The goal of this guide is to teach you how to set up and use D3M’s Quote Tool. We will go through the following sections: 

Configure Price Quote (CPQ) Software is a term used to describe software systems that help sellers quote complex and configurable products. It’s a growing industry trend that aims to make sales teams more productive, reduce the time-to-quote cycle and limit errors in complex industries requiring difficult and non-repetitive sales proposals.

D3M’s quote tool takes a unique approach to this concept of CPQ by basing system quotes on technical diagrams; DPQ or Diagram Price Quote. After the sales reps gather customer requirements and prepare a system diagram with the aid & approval of their technical team, they can automatically generate a budgetary quote and have confidence that the system will be built to spec. By turning on the quoting function in the diagram, sales reps can visually understand what has or has not been included in their quote and quickly determine what might be missing at a glance.

Having your technical and sales teams on the same page from the beginning of the sales process and using one common tool will go a long way in ensuring your company’s success during the lifecycle of your projects. By using D3M’s quote tool your team can expect:

Before setting things up, it’s important to understand a little bit about how D3M's quote tool works. 

A quote is comprised of line items in sections. Without doing any setup, you can open up a project and start creating a quote by manually filling outline items. However, after the first quote, that will be a very tiresome method of filling out quotes.

D3M provides quote parts as a place for you to store all the information about what you quote so that you can quickly quote the same parts again and again, saving time and reducing errors. Each quote part is comprised of the following: unique part number, name, description, unit price, and unit cost. It can represent a device, a type of equipment, a service, an annual fee, or anything else you might want to include in a quote. Adding this data to D3M is often as easy as uploading a CSV file that you exported out of your accounting system or perhaps another quote tool.

After adding your pricing information to D3M, rather than manually filling out your entire quote, D3M will suggest quote parts that you might want to use to fill out your quote faster based on the part number or name that you are typing in. 

That's all great, but let's be honest. It isn't much different from any quote tool. Well, there is one more thing...

When you are diagramming a solution you are typically representing devices and cabling that you will need to add to your quote. To make things even more clear, you can add quote parts to an icon or a connection in your diagram and D3M will automatically create the line item for it in your quote. What's nice about this, is if you and your customer later decide that the extra 100 portables and other repeater are no longer needed, all you need to do is delete them from your diagram. Your quote will be updated automatically to reflect the changes!

And that's not all. Since the icons that you use in your diagrams will often be quoted the same every time, D3M learns as you add quote parts to icons and then starts to automatically create the quote for you! After you and your team have quoted one or two systems, your workflow will be reduced almost exclusively to diagramming the solution!

Gone are the days of needing to diagram, and fill out a BOM, and fill out a quote, and create a proposal. Just diagram and let D3M do the rest!