Welcome to the beta for customizable quote templates!

[jmclaren]

Welcome to the super-secret HubSpot Community group for customizable quote templates! This is an invite-only group for beta users of this new feature. We've also got some HubSpotters here to help wherever we can. 

Gathering as a group there's a few things we hope to collectively get out of this:

• We want your feedback, what do you like, what don't you like? Do you have suggestions for how we can make it better?
• We want to see how you want to use this functionality. It informs how we shape both the functionality and our documentation. This helps us make it better prior to a full release to everyone. Gotta admit, you're already out there doing more with this functionality than we anticipated.
• There are questions that you might have, where the answers for you might also help someone else. You may have knowledge and experience other participants of this beta may not. Asking here enables us HubSpotters and you lovely folks to collaboratively share knowledge for the benefit of everyone in the beta. 

We will be publishing a link to our developer documentation for Custom Quote Templates here soon. If you are interested in that documentation please click the follow button on this thread.

Understand this is new functionality, and it opens a lot of doors for developers to do really creative things with it. We can't predict everything you're going to try to do with it. We are already honestly blown away by the creative things folks have been trying to do. So our initial documentation and examples may be limited in clarity for your specific use-case. This content will evolve over time improving based on learnings from this group.

Here's how you can help to make this functionality better:

• Try to keep your discussions on this functionality here in this group. Us HubSpotters are here and we're listening. Your conversations may influence how this functionality evolves. Not just that but our documentation too will evolve from the conversations here. We may not respond in every thread - to tell you the truth we are outnumbered by a lot, the number of folks in this group, is not the full amount of folks participating in the beta. Some will unfortunately choose not to participate in the group. =(  
• We will see about aggregating the posts that we've found throughout the forums on this topic in a thread here. If you come across ones we've missed, please add to that thread. Hopefully through collecting those posts you and others here will be able to find answers to questions you have. From there on we can incorporate learnings into our documentation, helping everyone.
• Help each other out where you can. This community is fantastic. If you take a few minutes to help someone else, they may pay it forward. Frankly you may gain some good connections in this group. Speedy history lesson - Dennis and I before joining HubSpot worked for agencies building on HubSpot, we were developers in this community sharing our knowledge and supporting folks in the community. In return folks in this community helped and supported us when we needed it. We became more knowledgeable, and also gained great connections in the community. We literally built our careers off of it. Eventually we ironically ended up working together at HubSpot. Not saying if you help each other you're going to work at HubSpot lol, but the other benefits are worth it.

HubSpotters In This Group

(a partial list)

• Me, Jon McLaren ( @jmclaren ) - Senior CMS Developer Advocate
• The ever enthusiastic Dennis Edson ( @dennisedson ) - Developer Community Manager
• The brilliant David Itkin - Technical Lead for the team working on this feature.
• The motivating Ethan Kopit - Product Manager for the team working on this feature.

These fabulous folks are dedicated to making the experience of this functionality a success. Please do us a favor, unless we ask do not DM us. We love ya and want to help but you will get faster and better help by asking in this group. 

We'll make sure that this group gets notified of any announcements related to this feature. Please subscribe if interested in those updates at
https://community.hubspot.com/t5/Custom-Quote-Template-Beta/bg-p/cpq-betablog-board.

If you are actively working with this feature it may be a good idea to bookmark this group so you can easily find it. Otherwise you can find it anyhwere within community.hubspot.com by clicking "groups" > "product" then choosing this group!

Thank you for participating in this beta, and being a part of this community. Introduce yourself in the comments to let us know where you work, what you do, and how and what you're using customizable quote templates for.

[AFord1]

Hi, thank you for the invitation to this group. Quoting is a huge part of our business however the functionality that Hubspot offers does not provide us with the ability to adequately quote.  We have to use 2 other softwares (paycove and panda doc) that integrate with a deal to do handle what we require. I am not sure if this is the right thread for this, however below are the list of things that Hubspot lack in my opinion for quoting.

• No accept button - e-signature is not used much in AU, and also adds another step to the process, we tried just sending a quote with confirmation via email, however, this didn't trigger my workflow to run the stage change automatically. 
• Ability to have standard, company T&C's rather than inserting them on each individual quote, so much room for error. A snippet is not good enough here.
• Ability to easily create a custom proposal - I understand we are in a beta for this, however it would be good to have it so it's easy for a team member to do instead of requiring a developer to build this
• Automatically adding tax from a company setting... I actually can't believe this is done at the quote creation stage as there is so much room for error and the legalities around this are to series to leave it open for error
• No ability to automatically send the quote with a standard email function, instead the manual need to create an email is required
• No notification option for when a quote is opened and reopened
• Radio options for quantity or product selection with approval 

We quote daily out of hubspot for our clients, but use software that is integrated to do so. It's very frustrating from a customer perspective.

[jmclaren]

@AFord1, thank you for the feedback!

We hear ya. Especially on your point about requiring developer resources to implement.

A little bit context on the approach. Developers can offer a greater level of deep customization to quotes faster than we ever can provide through UI.  The other side of this is that we're learning what you actually want to be able to customize most and what sort of tools we can build that are tailor fit to solve those specific problems. One of the primary things we expected to see was that folks would use this to make their quotes really match their company's brand. What has impressed us, is how innovative developers in this beta have been. We're not just seeing things styled differently - we're seeing developers trying to add functionality to quotes that we don't have out of the box. This impressive problem solving isn't unique to our quotes tool It's something that's driven CMS Hub, marketing email, and landing pages forward over the years. Like those tools, quotes will continue to grow in it's capabilities driven by your feedback and your ingenuity.

Additionally, it's one thing for your quote to look professional and match your brand. The more important side of it is that quotes should help you sell more effectively and efficiently. We want to know where we can improve it.

After all, as Brian Halligan has said about experience disruptors "How they sell, is how they win". We want you to win. 

Keep sharing your feedback, it is helping influence what we do first, and what comes next.

[himanigupta]

Hi Team,

Within the Quotes functionality, we are looking for the following items

1) Ability to add  extra columns independent to the product properties. Actually we offer services for different time duration that isn't really aligned to the 'Term' property of the product.  We aren't able to use the same product property as it is quite restrictive and we would require something that works as an independent variable that could be modified at the time of building the quote without affecting the already added within 'term' product property.

2) Possibilty to include a by default T&C's link to  the quote if the T&C's aren't manually added. 

3) There should be more space to add T&C's rather a little snippet for adding a two pager T&C document. It takes away entire format when copy and pasted

4) Also there should be ability to attach the document to the quote itself. We have some cases that client's legal department will provide a highlighted and corrected version of the T&C's that they would like to go with and would request to attach the correct version of the T&C copy. We somehow lack this fucntionality

5) Notification to the sales people whenever the quote is viewed.

6) Possibility to forward the completed quote to the specific inbox  rather leaving for the client manager to forward to accounts department for auditing purposes

Many thanks

Himani Gupta

[Marine]

Good morning,

Thank you for creating this thread! After using the tool for a few weeks now, here below are my open items. Most of them are related to our customized template. The context is that our external reps are creating the quotes and we need the tool to be as easy to use as possible and only have our customized options available to avoid confusion:

• Deal window: can we see our template and not the blue template as a preview?
• Quote template: can we have Pfannenberg Quote Template show as first choice - ideally we’d like it to be the only choice. Some of our reps are choosing the wrong template (usually first one in the list) and send this to the customer which is a big deal as these templates are not at all customized for our use.
• Unit Discount (in line items): Main open request: we’d like to auto-populate the customer discount in this cell when we choose the unit (customers have different discounts per type of products). For now we added the customer discounts in the company view on left panel so the rep has to go in the company view, note the discount, go back in the quote and add the discount.
• Final PDF Download: Very ugly, can we make it fit in one page and if note, make the cut better placed and not in the middle of a box.
• Recall and Edit: This option only updates the same quote but doesn’t update the quote name + date. We need to have a new quote name to be able to follow what was quoted and what was finally sold.
• Quote worklfow: VERY limited. Need to be able to send notifications to the contact owner in addition to quote owner (our quote owners are inside sales and are not following up with customers).

Thank you!

Marine

[lgancarz]

Hi! Not sure if this is the right place for this feedback, but one thing I would like to add to the above feedback is the ability to have a "custom" price for our products in the product library. Unless I've completely missed something, we have to assign a specific price to a product. We sell a SaaS product, and our yearly subscription prices vary from customer to customer based on the size of the customer. Right now, we have to put $1 in as a value/price for the product, just to assign a value as required. However, this makes it frustrating because when you enter information in the Deal for "Amount" (i.e. the price of the subscription), and then select the product to associate with the deal, it changes the deal value back to $1, which you then have to go in and edit in the product line item. 

Echoing other feedback, we also need the ability to have standard, but editable terms and conditions included by default with quotes instead of adding snippets - it's very error prone and easy to forgot.

Being able to attach a document to the quote is also necessary. As mentioned above, customers will come back with changes to terms that we need to include. 

[jmclaren]

Hey all, I'm disabling comments for this post.

I want to make sure your questions and feedback are easily seen.

For feedback we have a great thread going.

If you have questions I encourage everyone to review the other threads, your question may have already been answered. If not post a new topic.

If you know the answer to someone's question, share it. Not only might you save someone time. Grow you and your company's reputation through thought leadership.  You will also be helping us to identify areas our documentation needs to solve for.