[31] – Autotask Implementation Series: CRM – Opportunities vs Quotes, Tools

Welcome to PSA Impact, your podcast for all things PSA, RMM, and MSP. With your hosts, Rayan Bucianico 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. Hi, everybody, and welcome to another episode of PSA Impact with your hosts, myself, Chris Tim, and my co-host, Rayan Bucianico.

Hey, Rayan, how are you doing? I'm doing great today, Chris. How are things on your side of the pond? I'm great, thank you. Looking forward to the new year, looking forward to everything that life's gonna throw at us this year, so yeah.

Well, I think I can safely say that we're all pretty glad that 2020 is now in the rear view mirror and we can move forward with 2021 and start the new year with new plans and goals. So anyway, welcome to everyone to 2021. This is gonna be probably our second podcast in the new year. So what do we have on tap for today? So today we're gonna talk about, well, we're gonna continue with our series that we've been doing over the last few episodes.

And we're gonna continue talking about the CRM and opportunity stages, how those link to quoting. We're gonna then talk about the quoting system built into Autotask, the built-in one versus using third parties, that kind of stuff. And then we'll briefly also touch on some of the other tools that you can use to update your customers. So things like the Outlook plugin, which we'll cover off later on a later episode anyway. But yeah, we'll talk about a bunch of those today.

So really what I wanted to do now, Rayanne, is sort of just go into the whole opportunity stages. And I'd be interested to see how you see the opportunities working in Autotask and how you use them. So yeah, I'm really looking forward to, and I would love to say that it's one of my favorite topics, but I'm certain that it's already one of yours. You can't steal my line. I'll try, I'll try.

Okay, so when I'm working with an MSP, I always like to say that life starts, the customer life in your Autotask starts at the opportunity stage. And so one of the main questions I get is, what is the difference between an opportunity and a quote? And do we have to have an opportunity in order to do a quote? And do we have to do a quote whenever we get to the opportunity? And your experience is probably going to be a bit similar to this.

So whenever you do a quote, and do you have to do an opportunity before you get to the quote? No, but let me tell you this much, that when you do create the quote, an opportunity is going to be created for you. So it's probably better for you to first fill out the opportunity information and have a little bit more control over that so that you can build your widgets on which opportunities are due to close. And then you might want to have a different widget based on quotes, which quotes are in front of the customer. Do they have a signing document in front of them?

When is it going to expire? That sort of thing. So life generally starts at the opportunity stage. That's where you can use the information in the opportunity and track all of the information that goes, the correspondence, the to-dos, the follow-ups, and that can all be done at the opportunity stage. Is that pretty much how you're using it?

Absolutely, yeah. And I think you're right. A lot of people get confused about opportunity versus quote, and you're right. A quote is just, you can start that out without an opportunity, and it'll create one for you in the backend. So the opportunity is going to have information like when you've had that initial discussion with a prospect or a customer, and you want to track your pipeline.

You want to see what's inside your pipeline, what the value of your pipeline is, what it's cost you to win that business, you know, all that kind of stuff. That's where opportunities are really going to come into to their own. So some of the other CRM products out there call them deals. So if you're familiar with different terminology on a CRM, then a lot of them call them deals. And it's really just the monetary value of what that opportunity to deal with a customer is.

And then you would have a quote that gets assigned to that, and that is the actual physical document that you're going to send to the customer that's going to say, these are the things that we're going to provide for you. So if you create the opportunity, you can then go in later on and add the quotes, but you don't even need to have a quote necessarily for that opportunity. You can just build that out, build out, you know, how much revenue you think you're going to make. Well, you know, what are you forecasting for this month? That kind of stuff.

You're going to put all that information into the opportunity, and you don't need to have a quote for it. Then likewise, you know, if it was something that was small, like, you know, customers asked you to give them a quote for a new keyboard or mouse or something to that effect, you wouldn't want to necessarily run an entire opportunity just for that. So you can then just create a quote without the opportunity, and then it will create an opportunity for you in the backend. So let's move on into the quoting stage, right? So, and there are plenty of tools out there for you to, you know, prepare a quote.

You know, Quozel, which is now called Connect by Cell. There's QuoteWorks, which has been around forever, and probably is the one quoting tool that I know better than all of the others. I'm hearing of a third one that seems to have recently hit the market. It's called Quoter, and I have not actually seen it, you know, live and in person, but I've spoken to a number of MSPs recently that all seem to be looking at it at the same, you know, like very recently. Anyway, so the thing about the quoting tool is that let's say you have three different distribution houses or three different, you know, vendors that you buy your hardware from, and you're getting ready to quote some project for your customer, and you want real time, you know, pricing and availability from your vendors.

Well, rather than log into three different websites, you can open up, you know, this quoting tool and pull in the real live data, you know, put in your filters, what are you looking for? And then the quoting tool will go out, pull in all of the real live, you know, data, including, you know, quantity on hand and shipping dates and all of the other important information. And then you just click the button, you know, for the winner, and it populates on the quote. And so generally, those things come with like a little bit of an additional subscription cost to it. You know, I know that QuoteWorks is called, Edelize is the subscription, and I'm not sure what the other ones are called.

Are you familiar with those? Yeah, so the quoting tools you've mentioned, I mean, so you mentioned Quota, there's two with a very similar name. So there's Quota, and there's another one called IT Quota, which are basically both quoting tools. And then of course, Autotask or Datto has recently acquired a company called Glue, which is spelled G-U-L-U-H, not to be confused with IT Glue. So yeah, so there's a bunch of quoting tools out there that do the same job as you're talking about.

And on all of them, they use Edelize, and they all use the same product because Edelize is basically a third party tool that allows you to get product images and product descriptions and all that kind of stuff. So it's the tool that all those quoting tools integrate with to be able to get all of that information into your quotes. And actually, it's worth mentioning at this point, we're talking about setting up the CRM from a kind of an implementation point of view. I think my recommendation for a lot of people would be to actually, if you're just implementing Autotask, it does have a built-in quoting tool, as does ConnectWise and a bunch of the other PSA tools. My recommendation is get your implementation sorted first, and then start to look at these third party tools because I see all too often that people kind of buy every tool under the sun, and then they wanna integrate them all at the same time.

And my recommendation is often get the CRM set up, get the opportunity management set up. And even if for the time being, you use the built-in quoting tools that come with those products, use those. And then once your implementation is complete, you can kind of start to look at some of those other quoting tools. I don't do an awful lot of quoting as a general rule, but I use, when I do, I use the Autotask built-in quoting tool. So just like a lot of the other quoting tools, once I complete the quote and I have all of the information built in and the entire quote is built, I click Publish and send it out for approval from the customer.

So they will receive the email with a link to the quote that they can view online, and they can click the Accept or Decline button, send me a note, and then it will come back into my Autotask. Now, I learned this one the hard way. You are not necessarily automatically notified that a quote is accepted or declined. You actually have to go in and look at it. But I went in at, Chris, I think this was even your suggestion, to go in and create a silly workflow rule.

And it was so simple. I had the whole thing done in about 10 seconds. You create the workflow rule to say, hey, when the quote changes from waiting customer to accepted or declined, send me a notification, and it works like a charm. So if your quoting needs are relatively small, for starters, consider using the built-in tool until you outgrow it and you need something a little bit larger and a little bit more feature-rich. Yeah, I agree.

And I mean, the built-in quoting tool, especially from Autotask, it's not the most brilliant quoting tool on the planet, but it's good enough. And it does, for very basic quotes, if you were gonna do a quick quote for a PC or a laptop or something like that, it's very easy. You can just put together a quote really quickly. Where it differs from the third-party tools is it doesn't integrate with this at-least thing we were talking about earlier on. It doesn't do live price feeding.

So you can't bring in real-time pricing from Ingram and tech data and those kinds of things. So there are some limitations in it, but yeah, I mean, it's a fantastic tool and using the workflow rules, you can automate that. And it's probably worth actually at this point talking about workflow rules, because I think a lot of people who are listening to this now are probably gonna be some way through an implementation or looking at this to get the product better implemented. So just to say in terms of workflow rules is really when we refer to them, we're talking about the automation side of the PSA tool. Right, and we'll get into the workflow rules once we hit the service delivery portion of the implementation, because that's where we're going to probably, we could literally spend hours talking about workflow rules and all of the things that you can do with them.

But before we move away from the quote and the opportunity stage, and that third-party quoting tool, I just wanted to clarify one thing that if you are using that third-party quoting tool, you don't wanna create the opportunity in Autotask and then the quote in the third-party tool, because once you create that quote in the third-party tool, it's going to bring it into Autotask and create the opportunity for you. So you don't have one opportunity sitting there doing nothing, and then the other opportunity that has the quote from the third-party tool. So yes, yes and no. So actually some of the newer quoting tools now allow you to actually use an existing opportunity that's already on the system. So you can, certainly with things like IT Quota, and in fact, I think QuoteWorks now has it built in as well.

So what you can do is you can create the opportunity and then you can, when you go into the third-party quoting tool, you can open up an existing opportunity and attach the quote to that. Yeah, but it almost doesn't even make sense to do that if you know that QuoteWorks is gonna push over the opportunity with the quote, and then you can head back into Autotask, win the opportunity, and push it over to procurement, and then push it over to invoicing from the one-opportunity business. Absolutely, but there may be some instances, and I do this from time to time in my business. I mean, like yourself, I don't really do that much quoting, but there are times when I might talk to a prospect for a month or so, and then they say, then we get on to maybe talking about pricing, and then they say, well, can you send me a quote? And at that point, I've already got an opportunity, and I then don't wanna create a new opportunity from the quoting tool, so I'm then gonna say, you know, I'm gonna go to the quoting tool and link it to an existing opportunity that I've already got set up, that I'm already using for that opportunity when I'm talking to the customer.

Okay, so the quote goes out to the customer. The customer, you know, says, hey, this is great, and whether they sign it through the third-party quoting tool or they sign it through the Autotask, you know, quoting tool, whichever, it's now time to move forward. And so I've already mentioned the One Opportunity Wizard, and I always like to tell people the One Opportunity Wizard kind of takes the information and it splits it in half, right? So as you are, you know, you've won the opportunity, and you're going to now either create the project or create the contract, or even just, you know, create the ticket in the post-sale queue. And everybody always asks, why do I need a post-sale queue?

Can I just move this? Can I just move this directly into the queue that I want it to be worked on? No, you can't. You're gonna have to put it in the post-sale queue, but then, of course, workflow rule to have it automatically move for you. Is that pretty much what you do?

Yeah, so the One Opportunity Wizard, which I like to call the WOW, is pretty much exactly as you say, right? So the opportunity has been won. The customer said, yeah, everything's good to go. Let's go ahead. You win the opportunity running this wizard, and it does a bunch of things.

So it takes all of the items that you've quoted for, and it adds them into the billing. So you can then go and bill for those items. It also pushes them into procurement so that you can then go through the whole procurement process, which we'll talk about on a later podcast. But that kind of then allows you to do a purchase order and all of that kind of stuff, as well as billing for all of those products. Right, and I think a lot of people get that piece confused.

They think that everything stays tied together, and it kind of does, because everything's still tied to that customer. But the things, you're invoicing the customer the price that you've quoted, but you are purchasing the product at the cost that your vendor quoted to you. So that's why there's that definite split in the WOW or the One Opportunity Wizard. And this is also the place where you get to tell your accounting system how to post the items that are on the invoice. So as you're sending it over to the invoice, you're going to be faced with this screen and it will say, okay, so you've purchased this hardware.

Do you want to post it to hardware, taxable sales, non-taxable sales? So this is where you get to post it to, or point these items to specific material billing codes is what they're called. And so when you are transferring the information over to your accounting system by way of the invoice, it's going to pick up that information and post it accordingly. Exactly. So there's quite a few choices that you would make at that point.

And not to mention at the same time, you can actually not just send it into billing and procurement, but also it gives you the opportunity to create a recurring service contract at the same time. So if you've got services on that quote, so like you said, you have some products that goes through into the billing, it gets assigned to the correct material billing code. But at the same time, if you've got services on there, so things like your Microsoft 365, and you've got antivirus, all that kind of good stuff, that then also needs to go onto a recurring service contract. So again, you can then create either a brand new contract if the customer doesn't have one already, or you can just assign it to one that's already there. And the other thing it does, which I think a lot of people don't realize is you can actually link it into a project as well.

So whilst you've got your opportunity running, you can kind of scope out a project at the same time, which Autotask calls a proposal project. So you can kind of have your proposal project out there, you can scope that project, you can assign all your engineers to it, all that kind of stuff. And then when you win the opportunity, you can effectively flick a switch that turns that project into a live project, so that everyone that's been assigned to it is now seeing all of that, the work, all the tasks that have been assigned to them, automatically gets generated as a result of running that well. And that is a huge time saver, because once we get into the project portion of the Autotask series here, we'll walk everybody through, the setting up of the phases and the tasks and the schedules and all of that. So a lot of that stuff has been done at the opportunity stage, and then during the well, or the one opportunity wizard, all you have to do is hit that radio button, and now your project is created and all of that work you've already done does not have to be redone.

Yeah, absolutely. And so one of the things I wanted to bring up at this point, Ryan, and I know we'll cover it off later on another podcast as well, but it's worth talking about it now, because it does link into the sales process, is the Outlook plugin. And this is something that's kind of overlooked a lot in Autotask, mainly because a lot of people don't actually know it exists, firstly. And secondly, people who install it think it's only for the service desk. So, which is why I said we'll cover it later on on the service desk, because there is a bunch of stuff you can do with it.

But from an opportunity perspective, it's a really, really great tool to use. So if I'm communicating with a customer, I have the plugin connected into Outlook. So when I send an email to the customer and say, hey, Mr. Customer, just an update about our conversation, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I press a button inside the Outlook plugin, and it automatically takes that email and appends it to either the opportunity or the client note section within the CRM, so that I have a record of everything I've spoken to that customer about.

And then likewise, when they respond back to me, I can simply click a button and that will take that email and enter it into the CRM as well. So, I mean, do you use that process as well, Raya? I do. And as a matter of fact, if you don't mind my saying, that I got it set up and running for myself based on your own video. So you should tell everybody where to find your video on how to get the Outlook plugin set up onto their system, because it's an amazing tool.

And it is such a time saver, because so much of our correspondence happens through email, and you want to be able to capture that and keep it. And who wants to keep emails from a customer that is a thread of 20 back and forth items long, when all you have to do is click that button and say, please update this ticket or update this customer's note or whatever. And so I'm looking forward to the in-depth conversation with that Outlook plugin when we get to the service desk. Absolutely, yeah. And I think it's just a great tool.

And I use it in my own business every day. And actually, when I used to work at Autotask, Autotask, or I guess now Datto, uses it themselves as well. So every communication that they have with every single customer, they actually enforce the use of using the Outlook plugin, mainly because that means that at any time, anybody can log into the CRM and see all the communications for that customer. So that, as you say, nothing's sitting in the inbox. And then if that person is away or on holiday or whatever the case might be, you're still going to be able to see all of that information because it's all been captured in from Outlook.

And what we'll do, Ryanne, thanks for mentioning the video. I do actually have a YouTube channel, which I'm just starting up at the moment. So I will put it into the show notes for this episode, but you can either just go to YouTube and type in, I think it's Autotask plugin or Autotask Outlook plugin, and you'll probably eventually find it, or it'll be on my main website as well. So is there anything else that you wanted to cover on the CRM piece and the opportunities quoting? Is there anything else that we missed?

So, I mean, there's a huge amount of stuff that we can talk about on the CRM, because again, there's things like setting up sales quotas, which again, a lot of people don't actually realize it's even there. So you can set up what those quotas are for your sales team. And I would really recommend doing that because then you can look at, if you've targeted your sales guys to sell a thousand dollars worth of training or whatever this month, you can easily have a widget that can show you, where are you with that in a month? So how much have you sold? And at the end of the month, have you met all those targets, all that kind of stuff.

So it's something that's, again, is overlooked and almost every MSP I speak to either doesn't use the sales quotas or doesn't even know that they actually exist. So it's something maybe we can cover that off on another episode as well, because I think it's worth talking about and worth people understanding that it's actually there and what it does. Yeah, so maybe what we do is extend the CRM piece of this implementation series to one more episode. There are a lot more features in the opportunity and or the CRM package that a lot of people are not using. So it's not just a place to dump an opportunity and a quote, but like you said, it's a place where you can gather all of the information about the customer, about what you're doing for them or what you're planning to do with them over time so that if they don't respond right away and they come back in six months, you have all of the information, the follow-ups, you can set the follow-ups, you can set the to-dos, you can assign things to different people and keep everything in one spot.

And so, I think maybe another, one more episode of just really getting into the details of what's in the CRM piece, because I've heard so many people just say, oh, the CRM piece in Autotask is just garbage and it's really not. Plus it gives you that one spot where you can go to find everything out about that customer without logging into another portal or another portal and this piece is over here and that piece is over there. The more you can get into Autotask, even the documentation manager, which we've started using in-house, is another place where you can store a lot of information about your customers. So also we have the knowledge base that we can talk about too. So I think that there's still a lot more that we can discuss.

Absolutely. And not to mention opportunity categories as well. I mean, that's a huge topic we can talk about on its own because very, very similar to the ticket categories where you can completely customize the look and feel of the opportunity screen, add your own user-defined fields. So if you had an opportunity for selling a server, you might have a bunch of questions that you want to ask in the pre-sales process that you can add those fields onto the opportunity and actually get your sales guys to fill those in. And then actually the one thing that's really cool out of that, and I do this quite a lot as well, is I actually automate off the backend of that.

So you can have a dropdown list that says, and I actually have one that says, send customer welcome email. So when I close the opportunity, there's a dropdown user-defined field that I changed to yes, and that uses the workflow automation within Autotask that actually automatically sends the customer an update saying, thank you for your opportunity, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Here's a link to book with us so they can go and start to book their time, all that kind of thing. And we automate that entire process just when we close the opportunity. So there's so many things you can do, and you can do that based on a different type of opportunity.

So if you had a server issue, you might say, well, I'm going to send this email if it's a server opportunity or this email if it's a workstation, you can kind of send different kinds of emails or thank the customer for their business, all that kind of stuff. So, and the other thing I do is if I get referred business now, and it's something I've just started doing up is I actually keep the referrers details inside the opportunity as well. So then I fill in all of their details and their email address. And as soon as I close the opportunity, which means I've won the business, it automatically pings them an email to say thank you for the referral. So you can automate all of that.

And I think there's so much to talk about. So if I can, I think we should probably have at least two more episodes, at least on CRM, because I think there's a huge amount of stuff we can talk about. You know, and I think that's really valuable too, because like I said, so many people just dismiss the CRM as nothing more than a place to store the customer's name, address, and email address. And that is really not true. We have barely gotten beyond the sales process, let alone all of the information the CRM piece offers the existing customers.

So, you know, and I think that we'll probably move into that direction as we're getting closer toward the service desk. So, you know, stay tuned everybody, because we've got a lot of really awesome information coming at you in the upcoming sessions. Absolutely. And I mean, you know, just on that point, if I may just very quickly, the, you know, I think the reason a lot of people see the CRM as rubbish or crap or whatever words they want to use with it is, is I think because a lot of people look at the CRM in a PSA tool as something else. What they're really looking for is a marketing tool, right?

They're looking for something to do, you know, newsletters and campaigns and, you know, all of those cool things, you know, an active campaign or HubSpot or those sorts of marketing platforms. And the CRM in a PSA tool isn't a marketing platform. So if you're looking for something to do that, then you need to go down the route of using ActiveCampaign or you need to use, you know, HubSpot or one of those kinds of tools. And I do that myself as well. I use ActiveCampaign to do newsletters and all those kinds of good things.

And then, you know, at a certain point in ActiveCampaign, I will bring that stuff over into Autotask and actually get it created in Autotask. So, and then I'll run the opportunity through Autotask and not through ActiveCampaign. So yeah, so there's a lot more in the CRM than people think and there's so much more you can do with it. And of course, it's in the same system as, you know, everything else that you're doing in your business. It's your business management system.

Why would you not use the opportunity side of the PSA? As always, you're a wealth of information and I think this was a really great conversation. So I'm looking forward to next week, which, have we decided which area of CRM we want to tackle next? Is it- Next, we're going to talk about, so we'll talk about the stuff that you mentioned. So we'll certainly go into, you know, talking about the opportunity categories and we'll talk a little bit more about to-dos and some other areas of- Maybe building some widgets on, you know, on the open opportunities in quotes, you know, and tracking the sales pipeline and that sort of thing.

Exactly. So we'll, you know, we'll finish off on that. But yeah, this has been a real fun episode. We have some really cool stuff coming up. We will leave everyone in suspense.

We've got a few really cool guests coming up in the next few episodes. So, you know, tune in after this and there'll be some cool stuff coming down the pipe in the next few episodes. So this has been a lot of fun, Rayanne. And I think, you know, as always, I love talking to you about PSA because everything we talk about is my favorite topic. Of course it is.

Absolutely. So all that's left for me to say is your PSA is the key to your MSP success. So go out and make an impact on your world today. Thanks, Chris. Thanks, Rayanne.

Cheers. Thanks, everybody. Cheers. 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.