Web Configurator

BigMachines recently announced the release of BigMachines 12, the latest version of the company's award-winning SaaS selling solution. BigMachines software assists sales teams, channel partners and resellers in product configuration, pricing and quoting, proposal generation and B2B ecommerce.

Customers will benefit from enhancements and new features in BigMachines 12 including:

• The improved Migration Management Center allows customers to easily transfer changes between their BigMachines test and production sites. Customers can easily compare changes between two BigMachines instances, filter results, and select specific components to update. The new migration management center allows for greater visibility of changes and speeds up the migration process.

• BigMachines’ new Configuration Layout Editor allows customers to create complex configuration and search layouts with an easy to use drag-and-drop editor for pixel perfect control of the page layout. The results are web pages are easier to design, faster to load, and allow for richer functionality.

• BigMachines updated Commerce Rules Wizard now provides customers with a centralized location to create and edit all commerce rules.  The new functionality adds more flexibility in the BigMachines commerce process and improves the user experience by providing a more scalable, standardized way to create hiding attributes, constraints and validations within BigMachines.

Additional information can be found at www.bigmachines.com. Customers can view the BigMachines 12 release notes and learn more about scheduled upgrades by visiting support.bigmachines.com.

BigMachines' breakthrough innovation is on display in its brand new release, BigMachines 12, the latest version of the company’s flagship, award-winning SaaS platform. A sneak peek of the BETA version of the new release generated much interest and appreciation at BigIdeas, the annual BigMachines Customer and Cloud conference held October 23 – 25, 2011 in Chicago.

BigMachines 12 enriches the end user experience by allowing sales teams, channel partners and resellers to easily configure products, manage complex pricing, and generate quotes and proposals more efficiently and securely. The powerful online administration feature enhancements in BigMachines 12 will help admin users easily set up visually rich configuration pages, enhance the quoting experience for their end users and seamlessly migrate data from their staging and test environments to their production setups.

New features delivered in BigMachines 12 are the result of extensive industry research combined with customer input. BigMachines encourages active community participation in the form of:

• Customers ideas via the My BigIdea innovation web portal
• Interactions at Regional Customer Success Forums
• Votes on most-requested enhancements during BigIdeas in the United States and Europe
  

Current BigMachines customers will benefit from enhancements and new features in BigMachines 12 include the following:

• Intuitive drag and drop interface allows for high quality UX layouts of configuration pages.
• New AJAX commerce rules enable dynamic updates without the need to refresh pages, resulting in a rich end-user quoting experience
• One stop migration center administration provides enhanced ability to compare data between local and remote instances as well as seamlessly migrate data
• Enhanced step administration user interface simplifies management of workflow set ups

BigMachines BETA is scheduled to be available November 18th, 2011. Additional information can be found on the BigMachines Support Center.

You have questions. We have answers! Ask our team of B2B sales experts about your current challenges in the inquiry-to-order process and learn how you can sell more and sell faster with product configuration, workflow approvals, and proposal generation.

Cloud companies have changed the way software is developed, marketing and consumed. But what, beyond the web browser, makes cloud computing companies new and exciting?

ERP Analyst at Software Advice, Derek Singleton recently posted five reasons why the impact of SaaS goes beyond web-based architecture and browser based users interface.

Singleton's fourth point, Great User Experience Equals Happy Customers, is right on - but we think that truly great user experience extends beyond the application itself.

At BigMachines, this means that in addition to creating an intuitive look and feel for our web based sales software, we also invest in multiple online, face-to-face, and hybrid user communities.

Online via LinkedIn and My Big Idea, users can ask questions, submit and vote on ideas for our user-defined product roadmap, and share best practices for implementing product configuration across multifunctional teams.

In person, regional users gather to demo their own implementations of BigMachines software and our product management team attends to share the very latest configuration and commerce features and tools. After each even, attendees can continue the conversation on regional LinkedIn groups, monitored by our team of solution experts.

Annually, users and industry leaders in both North America and Europe gather at our two annual conferences to discuss sales challenges they face and brainstorm real, actionable strategies to take B2B selling to new levels of efficiency.

Besides BigMachines, many other cloud companies follow this practice of offering a great user experience beyond the browser - salesforce.com, xactly, and InsideView all offer similar programs to continuously engage users - all of which helps set SaaS companies apart and highlights the commitment to service in Software-as-a-Service.

You can read more about all five reasons Singleton believes set cloud computing companies apart as new and exciting at Software Advice.

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.

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!

With 30 new customers and 92 percent growth in contract bookings compared to the same period last year, it gives me great pleasure to announce that BigMachines grew significantly throughout the first half of 2011. In the second quarter of 2011, BigMachines achieved record bookings for a single quarter with total contract value increasing 132 percent and annual contract value (ACV) increasing 114 percent year-over-year. The company continued to show a profit from operations in the first half of 2011.

Our continued growth helps to support our findings that businesses worldwide are looking for solutions to improve productivity and increase sales. BigMachines has been in the forefront of cloud computing and sales process improvements for over a decade, helping companies sell more and sell faster. Our ongoing innovation and dedicated global team ensure that we can deliver and support the most robust selling platform to companies across a wide variety of industries.

BigMachines continued to grow its team of professionals this year, expanding its product development, service and support, sales and marketing teams in order to accelerate product innovation and provide a premium level of service to its growing customer base. BigMachines customers now include over 260 companies and more than 150,000 licensed users in a wide variety of industries including high tech, software, medical instrumentation, manufacturing, telecom, media, business services, and financial services.

During the second quarter of 2011, BigMachines also released the newest version of its award-winning SaaS software, BigMachines 11.1, enabling sales teams, channel partners and resellers to easily configure products, generate quotes and proposals, manage complex pricing, generate legal contracts, submit and manage orders more efficiently and securely. With BigMachines 11.1, customers enjoyed real-time upgrades, ensuring that they quickly received the benefits of the new release including a faster, more dynamic user experience, increased flexibility in creating sales documents using the BigMachines Document Engine, and many more enhancements. BigMachines also continued to drive innovation through the accelerated adoption of its My BigIdea web portal, where customers submit and discuss product enhancements and interact directly with the BigMachines product team.

BigMachines has also continued to gain recognition from industry analysts, the media, and its partners. BigMachines received a Positive rating in Gartner's report entitled "MarketScope for CPQ Application Suites, 2011." BigMachines was also selected as a 2011 CODiE Award Finalist as "Best Integration Solution."

Will Wiegler, Vice President of Marketing at BigMachines shared with me that, "A large contributor to our growth as a business has been our dedication to customer success. In 2011 we have held a series of five Customer Success Forums around the United States, engaging more than 150 customers to share best practices, learn and provide feedback on our product roadmap. As we continue to grow BigMachines, our customers remain the core of our business."

In addition, BigMachines is preparing for its biggest event ever, the BigIdeas Customer Success & Cloud Innovation Conference, taking place in Chicago on October 23-25, 2011. I look forward to meeting more than 500 BigMachines customers, partners, and industry experts during the conference, who will come together to learn about and collaborate on the big ideas that will streamline their sales processes, reduce costs and increase revenues. 

(This is a re-post from our website. To view the release in its entirety, visit www.bigmachines.com/press_releases.php)

BigMachines, Inc. today announced the availability of BigMachines 11.1, the latest release of the company’s flagship, award-winning SaaS platform. BigMachines 11.1 enables sales teams, channel partners and resellers to easily configure products, generate quotes and proposals, manage complex pricing, generate legal contracts, submit and manage orders more efficiently and securely.

New features delivered in BigMachines 11.1 are the result of extensive industry research combined with customer input. BigMachines encourages customer feedback gathered from many sources: customers submit ideas via the My BigIdea innovation web portal, share and comment on product roadmaps at regional Customer Success Forums, and vote on most-requested enhancements during BigIdeas Customer and Cloud conferences in the United States and Europe.

Current BigMachines customers will benefit from enhancements and new features in BigMachines 11.1 include the following:

• Fast, dynamic user experience utilizing new AJAX configuration rules enables  dynamic updates without the need to refresh web pages.
• Intuitive drag and drop interface allows for easy reordering of product and part line items during commerce process.
• Streamlined Document Engine administration provides enhanced flexibility in designing document layouts for proposals, contracts and other sales documents.
• New workflow approval delegation options allow approvers to easily delegate  approval authority.
• Simplified document migration for faster deployment and upgrades.
• Expanded access to pricebook data in configuration rules.

To read the entire press release, visit www.bigmachines.com/press_releases.php.

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 on the Mobile Web

Mobile web is here and growing! Having a mobile presence is increasingly becoming a critical requirement for reaching B2B audiences who are always on the go and always connected.

While not all products and services lend well to configuration on smartphone (or require that level of connectedness), offering other eCommerce self-service features to B2B clients can be the key to increased customer success, renewals and repeat business.

eCommerce Wrap-up

When determining if eCommerce is right for your B2B sales process, keep the following in mind:

• Your customers (and your sales) only stand to benefit from access to Enterprise Portals
• Utilizing the cloud for eCommerce ensures scalability with minimal investment of resources
• Web 2.0 technology empowers customers to create their own custom buying experience
• Empower customers with sales configuration and provide them with the knowledge to create their own products and service packages
• Integrating eCommerce sales tools with back-end order management software helps to ensure accuracy and alleviate headaches further in the process
• Keep mobile usability in mind and include self-service features for business customers always on the go

Learn more about the BigMachines eCommerce Engine by watching a replay of our webinar "Rethinking Your B2B Sales Strategy: Extend Your Reach with eCommerce"


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

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."

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 Order Management

One of the fears B2B organizations have about adding eCommerce to their sales toolkit is that unknowledgable customers will create invalid products, causing a headache for the sales team, as well as the order entry team, and even the accounting team.

Though a configurator will ensure only configurations which are both technically and commercially valid can be added to a prospect's shopping cart, integration directly to an ERP or other order management system is crucial for alleviating the human error involved with data entry.

By integrating your eCommerce Engine directly with an ERP and CRM, you can ensure data is captured and stored where needed - without unnecessary duplicate records - and that orders are sent on for fulfillment. Moreover, your prospects and other end users can see, in real time, if products or parts are sold out and are empowered with recommended or similar items to complete the transaction in a timely fashion.


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

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 and Configuration

At its core, a configurator assists the user to understand product information, underlying components and options in the buying processe, as well as enforces specific standard or policies. For B2B organizations, eCommerce Configurators alleviate some of the complexity in finding or creating the right product or service package.

When you add self-service configuration for your customers, you empower customers with the same detail of product information as your most knowledgable sales rep! In particular, Guided Selling ensures that B2B customers take all factors and use cases into account while configuring the right solution to fit their unique needs.


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

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 and Web 2.0

The driving force in new technology is organizations' desire to increase sales. By combining the power of Web 2.0 with eCommerce, you optimize your website and your sales process in three key ways:

1. You take advantage of Web-oriented architecture which allows for greater scalability and reach
2. You add or enhance social and community aspects of your products and services by integrating to relevant blogs, wikis and other social networks
3. You delight the senses with mixed sources of content such as product images, videos, datasheets, and more

In addition to the ease-of-use factor that Web 2.0 provides, you also have the opportunity to open up your products for configuration, social sharing, and user-defined content such as product comparisons and reviews.


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

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

Learn it, try it, do it!

BigMachines Administrator Training classes are highly interactive courses designed to teach new users how to:

• easily define product data,
• configure the user interface and
• maintain configuration rules,

all from within the integrated Web 2.0 Admin Wizard.!

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)

For many business to business sales organizations, eCommerce is seen as a threat to the sales team, or quickly dismissed as something that won't work for their customers/products/services. But eCommerce is not simply a trend to write-off: Your customers are your peers, who have adopted online shopping and are managing a multitude of transactions via the web day in and day out.

While B2B eCommerce does differ from B2C, the two are not either/or. Discounting and other pricing rules, advanced self-service and support requests, and customizable and configurable products and services and high volume orders can all be processed in today's web sales software.

Still not convinced the move is right for you? Here are just 10 benefits for your customers and sales team that may be realized by adding B2B eCommerce to your sales toolkit:

1. Provide product datasheets, descriptions and details from within an online product catalog. Your customers want information and no matter the time of day, day of the week, or busy schedule of your field reps, the information your customers and prospects need to make the decision to buy can be readily available via eCommerce web sites.
2. Link prospects to multimedia marketing materials. Remember that YouTube video the marketing team created? It's time to give more exposure to a one-time campaign and provide relevant media files from directly within your sales toolkit.
3. Include warranty information where it is most likely to be read. Whether you choose to include warranty information with product descriptions and datasheets, or provide it from within an eCommerce shopping cart, you can ensure your customers are aware of the terms and conditions associated with their purchase.
4. Let happy customers do the selling for you with user reviews and product ratings similar to Amazon.com's thriving review community. Have you ever bought something with less than a 3-star rating? Your prospects don't want to either.
5. Integrate with social networks and promote social sharing and user communities.
6. Enable auto-suggest search for prospects who may not know what they need. This widely adopted tool allows users to start typing a phrase while related product searches are suggested.
7. Empower prospects with Guided Selling. Create survey-like questionnaires for customers to provide requirements, needs, and budget to return best-fit solutions.
8. Provide product comparisons to engage prospects in the evaluation process and allow them to understand the benefits of multiple models or service packages.
9. Include recommended items to increase average order value, and ensure customers never place an order without full knowledge of the parts needed to receive maximum benefits.
10. Automate the renewal process with self-service options for eCommerce users. Besides the traditional shopping cart functionality, eCommerce portals can integrate directly to ERP and CRM systems to enable customers to renew, reorder, and renegotiate contract terms as well as process payments online

In all, these ten benefits of eCommerce allow sales reps to spend more time selling to highly qualified, highly informed and highly engaged prospects and less time doing paperwork. While customers are empowered with information at their fingertips, in real time, on-demand. B2B eCommerce is a win-win!

During a recent webinar, Rick asked:

How are parts, rules, etc set up and maintained in BigMachines?

Rick joined us live for a webinar about BigMachines eCommerce Engine however the answer is the same across our B2B Sales Platform. BigMachines offers training and certification programs for two levels of administration as well as for users and executives to better use and take advantage of the BigMachines Admin Platform.

BigMachines Administrator Training teaches our customers and partners the fundamentals concepts of setting up, customizing, and maintaining BigMachines. Students become familiar with the standard business processes enabled in BigMachines and how they can be used for the best business results. Application architecture and prebuilt capabilities of BigMachines software are taught in the context of a proven implementation strategy by certified BigMachines instructors.

Through a series of hands-on labs and exercises, participants practice the key tasks associated with setting up and maintaining BigMachines applications, putting their knowledge to work by creating a fully functioning commerce site. Moreover, course participants learn how easy it is to define product data, configure the user interface and maintain configuration rules using the integrated Web 2.0 Admin Wizard.

This is a re-post from our website. Stay up to date on the latest BigMachines news by subscribing to our Newsletter.

Cloud Computing platform and integration provider Magic Software offers integration services for Sales Configuration, Quoting and Proposal Leader BigMachines

Magic Software Enterprises Ltd. (NASDAQ: MGIC), a global provider of cloud and on-premise application platform and business integration solutions and BigMachines, the leader in product configuration, pricing and quoting, proposal generation and B2B ecommerce, today announced an alliance focused on integration services for the BigMachines Selling Platform.

BigMachines provides a web-based platform that empowers sales teams and channels to sell more and sell faster with solutions that simplify the configuration of products and services, generating 100 percent accurate quotes and branded proposals, and eliminating pricing errors. By integrating seamlessly with CRM, ERP and other enterprise systems, BigMachines ensures accurate data flow throughout the enterprise. Magic Software's integration platform offers BigMachines' customers an integration path to ERP, CRM and other enterprise systems in real time.

"Using iBOLT, we can offer a new option for our customers to integrate the BigMachines Selling Platform with business systems such as SAP, Salesforce CRM, Oracle JD Edwards, Lotus, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, SharePoint, and others. Customers are demanding simplified integration and optimized business processes, and the alliance between BigMachines and Magic Software delivers that," said Matt Gorniak, Senior Vice President of Sales and Alliances at BigMachines.

Guy Bernstein, acting Chief Executive Officer of Magic Software, added, "Working together, BigMachines and Magic Software can help customers optimize business processes to help them sell more and sell faster with BigMachines' pricing and configuration options, expanded mobile approval capabilities, updated CRM information, and additional administration controls. We are excited to add a leading ISV in the United States to our large and growing list of partners around the world."

iBOLT simplifies integration of business applications used for enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), logistics, supply chain management and other enterprise systems.

Learn more at http://www.bigmachines.com/magic-software-bigmachines-alliance.php

Join BigMachines for one or two webinars to be held this month!

On May 19, learn how you can streamline the sales process from inquiry to order with product configuration, workflow approvals and proposal generation. The one-hour webinar includes a live, interactive demo of BigMachines 11 web-based software. Learn more and register.

On May 23, learn how you can leverage Web 2.0 technology to offer a rich, real-time business shopping experience. In addition to a BigMachines eCommerce Engine demo, best practices and things to consider when adding eCommerce to the mix will be discussed during this online, interactive event. Learn more and register.