Salesbuildr, Next Gen Quoting for Autotask and Connectwise

hi everyone it's Chris here from sundel Consulting with me today I have two of my um all-time favorite people in the industry I have Victor and James from sales buer um they're going to talk to you all about this amazing product that they have um called sales buer um and I'm going to let them introduce themselves shortly uh and then what we're going to do is go through a little bit of a demo just kind of show you what this tool can do um and then you know at end if you have any questions um you can just post them in the in the comments below um and we'll get back to you as soon as we can so I'm going to pass over to uh Victor and just sort of tell us a little bit about sales Builder where it's come from you know um why you started it all that kind of stuff and then we'll pass over to James um who can introduce himself as well and then go through a presentation of what sales Builder is so hey guys and welcome and uh thanks for coming on the call and over to you Victor thanks for the great intro Chris that's the best intro I had all month um well yeah I'm Victor um I'm the founder of sales buer um we started sales buer let me see um building this three four years ago um why did we do it um I worked at autotask before that so I talked to a lot of other task Partners back then and there was an issue with with the status quo and there was a need for something new Fast user friendly and customer friendly and that's what we started out to build um we're have been in the market now for two and a half years and we've managed to build the application out from an MVP two and a half years ago to a mature platform that does a lot of interesting things that will make the life easier if you're in sales and work for an MSB cool excellent thank you for that and um James I know you've uh well I'm sure a lot of people on you know who are subscribed to this channel have probably seen you around at a million events they know you well um so do you just want to um yeah for the one person who probably doesn't know you do you want to just introduce yourself who you are where you come from and uh and then take us through a a demo or yeah take us through your slides and what you're going to do with with sales Builder that's cool that's very kind of you I'm not sure that's quite the case but a few of them might have unsubscribed for one of my emails potentially or had a microphone prodded in their face in fact it feels a bit weird actually Chris it being this way around normally I'm interviewing you harassing you at a show or something so exactly exactly but yeah it's awesome to be on here finally I remember going to an SBS group with you many many moons ago and you came in presenting about autotask and I thought this guy is like not all that funny but he knows his stuff he really knows his stuff and then yeah from then on I've watched the channel grow so we're absolutely yeah thrilled to be on the sella Channel finally my background's been MSP for S 20 or so years um in various different roles first distributor as MD of Zen software then doing a stint in Enterprise with akami and I've always had an interest in this kind of stuff Believe It or Not uh six seven years ago actually was putting together my own sort of MVP for a sort of quotation tool born out of the frustrations of quoting when I was formerly in the sales team many years before that and so I there was a perfect alignment so that joining sales Builder was it was kind of a it was a no-brainer for me really I've been keeping an eye on Victor's journey and met Victor through comper and and here I am evangelizing the products uh the pains and getting out there at shows and interviewing thought leaders and people who actually know their stuff like yourself Chris excellent and just um for you mentioned both of you mentioned the word MVP so for people who don't know what that is do you can you can you kind of explain what that means yeah it's it's the minimum viable products so what's the minimum that you can build that adds value and that that that customers will buy and think is useful that's that's where most SAS companies start like they buy the minimum viable product and um and then and then you start inating and and that's I think that's the beauty of um building software that's for a specific Niche like the MSP vertical and then it's not only for the MSP vertical but also for the sales horizontal process so so you can get very very specific um and it's cool because you you carve out this this this this slice of the market and then you talk to customers who will start using your MVP and they're going to come up with all kinds of remarks and questions and requests can I do this this is um this is very valuable this is this doesn't work for me and then and that's that's how you build an innovator product towards something that's that's very valuable for a lot of msps that are in the same boat right so MVP most viable product not most valuable person or most valuable player or whatever whatever they use in in sports these days so exactly yeah yeah excellent um yeah James I know you had some um uh you know some slides you wanted to sort of go through and just take us through a little bit of a journey of of the product so it be good to good to kind of have a look at those um and then if we um you know if I have any questions obviously I'll I'll ask you those as as we're going through um and then we can hand over to Victor who can uh who can demo it so do you want to do you want to kind of share your screen and and show us what you got I I I certainly will for my many years of uh working in the community I know how much people love Death by PowerPoint so I've brought the ultimate deck here no I'm going to just use this literally as a framework because it is there's a lot to the product and it is helpful I think to just be able to get some sort of framing around it um so just make sure I can share my screen okay can you and I will put time stamps on I know everyone absolutely wants to see James and wants to see you talk um and I'm sure they they're going to they're going to love what you have to say but you know there will be time stamps so if people want to skip straight to the um the demo they can do that but I do hope you kind of sit and watch what uh what James has to yeah give me give me two minutes right okay so um sales Builder really is is a about making sure you get the most out of your sales team and you know you guys are putting uh you know Time Blood Sweat tears into building your MSP into making sure you've got you know the right people the right products you're bringing on new customers marketing all the bits that go into being a successful MSP if you let it down at the sales stage you're really doing yourself an injustice so this this is although we are at its heart a quotation and proposal toour this is really about how can we get the most out of your sales team or whoever is in your sales team the sales the sales function and the way we do that is is through automation standardization and templatized the the key to growth so let me just show you I'll give you a quick run through of what's actually in the product these are the tiles so there's a lightweight CRM there's a portfolio management element to this so it links off to your PSA and your and your Distributors lets you find a concise portfolio to sell from there's a a whit space area where you can see opportunities in your customer base of course you can build beautiful proposals and templates that are that are interactive that mean you don't have to keep going back and Reinventing the wheel every time that you want to create a proposal visibility of pipeline so you know what's going to convert you're not in the dark you're actually you know not it's not relying on you necessarily to update things and there's a compliance element to this as well so you can see who's accessed quotes who sent quotes and you got a full audit Trail there plus some order automation once the quotes come in and I can't wait to talk about storefronts I really really love that bit so this is where it sits in your stack you can see we're second one along there so you got your accounting software on the far right there we are and then we plug into your PSA and your Distributors so we're on the sort of the sales the sales end of your of your stack we connect with of course autotask connect wise Dynamics Halo is is on the agenda for later on in the year that's one that Victor talk about later on sorry yeah you go for it about the um the Distributors and I know um I know you guys are a European company so I know where the answer to this is going to be but you know a lot of quoting tools kind of you know start by integrating with the American vendors and sort of don't connect too well with the the UK one so I'm assuming you've got and I can see companies like exertus and those kind of things so you know you're you fully work with vendors across the world or is it just UK and just us how does that work I think in terms of the way it's been borne out obviously Victor has been doing some great work in the in the benu so started with the sort of the Distributors there and slowly as we brought on more customers we've kind of added them and actually we're adding them all the time so it's not uncommon for if somebody's got a particular distributor they work with for us to add via using our API we connect and be able to add them as well but obviously we have a big focus on the US too so you can see some of the sort larger Us dises in there as well so yeah it's it's it's a real at the moment hopefully all the the major ones are covered yeah I I can give a little bit more detail there I I mean what's interesting that you can see is in the United States you have a landscape that's much more Consolidated than here in Europe right so you got you got a couple of big ones where that that covers 80 90% of of your day-to-day business and then in the UK you have you have to use suspects like Ingram Micro TDC next we also do West Coast EET excerts targets and um Westcon comster coming soon and then in the benock is even more we got 21 I don't know why the benlock is such a fragmented space but it is um so because we were born here we got the widest uh amount of distributors in the B okay that's a good question though it's nice we should probably divide those up it's really obvious but that' be useful to useful to show like that and and I mean even even just those those Distributors you know I see sometimes with some tools for example Works in on the US Ingram but not on the UK one or you know not not on the Australian um Ingram because some of the API are different so I'm assuming here it's it doesn't really matter which country you're in if you're using one of those Distributors like Ingram or um Tech data or whatever they call these days um that you know doesn't matter where you are in the world it's it's going to connect to to the distributor in that country um yes but it does matter where you are in the world because we do Benelux UK and Ireland and uh United States um so they do have specifics and and one of these specifics is is slightly subtle difference in the cataloges and also in the product specs right we have a most tools work with eiz as a product database we have iceap but we build our own distributor Hub interface so you can you can search for products lightning speed we enrich products but that's tied to a region so um Australia and the nordics are are coming later but are not on the list right now okay for example cool thank you so just whistling through some of the pain points we help with uh msps that have no CRM at all still working on spreadsheets and those that are stuck with crms that are totally bloated and therefore not really that usable people who have sprawling cataloges of products and and services that aren't standardized which therefore isn't helping the sort of the efficiency no visibility over pipeline necessarily and importantly templates that perhaps aren't at the Quality that they should be and take way too long to produce also flying almost blind in terms of where the opportunities are where the profit is in their in their business and of course sales Builder helps with that so there is a lightweight CRM as I mentioned portfolio pipeline visibility uh and of course we'll touch on the templates side of things and the proposals and the insights with the with the whites space module here's a quick look at it so we can dive into any one of these points Chris so we can uh do the demo on any areas that you think are most interesting um just so you can see it there we've got a lightweight CRM so you can create your companies you can enrich that data as you're doing it you can create contacts and label them depending on where they are within the sort maybe within sort of the buying group so decision maker stakeholders whatever it might be and you've also got a tab there where you can see okay so quotation send proposal sent it's all built in same kind of the same area and having a picture of Victor's face on there is is an absolute bonus as well it's beautiful it's beautiful you can't escape it when you work here abwh abely um the Whit space tool this is I mean this is definitely a place where if you're going to look at sales Builder you definitely want to spend some time with this and in actual fact you can just um fire up a demo and connect to your UL itask instance or whatever it is you're using and and see the see the output of this but ENT entally what we're looking at here you hear it talked about a little bit um in in the industry from various sort of um influencers thought leaders this idea of Gap selling or Whit space selling and you've got services along the top there and you got C customers down the side and what those are showing you is okay I've got a green tile so that person has that product and you can even see a value on there not sure if you can quite make it out there's a value there of what you're currently billing them anything else is sort of free free free range to you know an an opportunity potentially um so one of the first things you do here actually is look at okay I'm actually am actually under billing or maybe even over overbilling a particular customer so there's a bit of housekeeping to do there before you sort of get all excited and go off go off selling the idea is go for it Sor sorry I was gonna say how's it picking that up from all the task and and manage is it sort of looking at what you've got on contract so it's pulling the services from a contract generate that report yeah yes it it does contracts and services on the contracts and in case of other task it also pulls the charges on the contracts so some as you know charge based on users from the active or users or or devices yeah okay awesome and you can click on that click on one of those tiles and OB you can see that see the the invoice there your the current current sort of billing State um the other nice thing about this is is you can there's a whole load of powerful filters which which I'll let Victor go through in more detail basically lets you sort of really narrow down on okay I've got on with antivirus I want to sell them fishing simulation application or I just want to see this particular account manager's view or I want to export use that information either in a TBR qbr or potentially actually send right there and then from our software uh you know sort of what is effectively a bulk email where it makes sense you got be quite careful doing that you make sure it aligns with their you know their business needs and so on but you know the functionality is there so I think we should definitely dive into that one and can you from that screen if you then wanted to quote a customer for something that's in that white space so if you said you know customer X doesn't have 365 can you click on there and kind of generate a quote for them and send that over to them or yes you can I'll show you that in a minute y excellent good yeah definitely worth having a look at that that area um you can see a pipeline which is quite important obviously if you're anything like me or any some sales people don't particularly aren't the best at keeping their records up to date and when it's manual there's always potential for error because it's all integrated you can see the pipeline you can see what quotes you've sent what stage are up to and you've got you know a good idea then of you know what your your forecasting actually starts to become valuable rather than a bit of you know okay are we somewhere close I mentioned this bit I think this is another area we should dive into um the categorization so you the whole principle here is that you want to be creating products Services service bundles that really tie into your your sort of your customers pains and try and be as concise as possible and and what you can do here is basically take all those products and things that are in your PSA and your services in your PSA products in your Distributors and build yourself a nice concise portfolio that everyone's selling from that has standardized margins uh business process rules so if anyone quotes a certain level that there's some kind of uh approval required and also you can set you know standard you know mandatory options optional extras for both the salesperson and potentially for the the customer so you're building a really nice concise portfolio bit of work to do up front if you really want to get that working nicely but the best msps You'll Always Find have that kind of concise View and the whole thing of course is templatized it would be no surprise to you so in terms of the content blocks if you're quoting a a Jabra headset then you can create once a piece of content that is a Jabra headset that looks fantastic that has a data sheet attached to it and that anytime someone quotes that it automatically pops in or you can drag it drag and drop and do it do it on the flly you can label it and so on but again we can we can have a look at that the proposal editor Works in much the same way what I really like about this is I think this fundamental idea of I can actually put a bit of time up front into making a really nice template so if you come to us normally we would probably create the template as yours is right now and then iterate is probably the way to go but you can actually create templates that are specific to niches you know so if you've got a legal firm you can start building some legal company testimonials from businesses you've worked from or tailoring the language in that direction so it makes it really easy to kind of Niche down but without actually niching you know just gives you that that nice tailored tailored View and for customers they're interactive as well so you can you know they can adjust what they want you you don't have that back and forth between the customer potentially and uh and yourself wasting time they can just choose the options they want eign it and and and you're good to go cool and you were saying about this so the proposal editor is there something that if it you know if a if an MSP has a proposal already in in a Word document or something can they just upload that whole template straight in no they can't so so what we do as part of the onboarding is we we build that those templates for you and show you how to do it okay um so we we basically convert them by by copying and pasting the contents of the uh templates into sales Builder okay well yeah super easy to do you can get as you can literally get as granular as you like I'm one of these people who likes to fiddle with the fonts and colors and stuff and you can really like you can pretty much customize it to the 's degree and like Victor says we start you off so so you're kind of at this a good Baseline and then the self storefront elephant elephant we do elephants now that's a new line in our products 44% apparently is the figure for Millennials who don't want to buy without sorry don't want to buy from a salesperson directly so it's really important for any MSP these days to have the ability to provide selfservice purchasing I think for their customers why on Earth would you want to be spending your valuable salesp people's time handling particularly like low value orders where it's just like a repeat order whether it's just a standard laptop webcam but whatever it might be standard bundles here's an opportunity to not only provide a better experience for customers so you can actually do this on a per customer basis you can say right you know if it's a let's say media house or something and they want High powerered spec machines only you know you can provide just just those three and any sort of additional add-ons and things or you can have a open up a storefront which is just everything and I've seen some people doing like a sales area to get rid of the sort of the out out of dat potential Hardware or older Hardware I should say so it's a really powerful thing and if you're not doing it then potentially your customers uh so your competitors will be so really important to have that in your Armory these days when people want to be able to have that sort of you know that self-service side of things you can see there's a nice landing page there so when they place an order you can pop a video in maybe and say thanks very much this is the next step this is what's going to happen you know got any questions feel free to reach out to us um so really really powerful tool I've seen some of the better msps doing it who really want to just get rid of some of that sales admin stuff off the desk and it makes a huge difference you know you could free up an inside sales person almost by just saying look you know here's our here's our portfolio for anything more advanced come and talk to us you know absolutely and does this and I'm assuming this is obviously fully brandable um you know in the msp's colors and um all that kind of stuff and is is the URL like brandable as well so yes sir yeah you get your own your own subdomain under your your own under your own domain Okay cool so like shop dots and Del consulting or something like that yeah exactly yeah yeah sounds good why don't you absolutely well I'm going to absolutely t-shirts I'm not going to have a huge am as a as a consultant I'm probably going to have two products on there right you can buy Consulting package one or two but um but no I mean I can absolutely see how this um is is something that um that msps will use and and I get asked this actually all the time when Consulting calls is you know how how do we how do we make a shop front right how do we we don't want to talk to customers we don't want to go and sell them stuff right we just want to say here's our website go pick what you want buy it from our website and we'll you know we'll deliver it and the great thing is that way it stops them having to go to Amazon and buy the wrong machine or you know get the wrong machine you can almost kind of go these are the machines that we recommend you buy um and if you pick one of these we know it's going to work for you um you know as I said rather than just going to Amazon or PC World or one of those places so um yeah that's a great point the other thing is you could you can also like if you create these bundles or you add up and cross items you can also add your manage services yeah right or your software license to that to that line item and it's all it's all cared for and it all flows into your PSA and you can then convert it to an existing or a new contract yeah absolutely and that's that's brilliant I wish i' had this kind of stuff when I when I had my MSP business I think it's you know I I used to do things literally the oldfashioned way of um and I think there weren't that many quoting tools out then in those days either so everything was word and you know having to manually copy and paste stuff in and um you know fighting with customers when they're going to um PC World to buy you know the their home user machine or their Windows home that you have to support I to the same level as your preferred Hardware with with four gigs of RAM and it's like why doesn't it connect to my domain and you know so yeah we we've all had those questions I think this is is brilliant because you can just go go buy go buy the machine from there and it you know and also if I guess if you if you then have two or three machine different types of machines you're selling a Dell or HP you're not then having to go to your customer and say okay well you know let me give you the benefits of Dell versus HP you can just stick it on the website and go here's your benefits you choose Mr customer which one you prefer with up-to-date pricing as well that's the thing so to make sure you're not going to end up with a situation where you've added something and forgotten you had it listed at a certain price sold it at that price and g k I can't get it for that price anymore and so and so on the shop front that's then doing Real Time pricing from those Distributors is it so it's pulling in what the cost price is and adding a markup and giving yes it put it's it's putting them in on a on either a daily basis or an hourly basis depending on the distributor if they give daily or hourly updates um normally that's enough right especially for the pricing might be might be an issue sometimes for the availability um but that's another uh that's another discussion but um yeah everything is is um is uh organized properly and the other thing is that when the product isn't available anymore from your Distributors it will automatically hide the product so you can't buy something that you can't deliver okay and I guess it's the same as if if your distributor is out of stock of that item does that then also kind of show levels yes yes it does yeah you could yeah okay so you know if they want to buy the hpn and yeah Ingram doesn't have it or something then you just okay there's none of those in stock but there's five of these in stock or something yeah so so so then you can set a rule if it's not in stock do not show the item only show the items that have availability okay so you can only pick one that's available yeah or or discontinu so don't show disc or discon or out of stuff yeah out of stock yeah yeah I can tell you're gonna have lots of questions here Chris and I really want to hear them so I reckon we now's not a bad time to switch the demo I think we can even have a look at that stuff so you can see that because the distributor feed side of things is really really cool because you're stopping people one of our big msps we work with loved it because he was saying well actually I I have to check 10 up to 10 distributor portals to get that information and the time it saved me to do this and you can check it out on our YouTube channel it's it's Nostra we work with and he was saying oh it's really saved me some time so um yeah good stuff to look at absolutely I think you're right I think this is a good segue into doing a a demo um just so we can actually see how this how this actually works for real so yeah um Victor I'm going to pass it over to you to let you uh show us the magic there we go um let's um I mean let's jump jump straight into the proposal right for for um I'm I'm going to go then go up but I mean that the core thing of sales Builder is the proposal because everything from the from the platform comes together in the proposal and if you're working on a proposal this is what it looks like so you have a proposal here is based on a template you that's linked here you can open a template from here and a template typically has a cover page which you can select can be a full screen image can be an image with text in front of it um can be dynamic fields merged into it and then you typically would have a cover letter where you say uh here Chris here's your proposal this is why this here's what we're going to do and and editing that is just pick the pencil icon editing it like you're editing word and clicking on Save and you're done and as you can see here if you edit it you can see that there's a list a whole list of merge fields that you can use that pulls from your PSA that you can use in your proposal and it's it's a long list right you so you get your customer information your contact information but you can also use things like the quotation specific values um contract specific value so if you're sending out a a contract for 12 or 24 or 36 months you you can Define that in the settings and it will show you the month the start date the end date right the urces so the customer will know oh I'm signing off on a 36 Monon agreement and this specifically what it says Okay um does this work with um user defined Fields as well so if you've got a user defined field against your opportunity can you pull that in to here and and Chuck that in because what I'm thinking in this instance you might want to do that at the opportunity stage in in order task right so if you got a an opportunity in order task that you're managing through there you you may have a drop- down field that says you know how long is this this contract going to go on for and you'd say 12 months and then it would pull that field in and Chuck it into the thing okay yeah yeah well it it worked for du to defined fields from the company level that's what's in there right now from the company level okay yes we will be adding in US defined fields for opportunities too but like the the the duration of the contract and the ex amount of months is already part of the standard entity opportunities as you know so uh um but but you can use usually defined fields from aask company and then use those values in your proposals okay that's that that you can do for sure cool um well scrolling down here you will see that there's line items right so if I select the line item you can see that on the on the right side you can see the the information so if I click here on a distributor I can see oh here in this case you got a distributor copaco you can see the stock level and you can see the cost of the product and what sales B does it will it will calculate the sales price based on the cost the markup that you have set on the category where the product is in and that will calculate the sales price for you okay and if you had multiple vendors there because I saw that said lowest price so if you had sort of multiple vendors does it allow you to compare yes it does yeah it does so if if you have a product that's that's in stock you can see let me pick one um let me go to products here and let me pick a product that's in stock with Distributors and let me just try some random product here oh it's just about if you have multiple Distributors it will say it will show you all the prices and we'll select the lowest price from that list of Distributors and what you can do is you can set rules you can say look I have a preferred Distributors because I typically like to buy from I don't know tdcx but if the price is x% lower at the other guys pick the other guys so you you can you can do that normally you would do that manually here you can do it using a business rule okay um and again so so so you can manage your your line items here and you can also manage your add-ons and what I would mean by add-ons right you can say look we have some I want to add some mandatory add-ons onetime installation maybe a Care Pack maybe an nce license and I can select optional addons he can to be zero price as well can't I've seen this this use case where you say right okay I'm going to put like a server installation or whatever and you need to make sure it's got these particular cables or this mounting kit or something like that just to make sure you don't rock up at site without it basically yeah yeah you can do that I think the flexibility lies in that you can you can you can start off by slowly standardizing that portfolio so if if I'm going let's open another tab proct here and look into that portfolio because here is what we say okay you manage everything that you sell and what do you sell as an MSP it's always going to be Hardware software Services labor or a combination of one of those four yeah and this is where you laid it out so this this is basically a mirror of your PSA with the with the optionality of standardizing it in terms of markup shipping and add-ons so if I select add-ons here is where I can predefine that on this products in this category HP laptops always always have these add-ons upsell items as required because just just the way I want to sell my laptops yeah and this is the optional addon and so just a question on that so if you if you're adding those so you've got the HP Care Pack in there so you're saying always add this Care Pack but it's showing as unavailable so what what happens at that point if the product that you are adding is unavailable at your vendor does it still add the product to to the quite um you can see that right and and you can switch them out so there's always there's always some management involved in in keeping your portfolio healthy and up to dat right there's going to be stuff that's going to be end of life there's going to be new products or new models so you have to keep track of that so we have some things built in to make life easier for you one of the things that we do is because we have all those we have all those Distributors linked to your Marketplace so the marketplace is basically a Consolidated aggregated overview of all your Distributors inside sales B where you can find stuff quickly so quickly I mean if I want to find an HP Pro book with an i5 processor I can do HP Pro book i5 and it will show me all the HP Pro books an i5 processor and I can then select specific distributor or just show me all the ones that are available right okay so this works a little differently than what you used to you most tools have the eiz version we we we built this inside sales B Just For Speed and ease of use you can import products into your own portfolio and they will then inherit the rules that you have set on that category now what we do too because we have all these connections and we know what products are in stock which ones are not in stock and which ones are removed from the catalog what we can now do is say Okay um I'm going to clear the filters here and I can now say okay not found so this means I have three items in my portfolio that we can't find at any of your connected Distributors so these are end of life right so you want remove them or at least set them to inactive so they can't be added to a proposal anymore so we have a bulk editor built inside sales bter where you can bulk edit your portfolio and here is you can set these two unlisted and an active in other task nice so this is like a power tool to to to help keep your portfolio healthy the other thing we build is that what you can do is let's say I want to I want to uh do tdcx and I can now browse into a single category so let's say I want to go into computers notebooks I want uh Lenovo available I can now import these results and I can import these 74 results into my Lenovo laptops category and that's going to be a daily job so what it's going to do is anytime tdcx adds a new Lenovo laptop and it's available you will have it in your category inside sales Bard available to sell a daily update basically daily daily daily updates yeah what you C can then do too is say look if I go into that category Lenovo laptops right and I go into the settings of the category I can also say Okay hide products that are not in stock from end customers okay will not be visible if it's not un stock so and this is basically automating if your standardized on on Lenovo or Lenovo nhp you pull them in and you will always have all the latest models you can remove the ones that are end of life and you can hide the ones that are not available yeah that's that's awesome that's really cool yeah so it means you're not then having to as you say not having to kind of do a quote where your customers then trying to pull an item in that's no longer available or gone end of life you can just you can just tell it not to display that and your customers don't end up yell less manual work yeah yeah yeah yeah and and less less FS that you then have to correct Downstream yeah exactly when your customer now yells at you because you've you've you know they've bought a a laptop that's a that's been discontinued for the last three months and no one's told them and they're never going to get their stock right so exactly yeah yeah so so so so so that's a quote for you you can also do do like here we have a labor bundle so you can add either a quote specific bundle or you can pre-build a bundle add it to your portfolio based on everything that's in your portfolio and add it to your quote so here you can say look I want to add a single line item and there's all stuff inside that bundle and you can you can then decide do I want to share what's in the bundle with my customer or want to just simplify how I sell things and offer it as a single line item right in this case it's it's it's installation work but you can also say okay if it's a managed um managed Services per user the customer doesn't really care most of the time what's inside the bundle the customer cares about the end result yeah and the investment yeah so our recommendation is to hide it because that gives you the opportunity to also exchange what's inside the bundle in the back end right you're selling a n result and how you do that is up to you yeah absolutely and I agree I mean I think yeah customers don't need to as you said they don't need to kind of know that it's a a Dell PC right all they want to know is can I can I do my work on it right can I do my um PowerPoints or can I do my um you know CAD drawings or whatever it is and and that's all they know they don't care what make it is what model it is how much memory it's got they just need to know this machine is going to be capable to do whatever I need to do with it and working with bundles as well the benefit there is that you know if you've got people internally it also helps those people that perhaps aren't as experienced as putting together the complete packages internally new starters whatever there's set bundles to work with or non- technical people right who don't know that you need a exactly that yeah you docking station for or or which docking station you need if you got a laptop or something you know whatever yeah but if you have like a like a more software and services based bundle it's the same thing right you want to abstract it for your customer and simplify it you're selling a net results but you do need all the Individual Services line items in aask or in connectwise because you want to have them on the contract because you want to measure the profitability on the contract how much did I have to procure quantity cost price versus how my billing this contract or this manage services for the amount of devices or the amount of users and Sals will let you do that by by hiding the line items it will they will flow into the quote line items in in other task you can then convert it to a new or existing contract and you can then do the like I'm I'm I'm I'm billing this line item on the invoice and the other seven line items are do carry a cost they don't carry a sales price but I can keep track of them on my contract just a quick question if on that sorry again if you go back to that product you were just looking at um it said ETA something whatever date it was now um is that available so if the customer is doing this on the portal and they picking that D Multi-Device does it tell them what the ETA is so um you know yeah yeah you can you can you can pick or choose to hide it or show it okay because I think that would be really useful you know if I'm a customer buying something and I know that I'm going to buy whatever that device is and but I've got an ETA of next week then I'm going to know that that's when I should expect it right otherwise I'm going to say well I thought I was in stock and I'm expecting it tomorrow or the next day so it's good good point yeah it's a switch you you will see that there there's a lot of there's a lot of flexibility in Sals B so it's it's easy to use it but you can you can adjust it to your needs as you wish for for on a lot of aspects of the products um so maybe um like if if you if you have a proposal here um Let me let me switch to this one because this one is connected to an aask instance right so what we want to do is the whole workflow so I create a quote from the dashboard like here's the dashboard it has some uh Tils where you can see your your current proposals in the different stages you can create a quick quote by pressing Q or clicking the T and you can then select a template from your template Library y now what you need is a company right so you have to you have to add a company it automatically picks the contact person like the the primary contact uh but you can change it for another contct if you wish and if you want you can already select a product here right it will suggest the product that you quote on a daily basis but let's do something let me see here what's in stock this is in stock right so you can if you just do a quick quote so this will create a proposal based on this template or that customer or that contact here you have a button there that said create product so I'm assuming If the product isn't there you can just create like an ad hoc product oh does that then write that product back into your product catalog in in your PSA tool oh yeah for sure yeah so you you could create products on demand either based on a manufacturer part number or or a custom product if you want it will add it to your portfolio and as soon as you as you add that product on a proposal it will push it into your PSA not before because you don't want to make a MCH yeah um so so here's a preview of your proposal so this shows you the proposal Through The Eyes of your customer right so you have a virtual business card here which you can customize with your image your LinkedIn and your meeting planner and your teams chat okay that's good so we don't all have to be Victor then we don't all have to show we don't all have to be Victor you can but you don't have to we can keep trying AB um and then and then you have the like here the is the standard um um intro letter and there's the laptop I added you can also see that the the standardized add-ons have been added to the proposal based on the business rules I have set so you're selling a solution instead of just a laptop yeah right and then as you can see there's some there's some sales collateral from the library that has been added to this template there's some other stuff on this template you have your conditions you have your financial summary which can present the onetime investment the monthly recurring or the yearly recurring if it if you add it it will show it right so it's Dynamic so you can add multiple recurring dimensions on a proposal and um you can send it to your customer and you can pick a from a library of outgoing templates right and you can pre-write that outgoing email and it will use merge fields to personalize it based on the customer and the one that is sending the proposal and if you send it out your customer will now receive an email and that email has a link to the proposal you can see that's syncing to a task and the email sorry I was just going to say does that email send from your servers or is that something that they can customize it to send from their you know so does it show up like in the in their sent items in in their Outlook they will get a they will get a BCC so it's not directly integrated with your outlook or your Google workspace uh we use a platform called send git okay right and you validate your DNS and it will it will send on behalf of you you get a you can be in the CC or the BCC so you get a copy okay um and then and then the customer can then sign out here I've copied that link to the proposal and then the End customer can view the proposal inspect the proposal and depending on your settings you can say Okay customer can change the quantities customer can select the add-ons that's all Dynamic and then the customer can just add a PO optional add a note add a name and then they need to approve the terms and conditions which is attached based off on the template and only if they if they click that they can accept and then they can add a signature click on confirm and this will convert this proposal to a signed proposal that will then be uploaded as a PDF in your PSA to the opportunity entity it will be emailed to the customer like an email with a signed proposal and the terms and conditions because it's important because they might change in six months and you want to have the signed version the approved version and if I now log in back again because I think this is what's interesting in now here already approved quotes and I already opened up uh other task okay so here she signed a proposal right and I can open up the opportunity in other task right so it it it it fills up all the fields Across The Entity and it will upload the relevant attachments and it will fill in all the fields properly onetime Revenue monthly Revenue contract term Etc um the other cool thing here is now normally you would do the one opportunity wizard right to create this postal tickets that's a button here so this will create a ticket for you in other task it will add the products as charges on the postale ticket and you can provide the estimated hours the due date the billing code and you also can provide an internal ticket note we sent you the the Distributors that have been added selected for the products and the cost price at this time point in time that's really now we're creating Theos sale tickets boom you're done and now this has been linked to your proposal and you can now open that ticket and there you go so what say a lot of time yeah I mean this is I think this is something that none of the other quoting tools I've ever seen do that you still have to run the approv and post uh sorry appr and post the um one opportunity Wizard or or wow is in order task which is there's no wow about it but it's the uh but yeah this is really cool because you know yeah it's it's such a long drawn out comom some process now what about so you create the ticket in there what about can you create from sales Builder can you create the um uh the contract and everything as well so if you had recurring services on there can you build that contract no no you can't today and and the reason why is like you know deposal ticket and the products that you sold you know you will need to fulfill them and order them right so that's known most of the times once the quote with the services that will need to flow to a contract is approved most msps tell us we don't know when that contract will start because we need to provision them first do a project do a migration so we don't have the exact date yet we will know in in a week or in a week or two but not today so what they do is they will do this and then they will manually create a contract at a later point in time when it's the start date is known so we haven't figured out yet what what's the universal workflow rule could be for automating the quote to contract for everybody yeah so that's that remains to be seen it's it's a puzzle yeah yeah and it makes sense because I mean you know in the in the one opportunity wizard when you create the the contract you have to select a start date at that point and as you say you you may say well it's only going to start when they when the items have been delivered or something like that and how would you yeah how would you know so yeah but but this this was that that wall like the one opportunity wizard this was built based on feedback from customer set manate we have a high volume of of product quotes it takes up so much time it's Error prone right it's no it's not fun nobody likes to do it okay and then we decided to automate so this is available for all customers so now maybe have a look at that whites space what we talked about before because this was like what what does sales Builder do different than the rest is is for us it's about the portfolio management um having the ability to add the items in your portfolio to your quote templates and template building blocks so you got like you can pre-build a whole solution right so the other thing is if you have your templates you can also have widget templates which are essentially building blocks and you can you can add items from your portfolio to the template building blocks right you can add the services from other task and then you can you can write a Content that you will can drag and drop or link it to your proposal and once you do that and you have a let me pick a draft quote here right you have a a quote and now I can go into here and I can see those template building blocks and I can just pick one drag and drop it into my proposal and it will have my product description which I can customize on on the spot but it will also have all the items that I sell on a regular basis so for those msps that are standardized across soft Ware services and products you can you can build that that template library and be done with it so your starting point is 80 90% done you tweak it a bit and you know it's going to be your correct yeah that that is something I think is unique um the other thing that's unique was the quote to postale tickets and the other thing that's unique to sales Builder as a own platform is the whitespace and the whitespace is where we pull in um your contracts and your services you can see your customer landscape here and you can now inspect those right so if I you can see the these are the rows with my customers these columns are my service categories or my service codes that I have used to bundle my services and other time right so you can you can scroll and you can see the gaps in your customer landscape when it comes to your services portfolio I can open up contracts I can see and inspect those contracts start date end dat Revenue the charges on the contract the services on the contract and I can use those I can I can open it up too like I can jump into that contract another task boom there we are I can also create a renewal proposal based on this contract me pick another one um and just hit the button and you can pick a template and it will add all those services from the existing contract to a new proposal you can do some tweaks remove some stuff change some quantities add some up and cross sell and send it out as a renewal proposal but very fast the other thing here is you can slice and dice so what do I mean by that I can filter on show me all customers that have Services Under the Microsoft 365 service code boom these customers all have Services Under Microsoft 365 so if you have properly set up your service codes and your services this will be very valuable because now I can say okay now I want to sell um SAS protection to those customers now we'll show you okay um I got three customers with an open opportunity for SAS protection I can click the link and that will open up the opportunity the quote there we go S protection and it will show you oh here is an opportunity for MSP navigator that does have Micro 365 but does not have SAS protection let's create a proposal can pick template SAS and it will add SAS protection to the quote so from that inside of that highly um segmented list of customers you can now create your proposal based on a pre- pre-built template with SAS protection on there and send it out to the customer that is now let me show you something that's that's even more awesome like sometimes you want to sell things upsell your customer base but you can't sell send them a quote from the out of the blue you want to start a conversation first so what you can do here is say look all these customers have Microsoft 365 right but uh some do not have S protection basically you can select your result and then you can apply a label to that result for example example micro 365 it will add the label to those companies now I can go into the light CRM and say I'm going to have my contacts from my PSA and I'm going to I'm going to use the company label to filter only the context that match the specific company label that I've applied to the company so it could even be a campaign name that I guess if you're doing it as a campaign basis you might say June yes 365 upsell something yeah and as you notice this also supports AAS PSA classification does that's nice and now what I can do is say Okay I want to inform these contacts can be one can be two can be 100 and send them a pre-built campaign about Microsoft 365 co-pilot and now this is not going to be like a marketing saly campaign this is going to be a campaign from the account manager to their customer saying hey Chris how you doing look we we checked your account we're seeing that you you are a perfect candidate for our new Microsoft 365 co-pilot service let me tell you what it's all about right you confirm and it will send it to those customers you will get a a cc in your inbox and then once the customer replies you will get it in the inbox now you start a conversation and from that conversation you would develop the opportunity yeah and and that's how you can use leverage like marketing collateral you can set up a marketing automation inside your customer base and then it flows to your s cycle from there that yeah that that I love I think there's you know I've looked at almost every quoting tool on the planet and they none of them that I'm seeing I'm doing this and I think this is where it's really going to you know set sales Builder apart from the others because it's no one's doing this at the moment well accept you guys but um yeah it's combining marketing automation with the whitespace insights with the propuls platform is it worth showing the under billing sort of overbilling side of it as well so you can see that's one of the first things there's a number of things you do isn't there when you approach this you look for those opportunities where you're under billing but also you have MS who have like a standard Security package and they want everyone to be on that that's that's sort of like a non-negotiable and that's another area where you can say okay look are there people that potentially don't have our base level of security that we want so different ways you can use this tool yeah so so you can see there's a tab for the whites space but there's also a tab for contract items so these will this will show you all your contract items from your PSA you can say show me all the line items where my price on the contracts is different from my list price okay and and this where you can get if you're talking to those customers you can also jump into the contract fix that or open up a conversation or at least be mindful that you're under Billing at this point in time compared to your current pricing yeah the other things that we will add here in the coming couple of weeks is grouping uh grouping all those line items based on customer category service vendor category service to show you your most profitable services from your portfolio so you can then like you can you can use the whitespace to focus on the correct customers when it comes to your what you're selling and you can also focus on what Solutions in my portfolio are making me the most money so now I know exactly where I want to Focus my sales team on which is sell my most profitable services to the customers where there a great fit based on what they're already buying from me yeah that I really like I think that's really cool it's not entirely driven by customers but also you know we're always collecting customer feedback I know vendors will always say that but we have a you know we have a a user feedback board where you can come along if youve got an idea for a particular use case it's one of those systems where you can you know other people can vote on it and that really does that's certainly something that we consider in the development process is what's you know what's high up on that list that's all within our within our knowledge base yeah one of the things too what that was a High's feature is is tell me all the customers like if I want to sell a service announcement to all my customers that have Microsoft 365 right you can select all export filter companies or tag them with with Microsoft 365 and then you can do a service announcement from that bulk email feature saying hey we're having a release uh Updates this evening or there's an outage on Microsoft 365 be aware this is what's happening but you can also do a reverse like tell me all my customers that do not have Microsoft 365 yeah hey there's one now I want to sell them 365 what's really nice is someone else can create that email as well if it's somebody that's in let's say they're in a technical team or something and they want to they want to word it in a particular way about a particular service alert or whatever you know create a template and then ask the S people send it out in a personal manner you know yeah yeah that's really cool that you can you can kind of do that directly from because it saves you now having to go into your PSA tool and do that or some you know some other marketing tool that you have it's it's just kind of all handled in here which is which is cool yeah because typically what happens is msps by hotspot it's very expensive and they only use 10% of the capabilities yeah and it it lacks the inside from your PSA so you can't build up laser focused audiences based on what they bought from you and with this you can yeah a delineation isn't there between like the marketing automation side which is useful for marketing team and The Wider blanket emails from the company but actually the more personal account managers stuff this can take care of a lot of it yeah absolutely absolutely no I mean I definitely think this is um this is fantastic and and one of the things I've been um you know as you've been going through this I think the the look and feel of it is really cool you know I'm loving the interface it's kind of easy to use it's nice and clean and crisp and sharp you know um which which makes all the difference again you know unlike some of the tools out there that just you know um kind of stuck in the 80s so yeah and the cool thing here is you can also see which quotes has been approved and processed to a ticket because then they will have a link to the ticket ticket with the charges you can just open it up and see okay these have already been process so that's my tickets that's my charges good I'm in control yeah absolutely wow now that's really cool guys I think that's um that's probably a good a good place to leave it there I think um there's you know you've really gone through a lot about what this can do um if anybody wants to get in touch with you guys about like getting a demo how what do they need to do is it something they can just go on the website and sign up for a demo or how how does that work yeah they can go to the website uh there's information everything can be found online knowledge base pricing they can started from free trial if they want or they can book a demo also it's worth mentioning I touched on it earlier but you can actually if you want to just want to do a free whites space check you can do that you can start a free trial or we can we can guide you through it happily let you know help help you connect it and and Away you go you know you can see exactly where the gaps are and see what your see what the next step should be in terms of how how you can get some of that profit out of your existing existing customer base absolutely yeah that's really cool um I really love that and you say at the moment it's only all theask and connectwise but you got Halo coming yeah which it's autotask connectwise Microsoft Dynamics sales and Halo is planned for the end of this year okay yeah so that's so we'll keep you posted on that Chris we'll keep you posted absolutely well it's just you know on on um this channel there's you know there's a mixture of kind of order task and and Halo um customers that watch these videos yes so um you know and I'm sure you'll probably have a lot of Halo people banging your door down to get the Halo integration developed sooner than the end of the year um I I'll probably be one of those I'm literally gonna go and you know what I'm going to do I'm literally gonna go and sit outside Victor's house and not move until he's developed do what you got to do Chris yeah yeah yeah um so no I really appreciate that guys and if um if anyone wants to get in touch with you guys directly um you know how do they do that who who do they need to contact um and uh and how do they go from me yeah we of course have we do have a sales team sorry Victor you go no well it's it's James saluer dcom or Victor sales builder.com or um the book of demo is the best way because this it will do a round robin into the uh looking for who's available the sales team but feel free to follow me of course we have sales Builder TV as well I have to give that little plug so we got our own YouTube channel as well so lots of content on there thought leadership and insight and live sessions we do a live session every Thursday so you're welcome to come along and you know can dive into any area of the products and we do all sorts of stuff on there um yeah and I'm I'm active on LinkedIn so follow me for content and feel free to DM if you if you need me for anything absolutely I just want to say yeah just want to say thank you Chris for having us on it's an absolute pleasure to be on this sella Channel and yeah you've done a great job in growing it and I hope it continues absolutely well it's been so much pleasure to have you guys and I've I've wanted to have you guys on for a long time I've known you both for you know feels like a feels like a lifetime which is feel like too long is what you're trying to say is it too long but but no I love it it's it's it's been it's been a great journey so what I'm going to do is I'll I'll link to all of these Below in um in the comments below um you know I'll link to your YouTube channels to your linkins um all of that kind of stuff um and then if any anyone has any questions they can um you know just leave a leave a comment below and I will make sure that um that we get back to them either via you guys or or whatever the case might be so thank you thank you you know very much for coming on this really appreciate it and what an amazing product it's really cool thanks for the words Chris thank you so much no worries all right thanks guys see you best thank you see you