“Now, it typically takes four to five minutes to create a quote. That’s a pretty drastic difference.”

Voltrek is a Massachusetts-based, woman-owned business that specializes in designing, installing and servicing electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure. The company handles the entire scope of these projects, including planning, design, management, construction, and service and maintenance.

Following Voltrek’s acquisition by Orion Energy Systems, a provider of LED lighting, controls and electrical installation and maintenance services, the company is now expanding their services across the US.

Voltrek was struggling with their quote generation process, which was taking too much time and wasn’t suited to their business requirements. The company decided to look for a solution to overcome this problem.

Implementing Flexpricer has drastically transformed the way we work at Voltrek. What used to take us nearly an hour – generating a quote by hand, is now accomplished within a mere 4 to 5 minutes.

The Challenge: Lengthy and Complicated Quote Generation

Prior to implementing Flexpricer, it was taking the Voltrek sales team between 45 minutes and an hour to put together quotes. Voltrek didn’t have quote management software in place, so creating these quotes by hand was a time-consuming process.

In addition to taking a long time, the quotes were often missing add-on items or items that were specific to that particular project. For example, different brands of EV vehicle chargers have different activation and warranties that need to be calculated and added on to create an accurate quote. Shipping also needs to be included with these quotes.

Chad Connors, Senior Vice President Operations & Technology at Voltrek, explains, “There are a lot of “ifs” and “thens” in our whole product line. So, we found that the quotes were often missing the add-on items or items that had to come with the product.”

The Implementation: From Demo to Prototype

Voltrek’s implementation of Flexpricer went hand-in-hand with its move to Salesforce CRM and, while initially the company was investigating Salesforce CPQ, they ultimately decided it wasn’t quite right for their business needs. Connors then explored the Salesforce Marketplace and found Flexpricer. After demoing the project for a few weeks, he decided that Flexpricer was the right option.

“Usually I want to try a bunch of different options to find the best software,” says Connors. “But with Flexpricer, it worked from the start, so I didn’t need to look for anything else. The support has also been great. The team was really helpful with solving anything we asked of them. The pricing is reasonable too.”

The Results: Five-Minute Quote Process

Benefits

  • Guided Product Bundles

  • Automatic Add-On Calculation

  • User-Friendly Interface

  • Time-Efficient

Voltrek has specific quote generation requirements, which Flexpricer has been able to help with. For example, when their customer chooses an electric charging station, they always need to pick a cloud network plan. Flexpricer’s Guided Product Bundles has ensured that quotes can’t be generated without the cloud network plan add-ons.

Connors explains, “It’s like when you buy a cell phone. You pick a device, but you also need a network plan to go with it. The charging stations work in the same way, so our customers have to pick a plan to go with the station. Due to the way Flexpricer is set up, they have to pick only one plan, and they can’t proceed without adding that plan.”

This functionality extends to other add-ons such as extended warranty and hardware add-ons. Flexpricer automatically adds the relevant fees and charges to the quote.

“Flexpricer makes it so much easier for the sales team to create a quote,” says Connors. “It’s just point and click. It’s similar to shopping on a website like Amazon where you pick items, add them to the basket, and shipping and other costs are added automatically. This has minimized errors in the quoting process.”

With this added functionality and ease of use, The Voltrek sales team has significantly reduced the time it takes to create quotes.

“I sat with the sales team a number of times to watch them create quotes using the old system. It took about an hour to finish the process by hand. Now with Flexpricer in place, it typically takes four to five minutes to create a quote,” says Connors. “That’s a pretty drastic difference. Overall, Flexpricer streamlines the entire quote process and makes it much more seamless.”

The Future: Expanding Flexpricer to Quote for Turnkey Projects

Voltrek has been impressed at the level of functionality Flexpricer delivers, and the company plans to expand its use of the system to help them cost turnkey projects.

As well as installing electric charging stations, Voltrek can take care of all the logistics of a job from start to finish, from planning to design to construction. This includes work such as wiring the station from the power grid or excavation work to make space for the station. Voltrek has to hire contractors to complete the work, and they don’t currently have a way to cost the entire job as prices on line items can vary.

Voltrek plans to use Flexpricer’s cost-based pricing so that they can cost these projects based on mark-ups or sales price margin on the quote line items and services involved in these projects, rather than on a fixed sales price.

Connors explains, “The end benefit is we can now add the costing at the job level or the opportunity level to third-party construction, as well as the hardware and software products we sell. It gives us a much better way to see what our margins are. Flexpricer provides a real-time calculation of the gross margin achieved on any product added to an opportunity. It’s so much easier to track our margins and stay compliant.”

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