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I am curious what tools people are using out there to generate and manage their sales quotes. I would like to better understand the market for our online quoting system.

  1. Where do most of your leads come from? Eg. Quote request form on your website, phone, email, etc.
  2. Where/how do you store your pricing info?
  3. How do you generate, send, and track quotes?
  4. How many quotes do you produce per week?
  5. How much time do you spend per week generating and sending quotes?
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1 Answer

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I use the quoting function inside our CRM. I would not consider an online quoting system that did not directly integrate with our CRM.

Where do most of your leads come from? Eg. Quote request form on your website, phone, email, etc.

The lead source is different for different business lines. For our consulting business out our leads come from qualified referrals. For other business lines we take advattnage of web-to-lead forms that push information into our CRM.

Where/how do you store your pricing info?

Within our CRM we store pricing information. For higher-end custom work we have a standard pricing guidelines sheet on a shared Google Doc

How do you generate, send, and track quotes?

The majority of our quotes are generated from within our CRM. Highly customized quotes are generated from templates stored in DropBox.

How many quotes do you produce per week?

Between 10-15

How much time do you spend per week generating and sending quotes?

Depends on the percentage which are for customized work. In general between 3-5 hours.

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Thanks for your answer. It definitely makes sense that you would want any type of quoting system to integrate with your CRM. – Mike May 31 '11 at 17:19
One more question for you - if you cut all of the time spent quoting non-customized work, what would that be worth to you on a monthly basis? – Mike May 31 '11 at 17:53
If i cut all the time quoting non-customized work, meaning that there was automation linking my product directory and quoting module with a workflow trigger -- that would be worth about 2 hours per week at $80/hour on billable time so $160/week or so. – Joseph Barisonzi May 31 '11 at 20:58

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