QuoteWerks: Now More Than Ever!
As folks including clients and MSPs focus more on the “spend-side” including expenses, QuoteWorks is more relevant than EVER.
We recently cornered Brian Laufer, long-time partner at QuoteWorks for a business models update.
High-level points in the interview include:
• Sales quoting and proposal solutions with a focus on supply chain trends
• Using data science to analyze vendor information
• Supply chain issues in the IT industry during COVID-19
• The benefits of using a service to manage procurement for MSPs
Harry Brelsford 00:06
Hey nation nation. We're back. Another podcast. We're with Brian Laufer from QuoteWorks, a longtime friend how you doing?
Brian Laufer 00:14
Doing very well thank you
Harry Brelsford 00:16
all right. Hey quickly what is QuoteWorks? What does QuoteWorks do?
Brian Laufer 00:22
Yeah so we're a sales quoting and proposal solution. We've been around for almost 30 years now. So we've seen the industry change and with that we've changed along with it as far as how we deliver quotes to customers how we integrate with different solutions. But the main thing of what we do is we help basically anybody create a quote faster than what they're doing right now delivering the quote, you know, closing that, quote, getting payment, automating the process through their CRM and PSA all the way through accounting.
Harry Brelsford 00:53
Yeah, and as I recall, it's been a while since we talked, as I recall, I think you're hooked into the distilleries. So your quote has SKUs in pricing. Right?
Brian Laufer 01:03
Exactly, exactly. And we're able to very easily see all the pricing and availability from all the distributors that you work with. And you don't have to maintain those product lists or anything like that. We're able to you can do like a keyword search, you can do a part number search. And it'll show you you know, the parts from TD Synnex. From, you know, Ingram from dnh, even from Amazon business all in one screen.
Harry Brelsford 01:27
Yeah, cool. All right. Well, let's, let's get to the main topic. So your firm recently released a study, what's the study? What's the story?
Brian Laufer 01:35
Yeah. So, early last year, and 2022, we, we sent out a survey to our customers trying to get an idea of, you know, what the trends were in it, when it came to working with vendors and, and distributors, just because, you know, we're coming through COVID, you know, things were starting to shape up in Europe interchange in Europe, I should say. And so there were still a lot of supply chain concerns. And there are today as well, but we really wanted to get a better idea of what was going on. We were adding on more distributors and vendors at the time. We're continuing to do that now. But we wanted to get an idea of what they were seeing out there. You know, besides like the the people that we see at events, we wanted to open it up to all of the community to see what they thought, as far as you know, how many vendors they were working with, you know, what their average sale was that sort of thing. That way we can kind of share that information with the community. And we're going to continue doing that year to year. So we have basically a touch point to see how things are going as the years progress.