Price quote solutions for vertical markets
What are vertical sales? It helps to imagine the supply chain of a market, from the sourcing of raw materials to manufacturing to distribution all the way to use and / or consumption by the customer or end-user.
If you’re truly focused on selling into a specific vertical market, you should be able to spot opportunities at every tier, and you should ensure that, when it’s time to send a quote and a price, you’re using a sales proposal solution that is a custom fit for your vertical market.
Horizontal tools for vertical markets
At iQuoteXpress (IQX), we’re vertically agnostic: that’s to say, we work with basically EVERYONE. Technology companies, retailers, manufacturers, distributors, transportation, companies, and more. Everyone in the business of selling to other businesses typically has a need for a configure, price, quote solution (CPQ).
Go configure!
And while CPQ is sometimes just called a “price quote” solution, we think that shortsells its vertical prowess. Because it’s in configuration where a company focused on selling into a given vertical can really help speed and improve their overall quoting processes.
Example: automotive. If you’re selling into this vertical and have applicable products and services across multiple tiers in the vertical, it’s guaranteed the way you bundle products, services, and pricing — the way you configure them — is going to vary widely. E.g., you’re likely not selling the same products to a chain of automotive maintenance shops as you are to a parts machining shop, nor are you using the same prices.
With a CPQ solution like IQX, however, you can create different product and pricing configurations for different segments of the verticals you serve. You can have your price quote system pre-populated with these configurations as well, so that even a new sales rep will be able to quickly present optimal products and pricing to prospective customers.
Check your template-ture
In addition to granular segmentation of products and pricing for each niche of a vertical you serve, you can create sales proposal templates that are customized to fit each niche as well.
In the automotive vertical, for example, the expectations of what to find in a sales proposal will be wildly different at each stop in the supply chain: a machinist dedicated to making car parts will likely expect a nuts and bolts proposal (pun intended!), whereas an auto detailer would expect something with a lot more polish (pun intended again!).
It’s an age-old understanding in sales that you need to know your audience. What seems to get missed by so many people selling into vertical markets is that each segment in the market has a different kind of audience to know: i.e. a garage mechanic and a Tesla reseller both work in automotive, but there’s no way they should be getting proposals that look the same.
You want your price quote solution to deliver flexibility in how you both create and populate your proposals, and ensure that every proposal you send targets not just the market, but the segments within. A solution like IQX.
