[5] Quoting – with 3rd Party tools

Welcome to PSA Impact, your podcast for all things PSA, RMM, and MSP, with your hosts Rae-Ann Buccianico and Chris Tim. Learn how to get the most out of your PSA tool and manage your business by maximizing profitability and increasing efficiency within your MSP business. Let's listen in. Hello everybody and welcome to the PSA podcast with your hosts Rae-Ann and Chris. So Rae-Ann, did we have any topics or any questions that we wanted to talk about today?

Yeah, as a matter of fact, there was a post on the Facebook group from Brandon in Nevada and he asked that he's using QuoteWorks with Autotask. So he enters his quote in QuoteWorks and then he transfers that quote into Autotask which comes in as an opportunity and he's wondering if there's some way to have Autotask automatically win that opportunity. And so there's been this conversation about this topic and I think it's a really great topic and one worth discussing. What are your thoughts on this? Well, Rae-Ann, you know what I'm going to say about this.

It's my absolute favorite topic to talk about. I love everything about Autotask. I love these kind of questions because, you know, there's so many different answers to this, right? So there isn't really one standard answer. But what I would say with this is, you know, in terms of entering the quote in QuoteWorks, as you say, that will come into Autotask.

That will create the opportunity in Autotask. And then from within Autotask itself, you can run what Autotask calls the one opportunity wizard or if you want to abbreviate that, you can call it the WOW. And it is kind of a bit of a WOW factor really because what happens is you run that, it goes through a series of steps, almost in a wizard-based approach and right at the end, it gives you the opportunity to then add all of those charges to tickets. It also creates the contracts for you, creates the projects for you, and then also creates all of those billing items for you. So you have to run that workflow directly through Autotask.

There's no way to go into QuoteWorks itself and have QuoteWorks run that workflow or at least not out of the box. If you closed or won the quote essentially in QuoteWorks, all that does is goes into Autotask and closes the opportunity. It doesn't actually run that whole workflow. So then you're going to have to manually go in and do all of that. So, you know, and I know some of the comments on there, looking at it now, you know, there's a bunch of people have said the same thing about winning the opportunity.

There is actually another way to do this, you know, and that's using the APIs. So you can actually use the APIs on both products, on the QuoteWorks side and on the Autotask side, and you can write some kind of script or some kind of application that might actually run or have that whole wizard running outside of Autotask. So you know, once the opportunity is in Autotask, there might be something that goes and pulls that into a bit of middleware, for example, and then runs some kind of process in the background that's going to go and add everything to a ticket, to a, you know, an opportunity, create billing items, all that kind of stuff from it. So, so yeah, there's a number of ways to do it. What are your thoughts on that, Rayanne?

My thought here is that the winning the opportunity, the one opportunity wizard is probably one of the most important pieces, and likely not one that should be skipped. When you're winning the opportunity, right, you are saying, okay, this is how I want these items to be billed. Not only so that it gets onto the invoice for the customer, maybe also get into the purchase order so that you can track the inventory coming in and the purchase order going out, but also what accounts, what material codes or what expense accounts do you want these particular items to land in? And that is a specific space or screen inside the WOW, right, the wizard. And if you skip that or try to automate it, I'm concerned that you will be missing that enormously important piece of how do I want to post these to my accounting system, to my invoice, to my purchase order system.

And if you're using the purchase order system inside the PSA, whether it's Autotask or ConnectWise or any of the others, you want to make sure that not only does the proper part come in, but it's posting to your inventory the way that it needs to be. And so that's one of the critical pieces of the One Opportunity Wizard. And I'm not sure it's one that you want to automate. Absolutely. I mean, great answer, Rayanne, you know, and I think I hear this all the time, right?

I hear people saying, well, you know, I don't want to have to keep going into Autotask if I'm working in another tool like QuoteWorks to be able to run that. So what I want to do is I want to find a way to automate that. So one of the ways, you know, as I mentioned earlier on, that you could potentially do that is you could write that with the API. Of course, you know, whilst that's all very possible to do, it's going to take a lot of work, right? Because as you say, you've got to make sure that the product is getting, you know, the right material code, it's getting assigned to the right customer, you know, the wow in Autotask does all of that for you.

So, you know, and it's designed in such a way that says, once this is one, what do I want to do with all these parts, right? It's going to automatically pull that from the quote. It's going to push that through into procurement. It's going to push that through into billing. It's going to push that through into a contract, all of those kinds of things.

Now, so again, like I said, whilst that's possible to automate, and I'm using air quotes here that no one can actually see on the podcast, but while that's possible to automate as in writing a script with the API, I wouldn't recommend doing that, but you absolutely can because the API allows you to do all of those kinds of things. But you know, my answer in that is just stick with what Autotask gives you out the box and use what facilities they have to do it. Thinking about Brandon's question, I wonder if it doesn't make sense, right? Stick with me for a minute on this. He's saying, I don't want to hop from QuoteWorks to Autotask and then back to QuoteWorks to do another quote and then back to Autotask to win the opportunity, then back to QuoteWorks to create another quote, so on and so forth, right?

So if you have one person who's doing a ton of purchasing, and the larger the MSP, the more purchasing that's being done and the more valuable the QuoteWorks tool is. So what if you created the quotes, send them out to the customer through QuoteValet, they sign it, they pay their deposit, whatever, you get it back, you push the opportunity over into Autotask and you do all of your work for all of the different customers inside QuoteWorks and then at some point later in the day into Autotask you go and start winning those opportunities individually. That creates that space of time for you to look at it with a fresh set of eyes and make sure that everything is the way it's supposed to be before you push it out to the purchase order or invoice the customer finally with it. And of course, even just speaking everything, I'm thinking, are we collecting the money from QuoteWorks, are we sending the quote out through QuoteValet and collecting the initial deposit from QuoteWorks, or are you sending the invoice out of Autotask after you push the opportunity and win the opportunity and then send the invoice out of Autotask? Which one of these things is happening?

Because that's also going to determine what sort of things you can automate. Absolutely. I mean, that's really good. And I mean, while you were talking about that, actually, you were talking about doing some stuff in QuoteWorks and kind of doing all your QuoteWorks activity first and then coming into Autotask and doing all those kinds of bits later. And actually QuoteWorks allows you to, there's an option that you can say, I'm offline.

So you can actually still save your quotes, design your quotes, do all of that kind of stuff in QuoteWorks first without sending it into Autotask. So the first thing you'd have to do is connect to Autotask in order to pull the address and the contact details and all that kind of stuff into QuoteWorks, design your quotes. And then when you click on the save button, there's an option, a box that pops up and one of the dropdowns at the bottom says I'm online or I'm offline. And if you click I'm offline, what it does is it saves the quote in QuoteWorks, allowing you to do all that cool stuff that you were talking about, like sending the quote from QuoteValet, getting the customer to sign off, all that kind of cool stuff. And then when you're ready at that point, you can just click on the I'm online button and click the save button.

And what that will then do at that point is create the quotes and the opportunity and all that kind of good stuff in Autotask, which potentially, as you say, you could then at the end of each day or whatever the case might be, you could just run all of those one opportunity wizards for all of the opportunities that have won that day. Now, I mean, one of the other people who commented here saying, you know, he spends a ton of time cleaning up after our sales guys who don't go through the wind wizard. So, you know, I look at this and I think I wouldn't actually give that role necessarily to the sales people, because in my opinion, I would say that actually the sales guys are the ones who are going to do the opportunity. So they're going to run the quotes in QuoteWorks. They're going to do all that cool stuff, send the QuoteValet quote to the customer.

And even if they leave that box ticked that says I'm online, create it in Autotask and that's it. At that point, the sales guy's job potentially could be done unless they need to do some other stuff on that opportunity. But once the sale has been made, essentially, and the customer's happy and they need to close down that opportunity, that could actually be done by anyone else. That might be an admin person within the company, or maybe that might be the sales manager who's going to run that task or something like that. And because I find, you know, a lot of the time the sales guys, their job and their focus is to kind of go, you know, I'm going to go and make sales.

That's what I'm going to do. I don't want to get bogged down with all this admin on how the stuff gets created and how it gets pushed into contracts and how it gets billed for. That's somebody else's problem. So that one opportunity wizard can be run by anybody in your company. And I would, you know, I would recommend this probably not run by a salesperson, but maybe run by somebody else.

Maybe you have a sales admin-y kind of person who could run that role. That's a really great point, because I'm not even sure that you would want to have the same person write the quote and then win the opportunity without ever a second set of eyes on it to make sure that everything is being covered or everything is being invoiced properly or priced properly. I don't know that I have met many MSPs that don't have at least some second set of eyes on every sales process. Right. So the salesperson, like you said, you know, they're selling the product.

They're putting together the quote. They're sending the quote out to the customer and then the customer, you know, either approves it back or whatever. Then off it goes to purchasing and purchasing may happen by an admin person, as you suggested, or a procurement person in the company or even the service coordinator. More times than not, the salesperson is selling and not procuring. Right.

So so really, that's what we're talking about. And the salesperson is also not invoicing either, unless the salesperson's role is both sales and account manager all rolled into one. Chances are these are different people or they should be different people. Absolutely. No, I mean, you know, I think you've pretty much hit the nail on the head at that point.

I think that, you know, should be different people. And, you know, you were saying there should be a second set of eyes looking at it. And I fully agree with you. You know, I mean, certainly with I know we're jumping more into kind of talking about QuoteWorks now, but certainly from a QuoteWorks perspective, you have the ability for quotes to kind of go through an approval process before they actually get sent to the customer anyway. So that could be at that point your second set of eyes.

But also, likewise, with the opportunities in Autotask, you certainly have the ability to put some workflow around there. So, you know, if you're, you know, your margin on that is above or below a certain amount, you might want to trigger off an email to one of the sales managers to say, hey, this opportunity has has dropped below this margin level, whatever the case might be. So at that point, that could be a trigger for somebody to to actually look at that opportunity as well outside of the salesperson. So, you know, I think running the one opportunity wizard, you know, I think a lot of MSPs get bogged down with kind of thinking it's the same person who's doing the opportunity is going to be running that well. And I don't think that's the case.

I think that can be done by by a different person and should be done by a different person. You know, in that way, let the sales guys do what they need to do in quote works, bring the quote in into Autotask, work on their opportunity, do what they need to do with their opportunity. And at the stage that is ready to be closed, it's somebody else's job. And, you know, you could workflow on that. You could put a widget up there that, you know, maybe has an opportunity stage that says ready to close or something like that.

And then what you could do is say that could be a widget on somebody's dashboard that will trigger them to go ahead and actually run this one opportunity wizard. You know, I'd be interested to know, and the reason I'm asking is because I don't know very much about ConnectWise Sell. I've never seen it, not even when it was Closal. I wonder if, you know, ConnectWise Sell has this sort of automation when pushing those sales quotes into ConnectWise Manage. So question to, you know, any of the listeners out there, if any of you are ConnectWise Sell users and ConnectWise Manage users, is this even a possibility at the ConnectWise level?

Right now, we've been talking all day about Autotask and quote works, but I know that there's more than just one PSA out there. So I just wonder how other PSA users or other, you know, quoting tools. There's also Channel Online, which is a quoting tool. You know, do any of these offer that sort of automation that we're missing? Great, great question.

And I mean, you know, I know the reason it happens like this as well anyway within quote works and Autotask is, you know, those are two completely separate companies. They run as completely separate companies, you know, whereas as ConnectWise owns ConnectWise Sell, they own ConnectWise Manage. So potentially there might be some better integration in there. So actually, here's a call out to everyone that's listening on this podcast that's using ConnectWise. It would be very interesting, you know, if you want to maybe visit our website, leave us a message, let us know how you do that in Sell and perhaps we can get you onto the next podcast.

Maybe you can have a talk about it and let everyone know how that's done, you know, and also a shout out to ConnectWise. And I'm just going to go out on a limb here, Rayane, and say this, but, you know, all the other vendors are giving people like yourselves and me the ability to access these tools and work with these tools. I haven't been able to get that from ConnectWise. So come on, guys, maybe if you can let us have a look at these tools and see how they work, we can start to talk more about your products as well. So I thought I'd just put that out there.

Oh, I love it. Well, here's hoping that they'll respond. Right. It's a podcast. We can talk about anything we want.

Exactly. We can talk about whatever we want. So this is a great topic. And I think, again, like all these other topics, we can talk about this, you know, all day long. But I think we've we kind of hit home the point that I think, you know, the one opportunity was it is the way to go, certainly from an Autotask perspective.

But there are there is the ability to to use all of that through the API. But that would require somebody having the skills and the knowledge to be able to write all of that stuff themselves. And you know what? There's probably a reason why no one's ever written it, because why would you? It's you know, it takes too long.

And why reinvent the wheel when it's there already? So, yeah, great, great question to to talk about today. So. So, Rae-Ann, I think what all that's left really for me to say now is, you know, if anyone wants to leave us some feedback, please go ahead and do that. Visit our website at psaimpact.net.

So, Rae-Ann, your PSA is the key to your MSP success. Yeah. Go out and make an impact today. Thank you for joining us today on PSA Impact. We hope you've learned something and that you'll join us next time when we answer new questions posed by our listeners.