When I talk technology with my own non-scientific sample of equipment finance industry leaders these days, customer relation management and risk analysis are two topics that come up regularly. In tough times, management may be willing to hold off spending on many IT projects, but projects that improve interactions with customers or provide better intelligence about portfolio performance tend to get more, not less, emphasis. Bluntly put, hard times are good times for projects that help get good business in the door and manage that business well once it’s on the books.

A key to getting a technological bang for your buck in tough times is to be both focused and creative — focus on specific high-value challenges, and creatively use existing mature technology to meet them. Management is unlikely to support massive long-term projects, however worthy, where the investment up front is high and the payoff is years out and uncertain. Here, we’ll look at one such high-value/relatively low-risk application — focused Web-based quoting.

When times are good, inefficiencies in the sales process get hidden under the overall success of the business — it is easy to overlook the ways the origination process makes closing the transaction less than completely satisfying for customers. When customers are plentiful, they may be willing to put up with a sales process that’s too long, too complicated and inflexible. In times like now, a good customer is too valuable to leave less than completely happy.

It’s no news that customers, and the salespeople who champion them, want the sales process to be simple, flexible and fast. And, indeed, especially for small-ticket and lower mid-ticket transactions, a lot of progress has been made over the last decade. More and more information is online, and more and more processes are integrated. A typical large finance company might have a sales process where the desired asset is configured in a Web-based application, credit is scored in seconds, a quote is generated on the spot and, at the push of a button, docs are generated for signature and the transaction is queued up for booking. It’s a beautiful thing for the customer, the sales force and management — individual transaction processing costs are low, turnaround is quick and relatively painless, and the customer can take delivery on their schedule.

To get to this Promised Land, those same large finance companies focused on the most repetitive, high-volume business, and then spent significant money and time developing the system to serve that business. But what about lower volume business? Or what about lines where it’s not so much cookie cutter as a la carte? Or new and rapidly developing opportunities, such as green energy? These can be significant opportunities, but for a number of reasons, investing in a large, fully integrated system may not be justifiable.

Twenty years into the Internet era, the technology and skills needed to configure and deploy Web pages are established and ubiquitous. A finance company could quickly and, at relatively minimal cost, craft special purpose Web pages to exploit a niche or emerging market, and provide exactly the level of functionality in the website as appropriate for the user, who could be customers, inside sales, outside sales or the world at large. The more complex aspects of the quoting are handled behind the scenes, under the ultimate control of management.

The possibilities are limitless. Here’s an example: say you see an opportunity for financing specialized low mid-ticket equipment but are held back from exploiting the opportunity by the following factors:

So, we have a situation where we need to get sophisticated pricing in a form useable by people who are not finance professionals and who don’t work at their desks, and to manage the quoting process so that we can control complex and changing rules centrally. This is a daunting challenge!

However, imagine that the engineer in the field can access a Web page via a wireless connection, maybe even a hand-held device. She logs in, and the system now knows who she is. Up comes a Web page designed specifically for the sorts of transactions she would be interested in, so that she simply starts at the top of the page entering items she understands, such as cost of the system, location, type of equipment and so on. When she clicks the “get a quote” button, that information travels back to the pricing server, which generates a quote that takes into account the sophisticated pricing variables, including tax credits, and all the usual expense load and margin assumptions. At the end of the process, she receives a document ready to hand to the prospect.

An electronic copy of the quote is saved off on the central server, where management can review it and, once accepted, send it along to credit, documentation and funding.

This solution has three key wins: it gets a sophisticated quote into the hands of the prospect without having to go through a series of phone calls, faxes and e-mails; the person making contact with the customer generates the quote wherever they may happen to be; and management retains complete control over the pricing rules and processes. This is not magic — all of us make use of very similar technologies whenever we log in or get prices over the Web. By thinking creatively, equipment finance companies can use proven Web technology to better serve markets and satisfy their customers.