Two sessions from one on-site visit: a discovery conversation across marketing, sales and CPQ, then a live walkthrough of the current quoting process. Written for three audiences, with the CPQ detail set out for Mobileforce in its own section.
This covers two sessions held with Versalux during the same on-site visit: a discovery conversation across marketing, sales and CPQ, followed by a live walkthrough of their current CPQ and quoting process. Kongo and HubSpot need the full commercial and process picture. Mobileforce need the CPQ detail in particular, which is in its own section below.
The recording labelled every line as a single speaker, so who said what has been reconstructed from context rather than clean speaker tags. Where a name or detail is uncertain, it is flagged. The company name Versalux was supplied separately and is treated as confirmed. Roles beyond Adrian and Conor are inferred.
Kongo. Elite HubSpot solutions partner, running the evaluation. Represented by Adrian Bortignon.
Versalux. The prospect. A project-based lighting and products manufacturer supplying the building industry across commercial, mining, marine, oil and gas, and defence sectors.
HubSpot. Present through the partner representative who made the introduction, understood to be Conor Bell, who has worked with Adrian for around five years.
Versalux attendees included Matthew (senior stakeholder, signed off the recap), a marketing contact working alongside Chris, and references to Mark or Michael on the website, and Greg on the project chain. Sean, the national sales lead and a former sales rep, ran the CPQ walkthrough. Anita and Warren were named during the CPQ session as part of the quoting and approval process.
Versalux is a project-based business. The thing they track is the project, not the customer, because a single project can attract a large number of quote requesters. The chain runs from specifiers (architects, engineers and consultants) through to wholesalers, and then to the builder or contractor who wins the work.
A standing internal pain point is marking the losing quotes as lost, which currently clutters the system.
The trigger for this whole exercise is a new Shopify-based website.
It is not primarily a purchase channel. It carries a proprietary embedded tool, referred to internally as the project briefcase, that lets a customer configure products and build up a project over time in exchange for registering an account. Versalux want to consolidate fragmented data into a single source of truth and connect the website, quoting, ERP and reporting, so salespeople know who their customers are and what projects they are working on. Registrations are currently organic; they want to push adoption harder once the underlying connections are solid.
| Layer | System | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| ERP | Priority | Israeli-based. Versalux are happy with it and it stays. Holds projects, specifiers, quotes and sales orders. |
| CPQ | Syncom | US-based, tangled vendor history. Syncom Australia closed, so Versalux now deal with Syncom US for CPQ and Priority Israel for the ERP. Former Syncom Australia staff set up a new company, understood to be Kemah, which resells Priority but does not talk to Syncom. One individual holds the knowledge of the Syncom-to-Priority integration. Future in the stack is open. |
| Website | Shopify | With the embedded project briefcase tool. Product and pricing data intended to sit in Supabase (Postgres) and replicate via API. |
| Service | Phone & email | No help desk or ticketing. (Transcript said "Apple", most likely Outlook.) |
| Reporting | Spreadsheets | Refreshed via an OData connection. |
| CRM | HubSpot (free) | Free account connected to Shopify, collecting basic information only. |
Versalux would consider replacing Syncom if a CRM plus CPQ combination did the job well. Syncom have also mentioned their own CRM, which Versalux will look at.
The sales team spans a wide range of ages and comfort with technology, and works mostly from phones in the field. Ease of use is a hard requirement, not a preference. Around 80 per cent of the team log projects today; the other 20 per cent run on spreadsheets and enter data when they get a chance, so Versalux do not have a complete dataset. Enforcement has been deliberately soft, because the current app is clunky and hard to use for anyone without some IT ability.
They will win adoption by making the tool genuinely easier, not by mandate. Any HubSpot build has to clear that bar.
Salespeople carry revenue budgets. There is a commission structure, including commission splits by project where more than one rep has influenced the outcome. Reps own designated accounts, reviewed from time to time, and net-new specifier acquisition is an explicit goal.
The CPQ was built without hard coding, on purpose. It works from product descriptions rather than finished-good codes, so quotes go out fast. Versalux carry roughly 112,000 SKUs, with up to 50 variants of a single item at the same price. Waiting through that at tender stage would take days, which the market will not tolerate, and around half of what they quote they do not win anyway. So the tool is deliberately loose at quote stage. Customer service then adds the exact finish code at the order stage, once the job is won and the detail actually matters. The order process into Priority must stay as it is.
This conditional, loose-to-exact model is more than HubSpot's native CPQ comfortably handles, which points towards Mobileforce plugged into HubSpot. The detailed CPQ walkthrough is in the next section.
The new website is a value swap. A visitor can configure products without registering, but to save configurations, sort them, and pull data sheets and related files, they register an account. That registration is what gets Versalux products on spec for a project, and gives them early sight of what is being specified. Marketing want to drive that registration harder once the connections behind it are trustworthy, and to open new paths to market that the old static WordPress site never supported.
Service handles a steady flow of order and status queries by phone and email. There is no help desk. Versalux see room to make that easier with some form of support ticketing. Adrian also flagged an open question about how easy it is to separate genuine sales leads coming through the service channel from pure support queries.
Versalux currently run spreadsheets refreshed via OData, measuring projects year on year, project value per month, quotes per month and orders by value. Project value here means the estimated value registered at project registration, not won revenue. They want dashboards covering activity, quote output, conversion and downstream revenue, with role-based views for reps, regional managers and the board.
Requirements that shape the data model:
An email request arrives, usually with a schedule attached. Sean opens the relevant project in Priority, where the specifiers live. Most specifiers already exist and are picked from records. A brand-new one is added as a new company.
The request can come from an active builder, an electrician, or whoever is involved. A quote is generated against that requester.
Pressing configure drops the user into the CPQ. The worked example was a Nautilus fitting. Sean knew it was 1200 long, the only finish available was grain, and he selected "A.M. mode". He then added the same fitting at 1500 and at 600 using the same configuration. That produced three line items, which flow into Priority. The tool auto-generates a product description as you configure, rather than relying on a finished-good code at this stage.
Before anything reaches the customer, the quote routes to a rep, in this case Warren, to approve. It sits as pending. Warren sees exactly what has been built. If he is happy, he marks it approved, and only then can it be sent externally. A confirmation copy is generated to show it has gone out.
The customer either approves by email or sends a purchase order referencing the quote number. Once the quote is sent, the quoting job is largely done. Typical follow-ups are lead-time questions or a request to add a second covering option, at which point the quote is edited, reconfigured, repriced if needed, and updated.
This is the mechanism behind the loose-to-exact model, and it is the crux of what any replacement CPQ has to reproduce.
The quote cannot progress until every green option is selected. In the example, the finish had to be chosen because there was no alternative.
An orange option can be skipped and the quote still issued. When skipped, the user adds a comment such as "needs to be confirmed", or disables it. This is how Versalux get a quote out quickly without chasing detail the market does not care about at tender stage.
Once everything required is green, the quote can be issued. The visual, follow-the-bouncing-ball feel of this is exactly the ease of use the sales team need, and it is the standard any Mobileforce build has to at least match.
Keep the best-fit ERP, add the best-fit CRM and CPQ, and build an integration layer that mirrors only what needs mirroring between them. In practice:
Take Versalux through the full lifecycle of a project: first enquiry, first quote request, project creation, storing the various quote requesters and their communications, determining the winner, and the reporting that comes out the other side.
Confirm whether HubSpot native CPQ fits, or whether Mobileforce is the right engine. Early read favours Mobileforce.
Show Versalux the reporting frameworks Kongo build for similar building-industry clients (comparable shape to Materialise, Superwood and Metz Tiles) to set expectations on what is possible.