talk to their account manager because they thought the account manager would just make them spend money. You already paid for this help. ey're trying to help you. Another point is that it's generally true for most companies that when you're looking at quoting soware or a CRM, it's usually not about the features; it's about a failure of adop- tion. By that, I mean that the features, for the most part, are competitive. at's why these companies exist in the marketplace. But if you fail to adopt those features, that failure will have much more impact on your business KPIs. EMS providers have some new tools at their disposal that can change and improve the pro- cess. Is it fair to say that if integration is hard, maybe it's because you don't understand your processes completely? The burden of success is on the EMS company to understand its pro- cesses so that integration becomes easy. Yes, or to work with the implementation team of whatever quoting soware you choose. At some point, it becomes about the team you choose to implement it more than the soware itself. Not to say that the soware doesn't matter, but it matters less than the adoption of the soware. I see this across many companies when they're talking about quoting. Oen, they think this soware isn't designed around their pro- cess. I've done consulting work with EMS com- panies where their position is, "We do it like this. How can you make your soware work like my process? Otherwise, I'll build my own so- ware." It's okay to be different if different is bet- ter, and that difference is something your cus- tomers care about. At the end of the day, you want sales; you want to win those quotes. " Efficiency means you do it without spending a hundred hours. "