Custom Quote Template Beta

jmclaren
HubSpot Employee
HubSpot Employee

What do you think of the custom quotes functionality right now?

Résolue

Hey all,

As we work on iterating and improving this functionality we want to make sure we're solving for your needs. We want to hear your feedback.

 

Was there anything you expected to be able to do with custom quote templates that you couldn't?

What was the main reason you wanted to create a custom quote template?

If you had a magic wand, what is the highest priority change you would want to see happen to this functionality? 

Do you have prior experience building on HubSpot's CMS? Does it feel like a natural extension of that experience or does it feel weird/confusing?

If you had a magic wand and could change anything about the quotes feature of HubSpot, what would it be? can be templates related, could be billing frequency options, could be the interface, anything

Jon McLaren

Sr. CMS Developer Advocate

Get started developing on the HubSpot CMS Developer Changelog
How to optimize your CMS Hub site for speed

If my reply answered your question, please mark it as a solution, to make it easier for others to find.

1 Solution acceptée
RussJB
Participant

What do you think of the custom quotes functionality right now?

Résolue

Hi 

If I'm understanding you correctly. this is already possible. 

For example. 

{{ DEAL.dealname }} will pull in the Name given to the deal. 

You can also pull in your custom properties using the same method. {{ DEAL.custom_property }}. custom_property is the internal identifier of the property. credit to @amandaulm for this solution. 

 

I'm struggling to pull in all the properties selected from a multi-select custom property adding a special character (' / -) between them at the moment but date/ text, the multiline text seems good. 

 

Hope this helps. 

72 Réponses
jmclaren
HubSpot Employee
HubSpot Employee

What do you think of the custom quotes functionality right now?

Résolue

Wow! This is amazingly good feedback all of you. Thank you for sharing!  
We've been talking about some of these things internally, and seeing this feedback validates some things. 
I can't confirm right now any timelines but understand, we see your feedback. Your feedback influences both the direction we take and the priority of which things we solve for first.

Keep the feedback coming.

Jon McLaren

Sr. CMS Developer Advocate

Get started developing on the HubSpot CMS Developer Changelog
How to optimize your CMS Hub site for speed

If my reply answered your question, please mark it as a solution, to make it easier for others to find.

InviseAgency
Contributeur | Partenaire solutions Elite
Contributeur | Partenaire solutions Elite

What do you think of the custom quotes functionality right now?

Résolue

Hi and many thanks for the invitation to the hidden community!


I’m Fredrik and I am the CTO at Invise, Hubspot Elite partner. We’ve been working with customized quotes for a while now and, as you kindly asked for, I have some feedback that I guess would be valuable for the development of this feature.

 

It goes without saying that we really appreciate that this quote possibility even exists, as we regularly need to recommend third party integrations when it comes to creating and administering. So bravo on that, but let’s cut to the chase. This is gonna be a long one, but I want to explain 🙂

 

Just for the sake of it I created a customized quote that our agency is using ourselves and included some mumbo jumbo lorum ipsum inside it to get a better understanding on how it works. Please note that I have placed “notes” in italic inside the quote for better guidance.

 

https://business.invise.se/hubspot-sample-qoute-custom1 

 

In general the “create quote” UI leaves a lot to ask for as we are limited to a VERY few fields to enter multi-line information: “Comments to Buyer” and “Purchase terms”. Based on that we had to be very effective on HOW we are using these fields, and thus needed to hard code the rest of it (somehow static information).

 

This is functions that needs to be added in order to get this up to speed with competitors:

  • More possible fields for entering multi-line content. Too limited and one needs to be really creative and sacrifice text blocks you initially want.

  • Ability to save terms & conditions AND other information (such as quote information about services etc (now being used by Comments to Buyer).

  • As for now we are using “snippets” to store this kind of information. However, a snippet has a limited amount of letters that can be saved which means that all our services + t&c:s need to be saved as “snippet #1” and then add “snippet #2 etc. Just isnt super suitable for the quote tool.

  • One more thing that is frustrating about using snippets is that the quote tool does not interpret formatting like HIGHLIGHTED. In our terms and conditions we have some fields that our sales reps always need to change - like hourly rate and name of customer in t&c. Even if that information is highlighed in yellow when you edit a snippet, it will not appear in the quote. To make this easy for the sales rep to spot, we right now need to set the “change this text” to underlined, bold and italic. Just a small thing, but it’s annoying in the long run.

  • In the long run, and also with the help of implementing what is said under feedback #1, we need to be able to create columns to make it easier to read. A lot of agreements have loads of text and to be able to create columns it would be made more visually appealing.

  • Create it printer-friendly (especially for our clients who sometimes want a physical copy for internal meetings etc). If you look at our layout it is pretty black (would cost a lot of ink to print), but we have created a script that makes it grey out the blacks when printing as a pdf (or entering Hellosign (which generates a pdf version of the quote url). Our opinion is that this feature for the customer to be able to print should be easily done by default.

  • Be able to use quotes for estimates. Right now we are limited to a set value of the quote. Oftentimes we estimate a service to take X-XX hours, this is not possible to do in a clear way using the “products” section. Our workaround is that we created a product/line item with the name “estimate”. In the code we then told it to “if product “estimate” is the only product, DON'T show the products section. So for us, we just hide it and then write about the estimated hours and price directly in the “Comments to buyer” section. Not optimal, but works.

  • A test environment for the quotes when trying out custom code. As for now, everytime we create a quote and want to see the design of an e-signature section - it ups our limited “sent esignatures quota”. Not super.

  • To be able to customize the “Validate it´s you” email. When a customer wants to sign a quote with eSignature he/she needs to get a validation email. That email is designed in a super non custom way and is also pre populated with uncustomizable english. For our customers who come from different nationalities it just goes totally against our tone of voice, tonality etc. We would like our customers' experience to be with US the whole journey.

  • When you want to sign the contract, you enter HubSpots eSignature third party tool: HelloSign. This site generates a pdf of the quote and sends you to a different UI. That’s not a big problem, but there are a few things with the HelloSign integration that are really not super. Firstly you, as a signer, need to accept the terms and conditions of HelloSign. This has given us a lot of questions as our customers don't realise that they are also agreeing to HelloSigns UELA. Just a weird experience. Guess you can't change that.

  • When the document is signed, the sender gets one or many emails from HubSpot. First one is about “a signer has signed”, and another is “has been signed by all parties”. This email is only being sent, via HubSpot, to the sales rep who manually needs to enter the deal, locate the quote and then click “download PDF” in order to send it to the customer and internal stakeholders.

    • When all parties have signed, it would be VERY nice to automatically send that PDF to both us, our finance department and the customer for safe keeping.

    • One might think we could create some sort of automation? Yeah, we thought so too by creating a quote-based workflow. However. The PDF itself is not stored in your HubSpot portal, neither is the URL of the quote. At least you won’t find it. So it is impossible to automate this process as it is today. VERY frustrating.

    • Can’t we just send the link to the quote to the customer as it is signed? No, because that is one more really weird thing. Inside the web quote it will only say [SIGNED]. The autograph or initials you entered in the HelloSign UI does not show up in the url agreement. So it is not a “valid” document. The only place the actual signature is valid and has the right datasheet attached to it (information about the signer/IP/etc) is inside the PDF. Which you can’t get a hold of, unless you manually download it from inside HubSpot.

  • Being able to see who viewed the quote. When creating a quote it’s standard to be able to see if the opportunity opened the quote (and especially with HubSpot since tracking is in the foundation), but this is not possible. It is supported by HubSpots “Documents” feature, but not with quotes. What you CAN do (and we have done it) is by using our quote-specific subdomain and creating a custom analytics view of “business.invise.se” in order to see the overall pageviews.

    However, all of these visits are anonymous and will also display inaccurate numbers due to page views from internal sales reps/employees. (Yeah, we can exclude some internal traffic, but when people are working remote with tons of dynamic IP addresses and VPN, that is impossible) 😛 From a sales perspective a rep would also appreciate getting a notification if the recipient opens the quote, of course.

  • One of the most crucial things ever: be able to password protect! This is crazy. If not tech savvy - agreements and quotes are being open to the public. Generally these kinds of information are considered very confidential. We applied robots.txt not to crawl our sites and also created noindex. But this is still a liability and should be pretty top priority.

    I asked the support about this specific matter and received this as an answer from your product managers:

    “If the customers are worried about bad actors seeing the link, we can reassure you the bad actors will have to guess a 14-18 character randomly generated alpha-numeric string to see the quote. This is generally considered impossible in cryptography.”

    This is not a good solution, or answer, at all. Firstly because it’s not super safe and from my understanding from our devs a person can do a site-rip or other methods as it is looking right now. The second thing is that this comment totally relies on the scenario that the quote creator is not changing the “super not sexy” URL that i being automatically created by hubspot, like “https://428584.hs-sites.com/fbd515f57cd8f113b312”. (This is also the URL being sent to our opportunities, and that's why we instead created the structure “https://business.invise.se/hubspot-sample-qoute-custom1” as this is supported in the UI without any coding skills.) And there is also no security disclaimer there saying the dangers of using a custom URL (if HubSpot relies on the comment quoted above). Our company knows these kinds of things, but the man on the street probably doesn't. Ranting I know, but this is just not ok 😄

I’m gonna leave with those comments right now. Cause I know there are many. But hopefully you find them helpful in developing this as a super feature and not just some annoying CTO that thinks he has a lot to say 😄 

If you want more details or insights, please contact me at fredrik.landstrom@invise.se and I'd be happy to help. We also want HubSpot to be top notch!

PS. One additional thing I just remebered. When creating a custom quote you cannot choose what language the default text should be in. We went into the code and did some serious work here and managed to get it to be a specific language depending on recipient, but it is NOT supported by HubSpot. This is also quite frustrating as the quote in general could be in Swedish, but all the pre set headers, product summaries like "monthly" etc will natively be in English. So if one does not have dev skills, this is a hassle. But even for us 😄

Craig-Andrews
Participant | Partenaire solutions
Participant | Partenaire solutions

What do you think of the custom quotes functionality right now?

Résolue

I'd like to be able to pull properties from the deal into the quote. That gives me the opportunity to create custom properties in the deal and have those automatically emeded in the quote. 

ethankopit
Équipe de développement de HubSpot
Équipe de développement de HubSpot

What do you think of the custom quotes functionality right now?

Résolue

Hey Craig! We actually released this several weeks ago. Check the sample templates for the syntax for setting a Deal variable, then you can pull in data using Deal.[data_you_want]

Craig-Andrews
Participant | Partenaire solutions
Participant | Partenaire solutions

What do you think of the custom quotes functionality right now?

Résolue

Thanks Ethan!

 

Is there a place this is documented?

0 Votes
RussJB
Participant

What do you think of the custom quotes functionality right now?

Résolue

Hi 

If I'm understanding you correctly. this is already possible. 

For example. 

{{ DEAL.dealname }} will pull in the Name given to the deal. 

You can also pull in your custom properties using the same method. {{ DEAL.custom_property }}. custom_property is the internal identifier of the property. credit to @amandaulm for this solution. 

 

I'm struggling to pull in all the properties selected from a multi-select custom property adding a special character (' / -) between them at the moment but date/ text, the multiline text seems good. 

 

Hope this helps. 

Craig-Andrews
Participant | Partenaire solutions
Participant | Partenaire solutions

What do you think of the custom quotes functionality right now?

Résolue

Thanks Russ!

 

So, can I put that in the Quote template and have it pull those values into the quote?

0 Votes
amandaulm
Contributeur

What do you think of the custom quotes functionality right now?

Résolue

Hi Jon; thanks for the invite to this group!

 

For my company, I was hoping to have a way to recalculate line items and totals to reflect our weekly quoting and billing frequency, as weekly is not an option at this time (I have upvoted and commented on an existing idea to add this and other billing options). What I found was that while I technically could do that, 1) I would need to rebuild the entire quote-level totals calculation, as the built-in totaling all runs before the quote is rendered, and 2) there is no way to update the 'master' amounts and totals in such a way that they would reflect back on the deal, and in reports.

 

Definitely if I could magic-wand a weekly billing frequency, the quotes feature would be a perfect fit for our business! Barring that, being able to update the line item amounts in such a way that would trigger a re-calculation of the totals on the page would give us a perfect workaround (although I could see some potential security concerns with that as well).

 

I also would like to see some of the built-in HubSpot item properties easier to access in terms of what the internal field names are. I was able to pull what I needed using console logging, but it would be nice to have right in the UI somewhere.

 

I do not have prior experience using HubSpot's CMS or any other dev function with HubSpot; quotes are my first.

Leigh_Simpson
Contributeur | Partenaire solutions Platinum
Contributeur | Partenaire solutions Platinum

What do you think of the custom quotes functionality right now?

Résolue

Agreed on billing frequency.  One client has a requirement for hourly, daily and weekly billing frequency for their services.  

 

Can this be added to the current options?

Leigh_Simpson
Contributeur | Partenaire solutions Platinum
Contributeur | Partenaire solutions Platinum

What do you think of the custom quotes functionality right now?

Résolue

Is there any news / response on this please @jmclaren ?

 

We have clients who want to move to HubSpot for quoting, but need this functionality - and they are keen for an update.

0 Votes