Quote Automation
Software
Why do businesses invest in quoting software? Businesses build bespoke quoting software because it helps them make sure they’re charging the right price for products or services, and it’s easier than relying on the collective knowledge and Word docs of yesteryear.
Capture the request
Apply pricing rules
Approve and send
Quotes go out faster and the price stays traceable.
Sound familiar?
If you’re a sales rep tasked with sending out quotes, you may:
- open up last quarter's Word doc and adapt it as best you can
- refer to that person who joined before you who knows how to do these
- get hung up requesting discounts because the MD isn’t in
- send quotes with incorrect VAT, delivery charges and other maths errors
- not know who has viewed your quote because that feature isn’t reliable and would fail a privacy impact assessment anyway
The reason is simple.
Sales, Operations and Finance teams all understand the business’s offer and pricing rules differently, and there’s no system in place to help them apply these consistently and make informed decisions. This creates problems like:
- not charging the best price, such as missing out on volume breaks or forgetting to apply contractual or special deal prices
- not knowing who should approve certain quotes, with no context provided to help decision-makers understand the ask and no record of their decision
- not knowing which terms & conditions apply
- not being able to analyse the success of quotes with no centralised record of acceptance
These can be solved with quoting software that brings together:
- the offer, being a catalogue of your products, services, options, bundles, units, lead times
- the rules, being your pricing, taxes, discounts, extras, terms & conditions that apply to that offer, tested to ensure they produce the right output
- the process, being a way of working around exceptions & approvals, integrating with other business systems
- the paperwork, being documents generated using this information, connected to the quote & acceptance history, customer
How to build quoting software
We start by understanding your current quoting process. We’ll want to see examples of quotes and price lists, spreadsheets used to analyse quotes, ask about exceptions & approval processes, understand dependencies on other systems. This audit will help us scope the project and provide a recommendation. We’ll let you know if we think it makes sense to build quoting software, or use something off-the-shelf like Salesforce CPQ or HubSpot Quotes.
We then create a model of the catalogue, pricing rules and other features, and get your sign-off on this before we build any software.
When we’re building your quoting tool, we’ll start with a basic version that allows a small subset of users to create quotes for a small subset of products. We’ll integrate with other business-critical tools, such as accounting packages, CRM, e-signature tools. We test this with users to make sure everything’s working. We iterate the solution with users, then broaden its use. This may mean connecting more integrations, supporting the rest of the catalogue, enabling approval processes and reports.
We like to keep projects simple so you know exactly what you’re paying for each phase, own the source code and have clarity over data handover.
