Odoo enhances sales and efficiency for various businesses: retailers enjoy tailored quotes and online payments; manufacturers streamline variants, orders, and fulfillment; service providers simplify subscriptions, communications, and payments. Its flexible tools suit diverse needs.
Important Strategies for Robust Inventory Control Across Different Industries
Retail
For retail businesses, accurate stock forecasting, automated reservations, and backorder management are essential to maintaining inventory accuracy and customer satisfaction.
Quotation Creation and Product Variants: Easily create tailored quotations with customizable products — ideal for handling diverse customer demands.
Automated Optional Products: Suggest related products automatically — simplifies upselling and increases average order value.
Customer Preview and Online Payment: Allow customers to preview, sign, and pay online — enhances the customer experience and speeds up the sales process.
Manufacturing
In manufacturing, a replenishment dashboard, integration with sales orders, and consideration of vendor lead times ensure a smooth production process.
Product Configurator for Variants: Efficiently manage and quote customizable products — critical for businesses with complex product lines and variants.
Automated Delivery Orders: Confirm quotations to trigger delivery orders automatically — streamlines order fulfillment, ensuring timely manufacturing and delivery.
Sales Dashboard: Centralize all sales quotations and orders — provides a clear overview of sales activity and production demands.
Services
Service businesses, especially those dealing with subscriptions and field services, benefit from efficient stock management for deliverables, precise delivery tracking, and streamlined purchase order integration, all of which help maintain timely service delivery.
Quotation Flexibility: Quickly modify quotations with different services and pricing — essential for adapting to specific client needs.
Email Integration with Chatter: Automatically track communications — ensures all service requests and client interactions are logged and easily accessible.
Online Quotation Approval and Payment: Allow clients to approve and pay for services online — simplifies the subscription renewal process and speeds up payment collection.
Novobi Resources
Dig deeper into Novobi’s frequently asked questions for more helpful insights into Odoo solutions provided by Novobi to help you solve your problems.
Transcript
Hello, Odooers! My name is José Ignacio. As you know, selling is a very unique art form. There are many techniques when it comes to selling, but the most common and effective ways to make products accessible to buyers are through online stores, also known as e-commerce platforms, through a physical storefront, or even better, directly through a salesman. Yes, even door-to-door salesmen! At my furniture company, Stealthy Wood, we use all three of these methods, including door-to-door sales. However, in this video, we are going to focus on the last method: salespeople.
To learn how to use Odoo for the other two methods, check out our videos and documentation for the e-commerce and Point of Sale apps, which I’ll link for you. In this video, however, we’ll see how the Odoo Sales app makes it super easy and efficient for salespeople to create and send quotations to customers. The Odoo Sales app also automates tedious, time-consuming tasks to save salespeople time and, more importantly, energy so they can focus on what really matters: selling products. I’m really excited, so let’s jump right into our database and see how we can do this.
Create a Quotation
Let’s kick things off on our Sales dashboard. We’ll open up the Sales app, where we can see a convenient list of all our quotations and sales orders. To create a new quotation, we simply need to click “New” at the top. Perfect! From here, we’ll first select a customer. We can either use the drop-down menu, but that’s not as cool and flashy, so instead, we can create a new customer by just starting to type a name, like “Odoo.” Then, we can hit “Create,” which allows us to immediately use it, or “Create and Edit,” which allows us to add the customer’s contact information. Odoo will instantly create a new contact in our database. Let’s give it an email, “odoo@odoo.com,” to add a little more information—powerful, mysterious, and very sleek.
Next, we’ll add a product. Let’s say this customer wants to buy one of our customizable desks, so we’ll select “Add a Product” and choose “Customizable Desk.” Would you look at that? I have options because Odoo gives me options! Since this product has multiple variations, the product configurator pops up, allowing us to choose exactly which variation we want for this quotation. Let’s say the customer wants a black desk, and we’ll keep the material as steel because it is strong. We can also see that some optional products have been added below. These are convenient because we often sell these products together, saving our salespeople time since they don’t have to search for related products to offer. These optional products can be configured on the product form, so be sure to check out our other videos to learn more about that. Let’s go ahead and add our one-year warranty and confirm it.
This looks good! After adding the products, we can easily change the quantity or the price manually on the quotation. Let’s assume they want two, and for the unit price, let’s do some math. Boom! Just like that, the unit price was calculated using an equation.
What if we want to put an optional product on the quotation itself so the customer can add it to their cart later if they’re interested? Easy! To do that, simply go to “Optional Products,” click “Add a Product,” and if they’ve bought a table, our intuition tells us they’ll need a chair. But which chair? The office chair, in black. Just like that, it’s pretty easy!
Now, what else can we do with this quotation? Let’s go back to the order lines. Let’s assume that we want to organize the products into sections to make the quotation look cleaner, more readable, sleeker, and more professional. We’ll add a section titled “Furniture” and then capitalize it because we’re not animals. Boom! We’ll drag it to the top. Let’s add another section and call it “Warranty.” Perfect! That’s not redundant at all.
Send a Quotation
Now that we’ve finished creating this quotation, we can deliver it to the customer in a few different ways. If we want to give it to the customer in person, we can easily print it out and hand it to them by going up to the “Print” button and selecting “Quotation/Order.” Give Odoo a couple of seconds, and boom! Just like that, it’s done, and here’s what it looks like—a beautiful PDF that we didn’t have to do anything for.
We could also send it to the customer by email. When we click “Send by Email,” it prompts us with a few options. Once it loads, it shows us the text of the email along with the subject and a few other things. Here’s the templated text of the email, which we can edit if necessary. We can type something in, like “THANK YOU” in all caps, because we’re really happy right now. You’ll also see that the PDF is automatically attached. Perfect! If we like the changes we’ve made, we can save them as our own template for future use by clicking “Save as New Template.” But for now, let’s just send this email as is by selecting the send button.
When we send the email, a copy of it is automatically recorded in the “Chatter” section of the quotation, ensuring that all the information about this order is in one convenient place. Would you like to see what this online quotation looks like for a customer? No problem! We have a “Customer Preview” button that, when selected, shows us exactly what the customer sees. Look at that! There’s everything on this email, including our sections for “Furniture” and “Warranty.”
You’ll also notice that the customer has the option to add that office chair we talked about. How would they do that? They just click the little cart icon, and boom! It’s been updated automatically. Customers can also sign and pay for their quotation online, which confirms their order right then and there. That’s insanely convenient!
In our case, everything looks good, so we’ll go back to edit mode. A salesperson can also confirm the quotation manually from the back end by clicking “Confirm.” This turns the quotation into a sales order, and if we have deliveries already configured in our database, a delivery order is automatically created when the quotation is confirmed. Let’s confirm this, and notice the delivery smart button right there. Be sure to check out our videos on delivery and inventory to learn more about that, because I don’t want to bore you too much.
From here, I now have the option to create an invoice. I can also send it by email again or just cancel the whole thing. Let’s imagine, unfortunately, that this deal falls through—they don’t want it, and we need to cancel. All I have to do is click on “Cancel,” and I have the option to send a nice email to let them know why it was canceled. I can click “Send and Cancel” to send the email or just “Cancel” to cancel the sales order without sending an email. But we’re not rude, so we’re going to “Send and Cancel.” Give it a second, and as you can see, the status of the order has shifted from “Sales Order” to “Canceled.” This is just another way that Odoo makes our sales process super easy.
Conclusion
Well, that’s all for now, Odooers! Be sure to check out our other sales tutorials to learn even more about all the amazing features of the Odoo Sales app. Until then, always remember—go grab a snack!
DISCLAIMER: The information in this article reflects the views and opinions of Novobi, based on publicly available information, and is intended for informational purposes only. It is not legal or financial advice. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
