Conga Composer allows Despatch to send quotes up to 12x faster

Despatch Industries is an engineering and manufacturing company specializing in thermal processing. In business since 1902, Despatch primarily produces industrial ovens and furnaces. The company has dedicated business groups in the Thermal, Solar and Carbon Fiber market silos selling its products to businesses worldwide.

Challenge

For years, Despatch Sales Reps had produced quotes as mail merge Microsoft Word® documents. Although its quote generation process was functional, it was awkward and lacked a price calculation feature. And, because it was a manual process, it was inefficient and prone to errors. The sales team could produce simple quotes in 5-10 minutes, but more detailed quotes could take up to an hour to generate.

What’s more, the company wasn’t happy with the look and feel of the quotes going out to prospects. Management had little control. Individual Sales Reps often changed documents based on personal preference, which gave prospects and customers an inconsistent experience with the Despatch brand.

Management also was looking for better sales funnel reporting and insight to drive strategic business planning. With 120 Sales Reps drawing from seven or eight buckets of products, the quoting system was dynamic and hard to track. And a number of the Sales Reps weren’t vigilant in reporting their Opportunities in the company’s Salesforce® CRM system.

Despatch determined a document generation solution would solve these problems so they could standardize and streamline their quoting process. However, the solution needed to be easier and quicker than the current system, so that the Sales Reps would adopt it consistently and use it correctly.

Solution

Mark Clementz, Manager, TT Sales Channel, began to look into Conga document solutions following the recommendation of a colleague. Clementz aimed for a solution that would integrate seamlessly with Salesforce, which he was sure he could get after viewing Conga’s online tutorials. The goal was to have all quoting options available in a single, highly functional template.

“We needed a single complete, well organized quoting template for all of our products set up and implemented as quickly as possible. Conga Composer fit the ticket,” said Clementz.

With the help of Conga Services, Despatch implemented the solution within a short timeline. Now, all quoting options can be accessed from a single template and generated with a single button. The template offers flexibility and ease of use, as well as improved quote process efficiency.

Results

“Since implementing Conga Composer, the Despatch sales team now takes only a minute or two to generate simple quotes,” Clementz said. “That’s 5 times faster than using our old system!” With more detailed quotes, the time savings is even more dramatic. Sales Reps can produce these in 5 minutes or less, or 12 times faster than before.

About his experience with Conga Services during the implementation, Clementz said: “We were very impressed with how attentive Conga Services was in helping get things in place, even though our template set up was complicated. They stuck to our timeline and their knowledge was impressive.”

Despatch has also seen significant adoption by the sales team. To generate a quote, the Sales Rep needs to enter an Opportunity in Salesforce, so that 100% of Opportunities are now captured in Despatch’s CRM, Salesforce.com. Usability was also a selling point; after a short one-hour tutorial, the majority of the Sales Reps thought the system was intuitive and easy to use.

Now the Despatch sales team produces quotes more efficiently, makes fewer errors, and brand consistency is enforced. Because Despatch is one of the leading companies in its field, there is a high confidence that a rapidly increasing sales funnel will have a significant impact on sales growth. And an increase in quotes produced—especially without needing to add headcount—translates directly to increased revenues. This is in keeping with Despatch’s significant efforts to position themselves as an industry leader by streamlining their entire business process, from order placement to delivery.