Sofon Guided Selling

Sofon Guided Selling is a configure, price and quote solution developed by the Dutch company Sofon, aimed at manufacturers and suppliers of complex, configurable products. It helps sales employees translate customer requirements into accurate, professional proposals and quotations without needing deep technical knowledge of every product variant. The problem it addresses is common in engineer-to-order and configure-to-order businesses: product ranges contain thousands of options and dependencies, and quoting often relies on a handful of experts, leading to delays, errors and inconsistent pricing. Sofon’s approach is to capture product knowledge and business rules centrally so that the software guides salespeople through a structured series of questions about the customer’s needs and automatically assembles a valid configuration, price and document. This reduces dependency on engineering staff and shortens the time from enquiry to proposal while enforcing consistency across sales channels.

The product includes a rule-based configurator that validates combinations and calculates prices, discounts and margins, alongside document generation that produces branded proposals, quotations, technical specifications and drawings in multiple languages. Sofon Proposal Management supports approval workflows, version control and reuse of content, while the solution can generate bills of materials and production data for handover to manufacturing. Integration is a central strength, with connectors to CRM systems such as Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics and to ERP platforms including SAP, so quotes can be created within existing sales tools and orders passed downstream without rekeying. The software is available as a cloud service and can be deployed for internal sales teams, dealers and distributors. Typical customers are mid-sized and large manufacturers in machinery, installations, building products and industrial equipment across Europe. Sofon also offers implementation and consultancy services to help manufacturers capture their product knowledge in the rules model, which is often the most demanding part of a configure, price and quote project. Pricing starts from around USD 30,000; no free trial is offered in this listing and there is no free version.