Examining the Quoting Capabilities of Quotation Management

You can create a sales quote in the following ways:  

From the Sales work center using the Sales Quote view  

From Account Master Data via the Customers work center. As a follow-up document from an opportunity, a sales contract, or another quote.   

You can add predefined surveys and tasks from an Activity Plan to a Sales Quote.  

Once a sales quote is accepted, it can be converted to a sales order. Any details, products, or pricing you have in the quote will be replicated to the order in SAP S/4HANA. But since SAP S/4HANA is the order fulfillment system, if you add attachments or major changes to the order in SAP S/4HANA, they will not flow back and update the quote in SAP Sales Cloud. 

You can use scoping questions to add product images to sales quote form templates and activate versioning.  Once versioning is active, you can search quotes by versions or based on a group ID. The group ID links the same sales quotes with different versions together for easy access for reporting purposes.  You could also send sales quotes with the same sales quote ID plus a version number to the customer, when updates have been made from a previously rejected or reworked quote.  

External follow-up documents can only be created in SAP S/4HANA for an active, submitted sales quote. If a quote is replicated to or from an external system, version handling is no longer possible.  

When you add products to the quote, you can request external pricing. Price determination from sales quotes will return a quote price and can include available to promise, credit check, free goods determination, and material substitutions.  The pricing data that is being used resides in the SAP S/4HANA or SAP CRM systems, but is being leveraged by SAP Sales Cloud for consistency and accuracy.  This leads to a better shipping and billing process later. 

Documents can be generated in PDF format.  The layout of the forms can be configured to match any theme or design needed. 

Product management options like quick adds and recommended products can be used to quick quote creation and flexible recommendation options.  

When using product recommendations, product lists can be created to enable cross, up, or down-selling.  Cross selling uses one product to create a list of other products or product categories to recommend in addition. For example, when any bike is quoted, the product category for bike accessories is recommended.  Upselling products are used to suggest a higher value item instead of the one quoted.  For example, when a basic beach cruiser bike is quoted, an extreme beach cruiser bike is recommended.  

Promotions can be referenced for reliable and consistent pricing or quantity terms to be honored.  

The ability to perform fast edits, as well as copy and paste options directly from any list ensures a sales rep isn't wasting time making quotation edits during their sales calls or visits.

An accepted quotation is a legally binding offer for the quotation validity period.  Some quotations are valid for a few days, some a few weeks, others for even longer.  Capturing quotation signatures speeds the sales process and allows mobile devices to be used as Docusign media.  

When a quote has been digitally signed, a link can be sent to all document signers.

A document flow is captures all documents in a lead to cash business process and their document statuses.  The documents are linked together in a sequence for easy interpretation of what occurred on certain dates in the business process. 

A quotation could be a follow-up document for a sales lead or opportunity.  This would link the quote to those documents, as well as any activities like phone calls or appointments that were made about the quotation.   After the quotation is created, succeeding documents like sales order or other activities could be linked subsequently to keep the process flow going.  

Once a sales order is replicated to SAP S/4HANA, the delivery documents and billing documents can appear in the document flow of the sales order.  This will show a PDF overview of those documents in SAP Sales Cloud.  A great way for a sales representative to understand the entire flow of the business scenario surrounding a certain customer. 

Once you have qualified an opportunity and created a value proposition for the sales deal, you are ready to create a quote.

There might be many activities that need to be completed before creating a quotation based on an opportunity.  Other times, you might not need any previous document and a sales representative could create a quote based on a meeting or phone call activity, with no previous lead or quotation.

To keep a full sales cycle document flow, converting an opportunity to a lead captures the full history of the business interaction.