Who this is for
Businesses that quote before they sell: printers, manufacturers, event and travel companies, construction and interior firms, IT resellers, agencies and equipment suppliers. If your salespeople rebuild a quotation in a spreadsheet each time, if two of them quote different prices for the same job, or if a third of quotes are never followed up, this is the build. It sits under marketing and business automation services.
It only works when someone will commit to pricing rules. If every price is a negotiation with no structure behind it, the useful part of this project is the week spent writing the rules down, and that is worth doing regardless of what gets automated afterwards.
What gets automated
- Specification capture. A structured form or CRM deal fields replace the phone call and the missing details, so quotes stop being delayed by a question nobody asked.
- Price calculation. Your rate card, quantity breaks, material or component costs, margin rules, taxes and delivery, applied the same way every time by every salesperson.
- Document generation. A branded quotation, proposal or scope document as a PDF, built from a template with the right terms, validity period and payment schedule, filed automatically in the right folder.
- Approval routing. Anything below your margin floor, above a value threshold or outside the standard terms goes to a named approver with the numbers visible, and nothing is sent until that is cleared.
- Delivery and tracking. The quote goes out by email or WhatsApp with a record in the CRM, and where the tooling supports it you can see whether it was opened.
- Follow-up. A sequence on days three, seven and fourteen unless the customer replies, with a task for the salesperson at the point where a human call is more likely to close it. A quote with no follow-up is the most common leak in a sales process.
- Acceptance to invoice. An accepted quote generates the invoice, updates the CRM stage and triggers the operational handover, so the same numbers are not typed a third time.
What I deliberately do not automate
- Discount approval. Rules can identify what needs approval; a person grants it. This is the control that keeps automated quoting from quietly eroding your margin.
- Sending a quote nobody has read on a first-of-its-kind job. New job types get a human check until the pricing rule has been proven on real examples.
- Statutory invoicing and tax entries. The workflow prepares and pushes into your accounting software; the books stay with the people responsible for them.
- Price changes based on who is asking. Rules apply to the specification, not to the customer’s perceived willingness to pay.
- Chasing forever. The follow-up sequence has an end, and a clear reply of no closes the record.
How a build runs
- Collect thirty recent quotes, including the ones that were wrong. They show what the pricing rules really are, as opposed to what the rate card says, and they surface the exceptions that have to be handled or explicitly excluded.
- Write the pricing logic down and have the person who owns margin approve it. Every automated quoting project either does this or fails.
- Design the documents. One template per quote type, with the terms, validity and payment schedule agreed rather than copied from whichever old file was nearest.
- Build and re-quote the thirty. The workflow produces quotes for those past jobs and the output is compared line by line against what was actually sent. Differences are either a bug or a rule nobody had written down.
- Pilot with one salesperson for two weeks, with every generated quote reviewed before sending, then loosen once the review stops finding problems.
- Hand over with documentation, training and a clear route for changing a price without touching the workflow.
What you receive
- The workflows and templates in your own accounts, with documents stored in your own Drive or system.
- A written pricing specification: every rule, every threshold, every approval trigger, and who signed it off.
- A rate card your team can update themselves, in a sheet, so a price change does not require a developer.
- Quote numbering, versioning and an audit trail of who approved what.
- A pipeline report on quotes sent, accepted, expired and never followed up.
- Documentation, training and optional monthly maintenance as products and prices change.
Pricing pointer
Setup is quoted on request after scoping; a single quote type with a rate card, PDF generation and follow-up sits at the lower end of that range. Multiple quote types with component-level pricing, approval routing, accounting integration and reporting sits at the top. Monthly maintenance is quoted on request; CRM and document tool subscriptions are paid in your own name. This build pairs closely with CRM setup and integration and with lead generation automation feeding it.
Next step
Send three recent quotes and your rate card. I will come back within four business hours with the rules I can see in them, the ones that would need a decision from you and a fixed price.