Solutions
Better sales results and improved productivity with no-code and advanced CPQ capabilities. Build your company-specific product and sales configurators in no time, using Merkato’s user-friendly CPQ toolbox.
- Configure: define product relations, determine rules applying to your products, decide who has access that what part of your portfolio…
- Price: calculate products, raw materials and other resources, apply margins and multiple pricing options and determine the right price…
- Quote: document any configuration in custom product sheets, quotes, full (project) proposals and generate complementary documents such as orders, maintenance contract and lots more…
Plan & Sell
Make all product knowledge available at the fingertips of any seller or buyer. Simplify the sales of the most complex products, products with many variants and options, and complete projects. Configure your Merkato environment to accommodate all your sales channels:
- Have your configurators up and running in no time
- Make your configurators available to the right people in their language
- Sell the way that fits your company and products best
The smartest way to make all users product experts is by providing them with configurators based on templates you can build yourself. These templates digitise your product knowledge and determine how bill of materials will be constructed.
When multiple templates make use of the same logic, products or questions, configurators can be structured such that they make use of the same template sections, easing template maintenance when your business or products change.
Apply the logic that suits you best to define how to go from client requirements to your actual products. Either start from rules that show products or options based on previous choices or calculations, or show options based on a combination of criteria.
Opt for one or a combination of static or dynamic visualisation possibilities as required. Show drawings and pictures, both of components and of the selected end-product, steer your design and engineering tools, and integrate it all in your documents.
Define the way you want to work by building the subsequent steps that are required to go from qualifying a lead to concluding the sale. Workflows can involve various departments withing the company, subcontractors as well buyers.
Determine what various parties, collaborating in the crafting of a deal, can see and do. Allocate user rights on a combination of criteria so that internal staff, agents, resellers, clients, and others only deal with what is relevant to them.
When your configurable items influence other configurable products, you want to make sure the combination of all of them is still correct. In projects you may have generic parameters that influence all underlying products or have product-specific parameters that determine project features. Merkato covers it all.
Decide how you want your user interface to look like. Modify layouts, colours and fonts, and provide your resellers with a user interface that conforms to their brand guidelines. OEM-companies remain in control when providing their clients with the right configurators in the appropriate layout.
Manage & Control
Control what is sold how, and verify the status of all sales deals in your role-based Merkato dashboard:
- Make sure you capture all info to close all deals first-time-right
- Don’t be left off-guard when changes in products and prices may affect your profitability
- Control every aspect of coming to a sales agreement
Whether you apply configure-to-order (CTO), make-to-order (MTO) or engineering-to-order (ETO), Merkato ensures you capture all the relevant input to guide your sellers and buyers to the best choice for them.
Avoid products being sold with outdated prices as you push price updates throughout all sales channels. Apply multiple currencies, tiered pricing, temporary pricing, regional pricing, and more to always offer the right price.
Make sure your sellers spend time on the client instead of on their proposal. Define how you and your resellers sell, giving or not the freedom to add free text and third-party input with stunning proposal templates. Allow your clients to sign proposals digitally.
Attribute as many statuses as necessary and decide what must be done and what can be done when a deal has a particular status. Based on the status of a deal, automate actions that can relate to approvals, option selection, price adjustments, and others.
Analyse & Improve
Review the coherence in products sold and the way configurators are used and use it to improve on your offering:
- Use all data in Merkato to stand out in your industry
- Grow to become a frontrunner in mass customisation
- Be an expert at making the complex simple for your users
Know exactly what is happening in your sales channels. Use the Merkato dashboard to get a view of all deals at a glance. As Merkato contains a wealth of data, have all relevant information prepared to feed your business intelligence (BI) and/or CRM tools.
Get feedback on your product offerings to learn how similar or how different they are. Use this for managing and improving your products & components, variants and options (portfolio) and prices.
Implementing mass customization comes with several challenges, like the increased internal complexity resulting from offering a high variety for different customers. Clustering analysis is a powerful tool for modularising products and/or services to manage this complexity more easily.
Sequencing analysis is another tool to support you in reviewing and, where necessary, reordering the way templates are built. Knowing exactly how the information flows, how configurator sections are sequenced and what is their expected result, helps in improving their usability.
Integrate & Automate
Integrate Merkato with your other company tools and use it to automate and improve your sales processes drastically:
- Ensure data only needs to be entered once
- Integrate Merkato in your website and with your CRM, ERP, PLM, CAD and other applications
- Be extremely productive by creating automations within Merkato and across applications
The Merkato gateway provides an API (Application Programming Interface) with client libraries in different programming languages and an integration toolkit for setting up connections with different systems. We work seamlessly with other cloud applications and with applications behind a firewall.
Configurators can easily be embedded in any website. The design of your configurators can be adapted to accommodate your branding requirements. When desired, Merkato can be used in the background as a headless application, with your web application steering the configurators.
We’re very happy (and good, by the way 😉) in the CPQ-space. That’s why we integrate easily with your other tools to ensure the master data is managed in its rightful application. No worries when you’re still selecting your ultimate tools. We got you covered when you’re starting out with Excel or other spreadsheet applications as well.
Make use of the combination of statuses, actions, calculations, and the intelligent set-up of Merkato’s integration with your other tools to create seamless interactions. Use automations to avoid mistakes, to reduce the workload and to present the right information to the right people at the right time.