Quoting Tool

            You have nearly finalized a huge sale. The hard work is done, the customer knows what he wants, and the price has been agreed upon. When you get the signature, it’s payday – but the deal can still fall through. You need to lock it down with a killer proposal, but building it out takes a lot of time: writing a cover letter from scratch, copying in all the customer information and pricing data for the quote, branding it with a customer logo, finding the applicable terms and conditions, adding any visual aids and then double checking to make sure everything’s correct. After the exhausting process is complete, you still run a high risk of error and the quality of the final product leaves the customer mildly impressed at best. Fortunately, BigMachines’ Document Engine is the cure for the common proposal.

            With pre-built templates, proposal tools greatly reduce the time and effort required to build the kind of powerful documents that will give a sale the extra push it needs. One of the most attractive qualities of many modern tools is that building out the templates require little to no technical knowledge; it’s all just point and click. For a company at the top of its game, the issues usually associated with proposal generation are problems of the past. With a comprehensive proposal tool, professional, customized, accurate proposals are a mouse-click away. More importantly, your resources will be freed up to add real value rather than gather data and edit documents, and your customers will be impressed with the speed, accuracy and quality of your work. In business, win-win situations are seldom found, and not taking advantage of them can be costly. Why leave anything to chance?

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that much has changed since my grandfather’s sales days. Back then, he would travel to customers and prospects with a heavy bag of products so he could demonstrate how the product worked and interacted with its various components. Over the years, sales professionals started to move away from this approach – in part due to the back breaking pain it caused. Instead, some started to carry paper catalogs. While not as heavy to carry, these were (and still are) pricey and much more difficult to use for new and existing customers in terms of visualizing how the product actually worked.

Today, sales professionals have a new sales bag – the iPad. With the third generation iPad in the hands of more than three million people, it is having a huge impact on the way we do business – and the sales department is leading their companies through this transformation toward mobility by using the iPad and other tablets as a sales tool while out in the field. Sales professionals are using the iPad while in front of their customers to have a conversation about their products’ features and options, providing an opportunity for product configuration on the spot.

In fact, here at BigMachines, we recently conducted our Second Annual Benchmark Survey, which takes a look at the state of the sales industry today. The findings show that sales mobility is continuously growing with 66.7% of respondents currently using a tablet or mobile device for selling while on the road.  More so, the survey results indicate that face-to-face contact still provides the greatest success with prospects and customers. Taking both those points into consideration, this next statistic shouldn’t be too shocking: a total of 62.5% said their mobile device is important for completing complex sales.

Here are just a few instances as to why the iPad is enhancing the face-to-face interaction between the sales rep and customers and prospects:

• It provides easy access to critical data on-the-go. The more information a sales rep has about a particular customer or prospect going into a meeting, the greater the chance ofclosing a deal.

• It enables quick and professional price quotes on the spot. With the proper applications, an entire proposal can be generated in front of the customer and terms quickly negotiated.

• It adds an extra degree of transparency to the deal, which customers appreciate. As quotes and proposals are generated in plain sight, they have full visibility into what is being negotiated throughout the process.

• While closing deals faster is an obvious plus for sales reps, it is also advantageous to the client. The faster a customer is delivered the product or service it needs, the better off it will be.

• The iPad can minimize, or even eliminate, the confusion that often accompanies complex orders. It is equipped with adequate software applications for pricing and quoting in real-time, enabling sales rep to walk a customer through an entire order in-person, all while allowing the rep to easily explain and iterate through all of the options available right in front of the customer.

It’s pretty incredible how this new, lightweight sales bag is revolutionizing the way the sales professionals do their jobs better while on the road – ultimately leading to increased productivity and an improved bottom line.

So, tell me, is your organization rolling out the iPad to the sales force? What does your sales bag look like?

 

Tim Handorf

VP of Product Management

Last winter, our Deerfield office was treated to a special visitor, Bueto jamaicensis, commonly known as a Red-tailed hawk. Now, for a lot of us office dwellers, a huge hawk just outside the window is a pretty big deal.  For about an hour, the hawk obligingly posed on a branch. A parade ensued of various people with their cell phone cameras taking pictures of the visitor. Being the owner of a "not so smart phone" at the time, I had to borrow the company camera.  But as you can see, it wasn't quite up for the task of focusing on something only 5 feet away.  I also was not familiar enough with the settings to really get a great picture.

So what's the moral of my story, aside from the fact that it doesn't take much to amuse people in the middle of the workday?

Be prepared for anything.  If you're a bird watcher like me who is always looking up, you don't know when the next photo opportunity will come.  It pays to travel with a decent camera at all times. If I had been prepared and equipped with a camera on my phone, I would have already been familiar with all of the settings, and would have come out of that experience with a photographic memory to be proud of.

The same principal can be applied to sales. With the growing trend of mobile sales solutions, sales reps have no reason to be unprepared to meet customer demands. Companies have more options than ever to equip their reps with mobile selling tools to keep up with their customers' needs.  Whether it is a SaaS quoting solution accessible on a tablet or discount approval capabilities available on a cell phone, a rep should always be able to sell while engaging in valuable face to face customer interaction.

If you're in sales, you never know where the next big opportunity will show up.  In an airport and have just met a potential client who has the need for an immediate software quote? A mobile quoting solution would enable you to produce a quote on the fly via your iPad.  Maybe you'll run into a crazy bird watcher like me who has a burning desire to buy an amazing, state of the art digital SLR  who wants to purchase as soon as possible (or as soon as she gets a raise)?  With an on-demand sales solution, you can push out a quote faster than you can say Bueto jamaicensis.

I've since joined the rest of world and purchased a smart phone a few months after my unfortunate picture experience.  As you can see, while not a bird photo, I definitely did not miss out on the next opportunity for a great nature shot!

How about you? What are your plans for equipping yourself or your sales team with mobile selling tools to take advantage of that next big opportunity?

PROS, a world leader in pricing and revenue management software, today announced its participation in the BigMachines BigIdeas 2011 Conference, scheduled for Oct. 23-25 at Chicago's Swissotel.

PROS Senior Director for Pricing Science Neil Biehn, Ph.D., will address the conference in a delivery titled "Prescriptive Pricing Through Segmentation." He will uncover how combining pricing optimization with configure-price-quote capabilities can drive even greater profitability for organizations. In his presentation, Biehn will also demonstrate how optimized pricing and quoting tools -- augmented by PROS scientific segmentation -- enhance sales teams' confidence as they negotiate B2B transactions.

As technology partners, PROS and BigMachines focus on integrating the power of PROS prescriptive pricing software with the BigMachines B2B configure, price and quote platform.

"We appreciate the opportunity to present at the BigMachines conference, which is always a stellar event with a high-caliber audience," said PROS Chief Marketing Officer Tim Girgenti. "Today we're seeing a crisis in confidence among sales teams, as they deal with volatility in both currency and raw materials, and a competitive global market place. With optimized prescriptive pricing, we're bringing confidence back to sales teams, enabling them to win, with the assurance that they've provided their customers with the right quotes and for the right products."

Learn more about BigIdeas at www.bigmachines.com/bigideas

This is a re-post from our website.

BigMachines, Inc., the leader in product configuration, pricing and quoting, proposal generator and B2B ecommerce, today announced that its third annual Customer Innovation Awards will be presented at the BigIdeas Chicago 2011 conference. These awards recognize customers who have demonstrated business success and innovation using the BigMachines Selling Platform and those who have contributed the most popular enhancements to the BigMachines product roadmap. BigIdeas, the annual BigMachines customer and cloud conference, will be held October 23 to 25, 2011 at the Swissôtel Chicago.

Customer Innovation Awards will be presented for the following categories:

• Big Innovation Award is presented to the BigMachines customer that demonstrates the most innovative use of BigMachines within their company.
• Big Success Award is given to the company that demonstrates a significant return on investment (ROI) from using the BigMachines Selling Platform or demonstrates how BigMachines enabled them to eliminate costly tools and processes in their company.
• Biggest Idea Award recognizes the customer that contributes the most innovative idea to enhance the BigMachines' platform. Ideas are submitted online through the My BigIdea innovation portal on the BigMachines Customer Support Center.

For more information on the Customer Innovation Awards, or to submit a nomination, visit http://www.bigmachines.com/bigideas/big-awards.php

"The Customer Innovation Awards program recognizes excellence within our customer community," said Will Wiegler, Vice President of Marketing at BigMachines. "At BigMachines, we not only deliver innovative software to enable our customers to sell more and sell faster, but we also deliver customer success. At BigIdeas, we take the opportunity to highlight truly inspiring examples of innovation and accomplishment among our customers. The conference offers attendees to hear from many BigMachines customers in a variety of industries, to learn from their achievements, and leave with best practices that they can incorporate into their own business processes."

For more information and to read the full release, visit: http://www.bigmachines.com/third-annual-customer-innovation-awards.php

2011 marks BigMachines' third annual Customer Innovation Awards, presented at our Annual Customer and Cloud Computing Conference, BigIdeas. BigMachines customers who show significant innovation in the usage of their BigMachines Selling Platform, ROI, and contributions to BigMachines product enhancements can be nominated and win one of three awards: Big Innovation, Big Success, and Biggest Idea.

Previous winners include:

SPX Process Equipment, a leading manufacturer, who won for implementing an innovative use of BigMachines within their company. SPX used BigMachines to quickly adapt their sales processes to change across a wide range of products; from commodities through highly engineered equipment, and to streamline sales of these products through multiple sales channels.

Acme Packet, the leader in session border control solutions, who was recognized for its use of BigMachines in significantly reducing both its order error rate and the time to produce a sales quote. In addition BigMachines has increased accuracy of their price book, streamlined their approval processes and improved cross-functional communications.

Williams, a leading manufacturer of highly customizable engineered products for the HVAC industry, who won for their use of BigMachines to power the company's channel partner portal resulting in 400% sales growth within two years without increasing the numbers of sales managers, applications engineers or customer service personnel. Williams feels that they now have the most advance sales and ordering tools in the industry.

Want to join this innovative group? BigMachines customers may self-nominate or be nominated at www.bigmachines.com/bigideas/big-awards.php for two of three awards: Big Innovation Award and Big Success Award. Our third award, Biggest Idea, goes to the BigMachines My BigIdea community member that contributes the most innovative idea to enhance BigMachines' products; the honor is awarded base on the most number of votes received in 2011.

At BigMachines, we love numbers! Reporting, analytics, statistics, dashboards...give us some data and we'll dig in!

We recently examined traffic to our blog to better understand our readers - sales reps from around the world, data savvy executives, and business operations analysts looking for innovative ways to help their teams sell more and sell faster.

One of the biggest trends we found is the high number of readers visiting us from mobile devices - our readers are on the go and don't have time to stop!

So why should manual sales processes get in the way? BigMachines Customers take advantage of web-based product configurators, mobile web and email approvals, offline quoting using BigMachines Unplugged and more to continuously drive sales, delight their customers and never stop.

If you're reading this on-the-go, leave us a comment about the tools you use that help streamline sales remotely.

BigMachines will be hosting a party at Dreamforce 2011 with our friends at Channelinsight, InsideView, Marketo, Xactly, and Zuora. With wine on our minds (in addition to selling more and selling faster), here are two ways wine relates to sales:

Wine helps to build relationships: You use a CRM solution to manage contacts and key company details, keep a record of communication and campaigns, and save account related data - but selling isn't siloed to an online tool.

Building relationships in person, over drinks or other social networking situations can help demonstrate the personality and dedication you have to your customers - not to mention get quotes approved and contracts signed!

"Never buy the cheapest wine in any category, as its taste may discourage you from going on. The glass, corks, cartons, and labor are about the same for any wine, as are the ocean freight and taxes for imported wines. Consequently, if you spend a little more, you are likely to get a better wine, because the other costs remain fixed. Cheap wine will always be too expensive." --- Alex Bespaloff, New Signet Book of Wine, 1986

Bespaloff's statement holds true for most products and services. For the sales team, solution based selling strategies can help focus the conversation on the big picture: getting the highest quality tool or solution to a problem for the right price instead over the lowest.

For more useless wine facts and useful selling tips, join our Chatter group on the Dreamforce App.

Bonus: After you drink wine and close your sales at our event, don't forget to drink some water! Read our 2010 Conference Survival Guide from BigMachines.

During a recent webinar, one attendee asked:

Can we provide quoting and configuration capabilities to our mobile sales team?

The short answer is Yes! BigMachines offers two options for sales teams in the field: one for those with an Internet connection, and one for those without.

If you're selling in the field and have a mobile Internet connection, then all of BigMachines powerful selling tools including product configuration, dynamic pricing, sales quote and proposal generation can all be used just the same as you would as your desk.

As an on-demand solution, BigMachines provides sales tools online from within your web browser, similar to salesforce.com and Oracle CRM On Demand - in fact if you use these tools already, you can integrate BigMachines and use our tools from within your CRM!

If you're selling in the field without a stable Internet connection, you can easily check-out a quote using BigMachines Unplugged to work on while you are offline, and re-upload once you return to a network.

Are you a sales manager who's always on the go? Quote approvals can be automatically routed to your phone or other mobile web-enabled device to allow you to easily review and approve quotes at a glance to keep business moving just as fast as you do!

A recent discussion on LinkedIn asked:

What are the top three pain points in deploying your product configurator or CPQ applications?

At BigMachines, we offer our Breakthrough Opportunity Analysis workshop free to cross-functional teams to come together and identify pain points in the sales process as well as define what success looks like BEFORE they jump into deploying a new configure-price-quote solution.

Over the years of offering this service and working with customers to integrate product configuration with their current sales tools, we have found the following contribute greatly to success:

1. Have "tribal knowledge" product and sales experts create detailed documents of rules, constraints and insider knowledge. Once you have this information, filling in the "blanks" to create configuration workflows and approval automations becomes much easier!
   
2. Understand approval thresholds for quotes - including what modifications are ok or not, what discounts are acceptable or not, and other situations where an approver or multiple approvers are required. After these thresholds are defined, you can then eliminate bottlenecks with rules for approval workflows and move quotes and orders which mean pre-defined conditions automatically through the process.
   
3. Document EVERY technology, system, tool and manual process that is involved in the inquiry-to-order process. If you miss even one manual process, you risk losing buy-in from your sales/engineering/order/management teams. Engaging the do-ers of cross-functional teams is essential to deploying a successful CPQ solution.

Visit our website for more information about the BOA workshop or schedule an analyst briefing to compare your current processes with industry leaders.

BigMachines polled more than 100 sales professionals from a variety of industries including manufacturing, high tech and telecommunications. Respondents ranged from sales managers to C-Level sales executives.

Through this survey, we hoped to pinpoint the issues, concerns and success factors impacting mid-size to enterprise sales organizations today.

The results?

Sales professionals across the industry are telling us that the disconnect between sales and the rest of the organization remains high, ultimately resulting in issues with meeting their overall goals.

Moreover, respondents identified two significant pain points in the sales cycle – 28% cited the lag time from quote to close and 19% noted that managing multi-channel selling are broken in the sales cycle. Multi-channel selling includes a mix of offline sales, online sales, mobile ecommerce sales and other sales channels.

Though our survey underscores the struggles the sales industry face on a daily basis, nearly 60% of survey respondents are anticipating an uptick in deal size in 2011.

Implementing new software, optimizing processes and enhancing current tools such as CRM or ERP with configuration and guided selling modules are just some of the ways organizations are streamlining sales to achieve goals and metrics in 2011.

Review the full results from our study.

Join us on Thursday, July 21, 2011 when we share the success of BigMachines customer Illumina!

A leader in life science tools and #4 on Forbes Magazine's list of Fastest Growing Technology Companies, Illumina has streamlined product configuration, workflow approvals and proposal generation, as well as automated management of custom Terms & Conditions for their customers.

Manager of Sales Systems, Mark Santero will discuss how Illumina utilized BigMachines to transform their sales and quoting processes.

In addition, BigMachines Certified Strategic Implementation Partner, Pierce Washington, will join in to review best practices when planning a new software implementation.

Learn more about this webinar and register at http://www.bigmachines.com/webcasts.php

This is a re-post of a press release from our website.

BigMachines, Inc., the leader in product configuration, pricing and quoting, proposal generation and B2B ecommerce, today announced the launch of the BigMachines Certification Program.  BigMachines offers two levels of administrator certification: Yellow Belt and Blue Belt. The new certification program is immediately available to all current BigMachines customers and consulting partners.

BigMachines interactive training classes are designed to teach administrators and users the fundamentals of setting up, customizing and maintaining their BigMachines software solution. Yellow Belt certification classes provide the building blocks for implementing and administering BigMachines, and are a prerequisite for more advanced classes that lead to Blue Belt certification.

“Our customers and partners can feel confident that a BigMachines certified administrator will have the skills required to expertly implement and maintain their BigMachines platform,” stated Tim Handorf, Vice President of Product Management, BigMachines. “Our new training programs ensure that all BigMachines certified administrators achieve the same expertise, whether they take classes in person or online.”

BigMachines customers and partners can choose to take certification classes in the way that best fit their schedules, learning styles and budgets.  Classes are offered at BigMachines’ training centers in the United States and Europe, can be given at a customer’s office or can be taken via the new online learning platform. The new online option allows each customer to learn at his or her own pace, save on travel costs and still receive the same high level of administration training that an in-person class offers.

“Our company makes extensive use of Configuration, Commerce, and the Document Engine for guiding our users to a complete quote,” said Jason Parpart, Systems Administrator, Schenck AccuRate.  “As our company’s BigMachines administrator, comprehensive training in all aspects of BigMachines administration was a must.  After taking the Yellow Belt training, I felt confident in my ability to tweak and maintain our site as it went live.  After completing Blue Belt training, I now feel like I have a vast new set of tools at my disposal to make just about anything possible.  The training team has done an excellent job of putting together a rigorous but well-paced curriculum and they teach it well.  Training up to at least the Yellow Belt level should almost be a requirement for any BigMachines administrator.”

To learn more about BigMachines training or to register for a class, visit www.bigmachines.com/training.  Additional training opportunities are also available at BigIdeas Chicago, October 23 – 25, 2011.  BigIdeas Chicago is one of the largest cloud conferences targeted for B2B sales professionals and offers new insights to help them optimize their sales processes to sell more and sell faster. To learn more, visit www.bigmachines.com/bigideas.

Scott Santucci from Forrester Research recently blogged:

"Here are three common ways sales enablement gets defined (unconsciously) within our client base:

1.     Sales enablement = equipping individual sellers with skills and or tools to do their jobs better. This lens of sales enablement seems simple, but it leaves far too much to interpretation about what a seller needs to be successful. As a result, many different and uncoordinated efforts pop up all over the organization driven by folks trying to help. If there is a sales enablement function in organizations that views the role in this way – they are likely to be understaffed and constantly putting out fires across the organization. 

2.     Sales enablement = making the sales organization more productive. Companies with this perspective are looking at how all of their sales and sales support resources are deployed to drive productivity with less investment. An example would include process-modeling work to document an engagement model and the roles and responsibilities of sales people, sales engineers, consultants, and other subject-matter experts in order to streamline resources to meet clients’ requirements. This might also look like the marketing organization making advances in how it aligns its resources to tie into the strategic plan of the sales organization.

3.     Sales enablement = making the process of growing the sales line item on the income statement more effective and efficient.  Companies and leaders with this perspective are working on a whole new set of metrics, measures, and processes to streamline how they configure their portfolio, modularize their messaging, and arm their sales people with tools to combat the growing complexity of B2B selling. For these companies, sales enablement is an important, strategic function (and leadership role) required to bridge the gap between their strategic vision for the organization and how they manage the execution of that plan across the different functional groups inside their company. A handful of our clients have worked very hard to change their orientation to this perspective and are achieving breakthrough results."

Though the three definitions and job functions vary in focus, we love how each describes pain points felt by B2B sales organizations, regardless of industry, size or customer base.

Moreover, these same pain points are areas BigMachines focuses on when planning our product roadmap and addressing the needs of our users. Through product configuration, quoting, proposal and approval automation, and eCommerce, we strive to empower sales teams with the tools they need to be both more efficient and more productive.

Features like Guided Selling help new users learn product lines, options, constraints and recommended items. Document Libraries ensure that sales teams are equipped with the same dynamic templates to quickly and accurately send contracts and proposals to customers. Native Reporting assists sales organizations in understanding customers, products and how well the company operates from one interface instead of several software packages.

BigMachines continues to grow and gain enhancements as a result of the passionate sales enablement professionals who make-up our My BigIdea Community. In My BigIdea, BigMachines users help to drive development priorities and innovations by posting and voting on ideas with direct interaction from our product management team. As a result, the pain points noted by Scott directly align with our features and continuous development.

This is re-post from our website.

PLATO Learning, Inc. has successfully deployed the BigMachines Selling Platform. BigMachines automates product selection, pricing, approvals and proposal generation for PLATO's Customer Finance Consultant team.

PLATO Learning is a leading provider of education technology solutions, offering innovative online courses for kindergarten through adult learners that include reading, writing, mathematics, science, social studies, and life and job skills. They have more than 50 years of experience in the educational technology market.

PLATO chose to self-implement the BigMachines Selling Platform, replacing their existing quoting and pricing tool. Prior to implementation, members of the PLATO team attended BigMachines Administrator Training, where they learned how to set up and maintain their BigMachines software platform. With guidance from the BigMachines Professional Services team, they were able to implement their new web-based selling solution in under three months.

BigMachines now supports product selection, improved sales proposals and a tiered pricing structure. BigMachines is integrated with PLATO's Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system from salesforce.com. BigMachines also automates PLATO's sales tax calculations. In addition, BigMachines is used to automate discount approvals, ensuring pricing controls and accuracy.

"BigMachines has taken our quoting process to a new level and the integration with our CRM and tax software helps this business process run more efficiently," said Mitch Wacker, director of finance operations for PLATO Learning. "By self-implementing, we have enabled our internal team to continuously improve and add features beyond our phase one deployment. The professional training and support we received from the BigMachines team has been great throughout the entire process. In the end, the greatest benefit will be the ability for our sales professionals to deliver higher quality, tailored proposals that will meet or exceed our customers' expectations for contracting requirements and turnaround times."

"We congratulate PLATO on a successful self-implementation of BigMachines," said Shane Anastasi, Senior Vice President, Services and Support, BigMachines. "We have developed our implementation processes using best practices from hundreds of successful BigMachines customers. This streamlined methodology enables customers like PLATO to manage their own self-led implementation. PLATO's success is validation of our methodology, and we look forward to helping more customers sell more and sell faster using BigMachines."

The Illinois Technology Association recently turned the spotlight on BigMachines!

Included below are some excerpts from the profile:

What are your company roots?
BigMachines began as an Internet start-up founded by MIT graduates in a small office in Foster City, California. With a focus on Pumps, Valves and Lean Manufacturing, BigMachines software was originally developed to make the selling of highly complex, highly customizable "big machines" easy with product configuration rules used to create dynamic sales quotes and other branded output. BigMachines quickly realized that its Configurator, Pricing and Quoting engine could power much more than machinery sales. Today, BigMachines offers a variety of selling tools through the BigMachines platform to empower sales organizations to spend more time selling, and less time doing paperwork.

What makes you special? How is your product different from the other guys?
BigMachines is the premier salesforce.com and Oracle CRM On Demand partner, with more resources to serve our customers including: premium support, a global services team, enterprise-strength hosting coupled with enterprise scalability/security, a robust platform with many capabilities and features, and continuous ongoing investment in research and development.

Tell us why Chicago. What is easier or harder about being based in Chicago?
We see our Chicago location as a competitive advantage, since there aren't as many technology companies as in the Bay Area with which to complete for workers. We've had no difficulty hiring skilled software and technology workers, and we appreciate their Midwestern work ethic.

Read the full profile at http://illinoistech.org/story.aspx/304225

Not sure how eCommerce can benefit your B2B sales team?

Learn more about the benefits of BigMachines eCommerce Engine and gain a better understanding of what makes a great eCommerce platform in this week long series!

eCommerce for Enterprise

You may already use an "enterprise portal" - a comprehensive website providing access to and interaction with relevant information assets - think CRM and ERP - but did you know that externally facing portals can provide increased revenue and profitability?

By adding access to product information, marketing content, knowledge assets like guided selling modules and employees to your corporate website, you can enable customers to create a highly personalized shopping experience - as well as their own, technically and commercially valid, sales quote.

eCommerce in the Cloud

If you're still not clear on the benefits of cloud computing, consider this: Web based platforms support business flexibility and speed requirements by exploiting new and enhanced forms of application development and delivery. What does that mean for you? More storage and more computing power!

For B2B organizations which sell complex products or services, this means all of your product lines, part lists, pricing options, recommended item rules and more can be made available to external audiences without an additional investment in hosting infrastructures.


Other posts in this series:
Exploring eCommerce: Enterprise Portals and Cloud/Web Platforms
Exploring eCommerce: Web 2.0 Sales Tools
Exploring eCommerce: Sales Configuration
Exploring eCommerce: Sales Order Management
Exploring eCommerce: Mobile Web

Founded in 2000, BigMachines is a company defined by innovation, growth, and customer commitment. In just over ten years, what started as two MIT graduates has grown into the global leader in product configuration, quote and proposal, and B2B e-commerce software.

From the beginning, BigMachines has believed in hiring talented, motivated people that are passionate about helping our customers succeed. We look for technically-savvy interns and graduates from leading universities and colleges that can make an immediate contribution to our customers' success. We offer exciting opportunities for new graduates in our product development, professional services, and sales teams across our global offices.

As a rapidly growing company, our team members immediately take on real responsibilities and meaningful projects, while working with the latest b2b sales software tools. Some of our recent hires have gone from new graduate to managing client projects or supervising internal teams within 2-3 years.

We honor our team members each month based on customer feedback and internal nominations, and celebrate the individuals who help us deliver a world-class B2B applications that's easy to implement and easy to maintain.

On top of dedication to our customers, BigMachines also supports a "work hard, play hard" atmosphere. Weekly cross-team lunches; quarterly outings to sporting events, comedy shows, picnics, holiday parties and costume contests; fully stocked break rooms - and more - all help BigMachines to configure a winning team!
Come work with us!

During a recently held event, our team was asked:

What capabilities are available when integrating BigMachines to SAP?

BigMachines helps companies sell more and sell fast, while SAP help companies of all sizes and industries to run better; combined the two tools create a powerful sales solution!

BigMachines extends your SAP's native functionality by providing:

• Guided Selling and advanced product selection
• Intuitive and flexible web-based sales configuration
• Rich proposal generation tools - including datasheets, pictures, even CAD drawings!
• Ability to manage pricing and quotes across multiple sales channels and distributors

Through BigMachines Integration Platform, our award-winning sales software will fully leverage master data and knowledge already embedded in your SAP system. To date, BigMachines has successfully deployed a variety of interfaces to SAP for many joint customers including:

• Integration to SAP R/3 for single item master and customer master data
• Seamless Inquiry-to-Order integration and automated order processing from BigMachines to R/3
• Ability to check inventory and order status realtime in R/3
• Integration to SAP R/3 Variant Configurator (VC)
• Integration to SAP Internet Pricing and Configurator (IPC)
• Integration to SAP CRM and Internet Sales Application (ISA)