QuoteWerks vs. Qvidian RFP & Proposal Automation

The sales department is satisfied with QuoteWerks and this generates satisfaction throughout the company. The main recommendation is to use the free trial first in order to know what the goals of each company are according to their size and futuristic vision. QuoteWerks opening easy and robust integration with our CRMs, this also improves workflow. It works as an electronic signature that has improved working time and in general the relationship with our clients because we no longer have to ask the client to print the document and then sign it.

Incentivized

Functionality and support are my two main areas. I want to be able to speak to someone when I have an issue. To Quvidian's defense, my company didn't see the value in sending someone to NH for the training. I'd used an RFP machine before so they thought that was sufficient. It was a poor decision on the company's part because although it was similar, it was not the same.

• Organize product data, costing, pricing and images in one central location
• Quickly prepare and disseminate quotes
• Time saved is redirected to other business management activities
• Interface with Act! CRM keeps quotes organized by customer
• Tech support is excellent for the few times I have had to contact them

Incentivized

• The search function ranks information based upon usage and is adaptive, learning/improving rankings with every search. This makes finding the right piece of information quick and easy.
• The tool offers flexibility to build various types of sales documents (proposals, presentations, case studies). This drastically reduces the time it takes to put together a client-facing document.
• The content management functionality allows for various content formats and related content can be connected. This simplifies tracking content updates by knowing which other pieces of information may also need review and update when a change is made outside the normal update cycle.

• The data structure that is required to set up the "price books" behind the scenes is a little cumbersome until you learn how to do it and practice.
• The sync function for the data is sometimes a little slow in the Standard and Professional editions because of the Access back-end. The Corporate edition uses a MS SQL back-end and is better.

Incentivized

• This is a weird one but when adding content to the 'Q' the tab in word sometimes disappears. Not sure why that happens and we haven't really tried to trouble shoot yet. My solution at the moment is just closing it and re-opening it. Sometimes it works and sometimes I have to do it a few times.
• While being a great place to keep content for our team to access, there is always the thought of whether the information is still accurate. Especially when comes to statistics and facts. We at times get so used to just using what is in our boilerplate that we forget to question whether information is accurate or not. This is more of an observation for users rather than an issue with 'Q' however the information is only as good as it's accuracy.

We will renew because QuoteWerks has all the capabilities we require for our business processes and our reps like it. The support is top notch and the pricing model saves us considerable money over SaaS models. I also feel confident that Aspire Technologies will continue to improve and add features

Incentivized

We've already renewed our contract with Qvidian and plan on using it for the foreseeable future. Apart from the fact that Qvidian has all the features we need to respond to RFPs and maintain a large informational database, the time that would need to be spent researching and testing out a different piece of software just wouldn't be worth it. All of our users are well learned in Qvidian, and it's easy to teach to new users. Having to learn a brand new application when the current one works great is pointless. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" applies here.

Our company's experience with Quotewerks has been position and we have continued to look at other solutions to make sure we are not missing something, however for the pricing structure for what we use, makes it the right solution for our business.

Incentivized

The shift they made in architecting documents from content to outline, is now reversed allowing outline creation first, then content which is more natural. But, due to the fact that we went through a migration of content to get to the new version, it feels less optimized than if we would have re-implemented.

End users having to configure settings more often than desired

QuoteWerks is a very stable, robust solution. In my experience: bugs in the software are rare; any crashes or system failures are usually due to other infrastructure issues rather than the software itself, i.e. a problem with the network or server, an issue with a.n.other piece of software on the User's workstation that has a knock-on effect on QuoteWerks.

Qvidian system maintenance is performed on weekends, usually at odd hours, and advanced notice is given so that teams can plan accordingly.

Once set up and running, and particularly when running the more reliable, faster Corporate edition rehosted to SQL Server, then QuoteWerks performs very well. The only reason for the slight mark down here is that QuoteWerks is very sensetive to having a database connection. If there is an issue whereby the connection to the server is lost (network glitch for example) then whereas Outlook (or a.n.other piece of software) might just wait and poll in 30 seconds time, QuoteWerks will crash and potentially a User lose all changes to the document(s) that they were working on.

Remote or VPN employees seem to have somewhat slower access time. Server maintenance has improved performance.

Finding occasional recurring prompts to update settings in Microsoft (Explorer, Word, Excel, Powerpoint)

Quotewerks Support and the UK Distributor here have always been responsive to our requests and in particular helped us out when we need some new functionality which then got added in the next build...this really impressed me and showed that where case was made, they readily embraced it and the new build was completed within 60 days.

They are very much in support of great customer service. They respond quickly with emails and in some cases phone calls to resolve any issues and often times user questions in the past when I could not figure something out.

Incentivized

There is in-person training offered in Orlando, but our company did not want to spend the money.

Incentivized

Live instructor training is expensive, though we have had instructors come to our offices for a ‘refresher’ before. The refresher was more of a “let us fix that for you” than a training on how to do it ourselves.

Originally it was weak, but they have really stepped up.

Incentivized

Online training is limited in my opinion.

I do not have any key insights on the implementation so I cannot provide any valuable information here. I do know, however, that the process went well when we switched from a old platform to a new hyperconverged solution to host Quotewerks. It seemed to be a quick process and our engineer was able to do so almost seamlessly.

Incentivized

IT works great. UPgrades are handled automatically. I was not involved in setup but I know they are there when we need them

Incentivized

Both this software were similar in what they do and pricing, however, the QuoteWork software in my opinion does a better job recording and tracking communications between personnel and clients. QuoteWerks also gives a lot of data that might seem like overkill, but having too much information is better than too little.

Incentivized

Of the competitive vendor demos I have reviewed over the years, each may have its own strength. Some may be set up to drive compelling differentiators or solutions (E.g., propLIBRARY.com). Some may be built on existing CRMs (E.g., Qorus). Some may have tablet-friendly interfaces (E.g., SAVO). Others focus on collaboration (E.g., XaitPorter). There is nothing wrong with any of these models. You will just have to perform your own gap analysis and see what best addresses your needs. For Blackboard Inc., none of the aforementioned competition offered a holistic and robust replacement for our current PA tool. We have senior writers to craft compelling differentiators. We use SFDC, not SharePoint as our EA CRM. While our strategic writing and architectural needs outweigh having the slickest tablet-friendly user interface, we still have an interface and user experience that is geared toward usability and performance while being cognizant of adoption. New collaborative tools are a big draw, especially when responding to private sector proposals with a 10-to-20 day turnaround. However, not only has this not been a pain point for us (we currently have a versioning process in place) but the conversion and adoption hurdles just for one feature where there is already a workaround in place does not justify the migration.

We've implemented QuoteWerks in both micro ("one man band") businesses as well as much larger organisations. With QuoteWerks Corporate editions option to host the backend database on SQL Server (a very powerful and scaleable database platform) it's possible to work effectively with QuoteWerks in an organisation with many 100 Users. The flexibility of the product also lends itself very well to evolving with a growing business and having various individual user configurations to help them work best with the software in their individual role in the organisation.

• Quotewerks has allowed us to improve the accuracy and speed in which we are able to generate and deliver a quote.
• Quotewerks has improved the overall consistency and appearance of our quotes.
• Quotewerks has allowed us to prevent costly pricing mistakes based on stale data or price lists.

Incentivized

• Our experience has been largely positive. It's allowed our RFP team to quickly and efficiently produce very professional documents. This has lead to more time being able to speak to the clients needs specifically. We've received lots of positive feedback from clients saying that the RFP looked tailored to them, and not just some content dumped in a binder. That was our goal.