Something I’ve come to grips with recently is that my quoting process for clients is horrible. I know my products, I know what I deliver, but the process is painful and tedious. Currently I’m using a combination of PDFs, Word Documents and Excel Sheets to create a cohesive quote for services to our clients. Frankly, it’s a pain, and takes entirely too long to finish.

The downfalls to the process:

• Have to enter the same information in multiple locations. My templates are simple and can’t pull from a single source.
• No central hardware/software interfaces, means the same thing might be called something completely different across two separate quotes.
• Manually compiling all the separate components into a single PDF file for delivery.
• Tedious process that would make it difficult for me to pass off on a sales person.

I know Autotask Pro can generate quotes, but I’m not sure at what level, and frankly, we’re not ready to grow for the Autotask Go product at this time. I’ve really been researching some quoting systems, and frankly I have yet to find anything that appeals to me. I want something simple and web based, that will allow us to generate quotes with some mouse clicks, drop downs, and check boxes. The idea of a roll your own has run through my head, but that would really be excessive, and more than likely take a while to show a good ROI on that initial investment.

Being a relative newbie at the marketing and sales game, I have to wonder if something like Salesforce.com would benefit what I’m trying to accomplish, or if that is just for pipelining and lead management like most CRMs really seem to be focused on. I could approach my friend Jared over at SET Consulting and see what they could do to integrate and streamline the quoting, but again, would probably take a while to generate a good ROI.

I know there are plenty of companies out there with years of working on their process of quoting their work and would love to know some of their tricks for streamlining the process.