Quote-writing is a critical yet time-consuming and error-prone part of most sales cycles. TeamGram greatly speeds up this process with templates. You select a contact, pick the products, apply a discount (if any). Price look-ups and calculations are automatic.
Quotes are documents you send to your customers explaining the terms and prices you are willing to offer them on a specific deal.
Buyers take quotes seriously, mostly for their financial implications. Since quotes are so carefully inspected by buyers, you might as well use them to make an impression and drive the sales process in your direction:
- Stand out among the competition: A quote is much more than a pricing sheet. It reflects the character of your company. You want your quotes to look professional, convincing, and be free of errors.
- Highlight your strengths: Giving buyers reasons to choose you besides low prices is usually a good idea, even if your prices are lower than the competition. Competitors can always cut prices, but things like experience, quality and features are harder to replicate. Don’t just send a pricing sheet. Make sure your quotes highlight other reasons to choose you.
- Move faster: Quotes are not final contracts. Well crafted quotes help salespeople focus the buyer’s attention on the important matters, and get results faster. Being able to quickly respond to customer requests to revise quotes allows you to move the negotiation further and faster than your competition.
- Protect your interests: Buyers place a lot of emphasis on costs, but costs are actually a product of the terms of a deal. These may include delivery times, payment terms, warranty, installation services, etc. It is important to have these terms clearly communicated along with your prices, and make sure the buyer agrees to the entire contents of a quote, not just the prices.
Using Quote Templates
Writing outstanding quotes that achieve all of these goals from scratch can be very time consuming. TeamGram’s quote templates can help you scale your sales operation by helping you produce high-quality and error-free quotes quickly.
System administrators can define multiple quote templates for use in different kinds of sales. If you are an administrator, check out the Admin Guide to learn more about creating quote templates for your users.
A quote template quickly sets up the default look of your quote with your company letterhead, footer image, visual layout, and preliminary text content. In most cases, you can use a template to produce a good looking quote document in minutes, simply by selecting a customer, specifying the products and quantities.
Building a Quote
The best way to start building a quote is to go the related deal page first.
Note that a deal and a quote are not the same thing. As a salesperson, your goal is to close a deal. A quote is just a document you create and use in that process. Quotes are important documents, but ultimately it is the deal that matters.
Select the deal you want to quote for. When the deal page opens, go to the quotes tab under it and click on the new quote button.
Select a Template
If your system administrator has defined some quote templates for you (which is highly recommended), your first step in building a quote is to select the template you want to use. You may be able to choose from a list of available templates. Some businesses use a single template, while others have different templates for different types of sales or languages.
Specify The Customer, Contact, Deal and Subject
The recommended way to start building a new quote is to start from the deal page. This will automatically fill in some fields for you. If not, make sure you select the customer, the primary contact who will receive your quote, and the deal this quote is about. You must also enter a short subject line that will appear on your quote.
Enter The Opening Text
Everything you want to say before your prices goes into the opening text. Normally this must include some information about your company, and highlight the reasons to choose working with you.
You may also want to go into specific details about your quote, explaining your solution and what you propose to sell. This information will help your customer better understand the value of your solution.
Some of the wording in your quotes will be standard for all quotes (like a brief introduction of your company). You will probably have this text filled in when you select a template. You may also want to have some additional text that will be relevant in some quotes, but not others. For example, you may want to mention your experience in a certain type of project, only if you are quoting for a project where that experience is relevant.
Your system administrator can save commonly used paragraphs as text blocks. You can select them to quickly insert them into your entry text by clicking on the text block button at the top of the text editor box.
Select Pricing Method
Sales taxes or value added taxes (VAT) may be applicable to the items in your quotes.
Your system administrator may have disabled tax calculations for your account. In that case, this section does not apply to you. But in most countries, taxes are applicable, and it is important to know if the prices you enter into a quote include or exclude taxes.
Always make sure the unit prices of the products in your product list do not include taxes. Also make sure the correct tax rate for the product is entered in its product listing.
Even if you enter item prices including taxes, TeamGram always shows unit prices excluding taxes, and adds taxes at the end. In order to make the calculations, TeamGram needs to know if the prices you enter into the quote include taxes. Use the combo box at the top of the pricing table to specify:
- Prices include tax: Use this option if the product prices you enter in the pricing table already include taxes. TeamGram will use the tax rate next to each item to work out the unit prices before taxes.
- Prices exclude tax: Use this option if the prices you enter in the pricing table do not include taxes. You must enter the tax rate next to each item, so the total tax for a quote can be calculated and displayed.
- Taxes are not applicable: This option disables tax calculations. Use it if your prices do not include taxes and you do not want to display taxes in your quote. You may still want to add a line to your closing text about customer’s obligation to pay any applicable taxes.
Enter Item Details
The next section after the entrance text in your quote will be the pricing table. You will need to add each item in a separate line. You can add as many lines as you need. You can also break it down into multiple sections to group related items together.
- Select a product: The first column in the pricing table contains the product field. To select a product, simply start typing in the product name, brand, model, or SKU. Matching items will be displayed in a drop down menu. Click on the item you want to add to your quote. If the item you are looking for is not already in the product list, you can use the new product option to define a new product.
- Specify the quantity: In the quantity field, enter the quantity for the item selected.
- Adjust the unit price and tax rate: If your product list already has a unit price and tax rate for this item, TeamGram will pre-fill them for you. If your administrator has allowed you to do so, you may change the unit prices in a quote.
- Calculate the line total: TeamGram automatically calculates line totals for you. No additional action is needed.
- Enter the Unit Cost (For Profit Estimates): Entering unit costs of line items is optional. Even if you enter them, they are never included in the quotes sent to the customers, but are used to report estimated profits of your quotes. If this feature is enabled for your account, enter the estimated cost of each line item in the unit cost field.
- Enter Additional Information about an Item: To add additional information on an item in your quote, click on the green circle with the white pencil icon to the right of that line. This will reveal more fields:
- Measurement Unit: This field shows the measurement unit applicable to the quantity and unit price entered above. If the product description has this information, this field will be prefilled. In that case, avoid changing it. Otherwise, you may enter the measurement unit here.
- Discount: You can apply discounts to each item separately, or to the entire quote. If you want to apply a discount for a specific line item, use the field here. You can enter discounts as absolute amounts, or percentages.
- Info: Use this text field to enter additional text info like custom dimensions, colors, etc.
Add New Lines and Section Titles to the Pricing Table
To add new lines to your pricing table, click on the add new line link at the bottom of the table.
You can use titles to break down the pricing table into different sections. That will help you group related items together. To create a title, click on the add new title link under the pricing table.
You can also arrange line items and titles in your pricing table into any order you want. To move an item up or down, use the green arrow icons to the right of each line or title.
To remove an item completely, click on the red button to its right.
Review the Currency Exchange Rates
You can quote prices in multiple currencies in TeamGram. Your customers will see all prices in the original currencies you entered them, but your internal reports will convert all totals into the default currency of your company.
TeamGram automatically gets the exchange rates for conversion when you create a quote, but you can specify different exchange rates if you prefer. To override the exchange rates suggested by TeamGram, enter them in the boxes provided under the pricing table. This section will only be displayed if your quote includes items priced in different currencies.
Enter Closing Text
After the pricing table, it is important to add other terms and conditions applicable to this quote. These may include delivery, warranty, payment details, etc.
You may also want to end your quote with some closing remarks and make yourself available to answer any questions.
As with the opening text, your template may prefill this section with some text, but you can make changes. Your system administrator may also have saved some text blocks that may be inserted here as needed.
Enter the Expiration Date
Offers are not valid forever. Enter the date until which your quote will be valid. You can also add a reminder for yourself, so you can make a follow-up call to your customer before it expires.
Saving and Viewing a Quote
Once you have entered all of the information for your quote, you can save it. When you save a quote for the first time, it will be saved as a draft. You can still edit and change quote drafts.
To see how your quote will look when it is sent to your customer, click on the PDF button near the top of the quote page. This will download a PDF file. Open the file in a PDF viewer and check for errors.
Note that the quote is marked as “DRAFT”. Do not send draft quotes to customers. Read the “managing quotes” section to learn how to finalize a quote and send it to your customer.