A Leading Marketing Agency Used SpreadsheetWEB to Develop Custom Sales and Quoting Solutions
The Challenge
A leading marketing company based in the UK creates sales and quoting tools that are tailored to specific customer needs. Many times, these tools are built in Excel incorporating various formulas to evaluate complex product pricing, discounts, financing, leasing and tax calculations. These tools are created on a client-by-client basis and feature bespoke branding. Often, complete customer proposal print outs are also created in Excel. While creating and maintaining such sales and quoting tools in Excel makes it easy to update and adjust pricing data and formulas at will, it also makes it harder to control and monitor the entire sales process. Because the data entered into these Excel files stay on sales people’s desktops instead of a central data repository, collaboration, data aggregation and reporting became a difficult and error prone task. Their clients wanted to control and manage the overall sales process better but still be able to update their pricing algorithms quickly. They also wanted to create professional proposal documents that can be shared electronically with their customers rather than print outs from Excel spreadsheets. The company didn’t want to hire software programmers to build applications either due to very high cost of such projects. Their clients wanted a cost-effective solution otherwise they would continue using Excel despite its shortcomings.
The Solution
They started using an online software capable of turning Excel spreadsheets into web applications. But the product was far from meeting the requirements of their clients. It was especially limited in terms of creating professional looking customizable proposal documents.
"We wanted to produce web-based solutions for our clients. We found Spreadsheetweb ticked all the boxes for us instantly. and we are able to use it as a sandbox for our applications to create extremely complex solutions.”
They started searching for an alternative. Functionality was one of their primary requirements. They wanted a create web application without requiring in depth programming expertise. Flexible document creation was another important requirement. Most of their clients prepare complex sales documents containing sales quotes as well as varying legal language depending on products and terms selected. The platform needed to generate this type of documents without any coding required. They didn’t want a cloud-based platform. They wanted to host the application on their servers under their own domain. They also wanted the platform capable of complete white-labeling. Thanks to the fast development, low associated costs, and extra features that come with the software, the company decided that SpreadsheetWEB was indeed the best solution to their business challenge.
The Results
Since they had many clients to bring to SpreadsheetWeb platform, a partnership was the most appropriate arrangements. After signing the partnership agreement, they were able to get their fully configured SpreadsheetWeb server up and running on an AWS data center in the UK within a few days. It was also configured in a way that it was fully white-labelled thanks to SpreadsheetWeb’s built-in customization features. They started building their first application right away. Within a few weeks, the application was complete, tested, and ready to be released to their customer. The feedback from their customer was very positive.
“SpreadsheetWeb have been extremely helpful throughout our early stage process. You couldn’t really ask for a better partner in terms of reaction time. They’re willing to go above and beyond to assist their partners and whilst based in a completely different time zone to us, the service has been as high as you could expect from any top London based software developer.”
Ability to develop and deliver an application quickly, allows the Company not only to migrate their existing customers to SpreadsheetWeb platform, it also enables them to market it to a large audience in the UK by offering them a powerful, yet highly cost effective sales and quoting platform.
