Automated Quotation System?

I am looking at our quotation system and I am starting to see a lot of patterns. I was wondering what others used for their quotation process. Is it simply just writing up each quote for each potential client (lots of time).

Do you take old quotes and mash them up into a new quote for the new client (still time consuming but not as prone to missing something)

Is there a system that you purchased?

I have been looking at the patterns and thinking that there could probably be a way to create a pivot table system in M$ Office (Excel with OLE to Word??). But if there is something that can be purchased for this kind of process?

Any thoughts would be MUCH appreciated.

The only “systems” I know of are massive ERP systems. However you could do 1 of 2 things (or both!)

  1. Create an Excel Template, so that you only have to enter in information into fields, that way you aren’t forgetting anything.

  2. Try Salesforce.com an online CRM that is pretty slick. Many more tools than just quote writing.

I am currently using M$ Business Contact Manager as my CRM. Being a small show, I went this route over Salesforce.

The excel spreadsheet with a pivot table is pretty much the route I am looking at for now…but I am far from an M$ office Geek. So, either I need to hire someone to do it, or I need to spend a lot of time “learning” how to do it myself.

You could start with one of these, and modify it to get where you want…

I tried setting one up myself in Excel. Although the input was in Excel boxes the end result was full sentences in Word, making it seem more personal.

However, after testing it for about 3 months I found it was removing the quality aspect somehow -those inspired one or two lines that show that you’re thinking into the project and clinch the deal.

So I went back to building upon older quotes or writing from scratch. Despite this being a longer process, being closely connected to the building of the sentences seemed to bring the creativity back.

Thank you for posting this! It is exactly what I was looking for to build an online quotation tool.