Custom Quote Template Beta

jmclaren
HubSpot Employee
HubSpot Employee

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

SOLVE

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

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1 Accepted solution
RussJB
Participant

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

SOLVE

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 Replies 72
BRAWAT
Participant

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

SOLVE

The marketing & ad industry uses an Insertion Order instead of a quote. A few parameters that would be immensely helpful while creating a custom quote:

  1. Building a checklist: If we can build (or attach) a custom checklist, that would give the flexibility to send quotes for large projects highlighting what is covered under the project, any pre-requisites, expectation setting with the client, etc.
  2. Adding attachments: Several projects need images, documents, even videos to be attached in the quote to make it comprehensive for clients.
0 Upvotes
MMT
Contributor

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

SOLVE

Salesforce have been promoting and announcing some big new and innovative features for CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote Software) tools. They've realised, like several other CRM's the critical nature of the quote/product functions, for helping their customers grow their bottom line, reducing wasted time for its sales teams - see below.  I'm sure Hubspot has Salesforce in its sights and to do better again!

 

Below for reference only

 

CPQ Salesforce, or Configure, Price, Quote Software by Salesforce is a sales tool for companies to provide accurate pricing with any given product configuration scenario. CPQ applications take into account optional features, customizations, quantities, and discounts, allowing sales reps to quote prices quickly and accurately. Salesforce CPQ gives your sales team easy to use software, available on any device due to it’s cloud based platform. Hosted within the Sales Cloud platform giving you a direct link with your CRM to make the most impactful sales decisions.

 

How can CPQ increase the bottom line? 

While many companies don’t have CPQ software yet, those that do are seeing impressive positive results in time, deal size, quote accuracy, and sales processes.

 

CPQ reduces wasted time.

In order for sales organizations to be profitable, they need to work smarter and more efficiently. A way to do so would be to take a look at lean manufacturing principles, such as eliminating waste in the production process and applying it to sales tactics.

 

https://www.salesforce.com/products/cpq/resources/what-is-salesforce-cpq/ 

 

0 Upvotes
ethankopit
HubSpot Product Team
HubSpot Product Team

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

SOLVE

@jon_d to be clear (and sorry for not responding sooner) - yes, all custom modules that you create as part of a quote template will be available for users to edit (1) in the template editing UI (i.e. Settings --> Products & Quotes --> Quote Templates --> Click Any Template You Have Created) and (2) if they're labelled as "editable" reps will also be able to edit those modules when creating a quote. The admin creating those templates will have that control. 

geoffroy
Participant

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

SOLVE

@ethankopit — Do you have an update on the availability of this?
This would be great to make the custom quotes practical and flexible for our sales team.

Thanks,

G.

geoffroy
Participant

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

SOLVE

We are playing with the quote templates at the moment and this is exactly what we are missing to move on. Looking forward to this update!
Coming from the HubSpot's CMS, it felt very natural and fast to build the templates and we could reuse some of our existing patterns to save time.

0 Upvotes
jon_d
Participant | Diamond Partner
Participant | Diamond Partner

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

SOLVE

@ethankopit wrote:

@jon_d to be clear (and sorry for not responding sooner) - yes, all custom modules that you create as part of a quote template will be available for users to edit (1) in the template editing UI (i.e. Settings --> Products & Quotes --> Quote Templates --> Click Any Template You Have Created) and (2) if they're labelled as "editable" reps will also be able to edit those modules when creating a quote. The admin creating those templates will have that control. 


@ethankopit - Do you know when this will be available?

 

We are working on custom quotes for 2 clients (and also for our own company), and this would be great to use.

 

Thanks, Jon.

MMT
Contributor

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

SOLVE

QUOTING and PRODUCTS - POORLY DESIGNED

Seems to be one area where Hubspot has made very little improvement or genuine committment to improve quoting / products areas.  Functions are limited, userability experience and customisation is also limited.  Intergration with billing systems has several pitfalls, even after integration.  Its really disappointing, especially as QUOTES are probably one of the most single most important aspects of any company doing business.  

 

The community has been begging for improvements, critical and "essential" features that most businesses and users need Hubspot to implement as priority including:

 

1. Default taxes settings for quotes - %, or specific tax amounts for specific products, regions, countries.  This is glaring oversight of Hubspot, that it should implement immediately.  

2. Default company terms and conditions for all quotes - not relying on users to have to manually add snippets or terms and conditions

3. Allowing users to create quotes on behalf of others users - this is a critical feature when there are sales teams/admins helping each other. 

4. Company details (VAT, GST, ABN, banking details etc) fields to be able to be added automatically for customers to easily set up companies in their vendor systems

 

If HubSpot are expecting users to manually input above every time a quote needs to be created, then you're only exposing users to make mistakes with customers, ruining reputation, due to manual inputting by users, and restricting Hubspot's users from giving the best experience they can and doing business with their customers, and adding manual work and costs to us users. 

 

hopefully Hubspot can take these on board as a priority, will be a small step to start catching up on the other CRM leaders - Salesforce, ActiveCampaign etc. 

 

Cheers team!

 

these are very simple, not rocket science.  Ask HubSpot to look through the prism

ethankopit
HubSpot Product Team
HubSpot Product Team

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

SOLVE

Thanks for the feedback @MMT and I'm sorry that you don't feel like we have a genuine commitment to growth 🙂 Quite the contrary, our Quotes tool is being heavily invested in, but a lot those investments just aren't released quite yet. I'm excited to hear what you think when you get a chance to try some of them out. Let me address some of your comments piecemeal.

(1) This is something we're working on. First, we will likely implement a tax library, then there will be some sort of configuration step that allows you to set default taxes on quotes, payment links, line items, etc. Thanks for keeping us honest. We'll probably do this with discounts as well.

(2) In some of my comments above, you'll see that this is also actively being worked on. The way this will work is that template creators will be able to add default content (e.g. text, images, videos, etc.) to quotes in the quote template editor AND they will be able to mark those modules as editable/not-editable during quote creation. Then, when a quote is being created, only the modules that are marked as "editable" will be editable.

 

(3) We definitely want to make Quote Owner a changeable field. It's quite common for users to create Quotes for other users and our UI definitely doesn't give you enough leeway there.

 

(4) Soon, we'll be releasing HubSpot Payments which will allow you to collect ACH information in the US, but we don't have a European offering (yet). Unfortunately, we can't store banking info like bank acc info, SWIFT, or routing numbers in the CRM for compliance reasons. However, using customer quotes, you could easily embed a form that collects non-payment information.

 

Our overall goal for Quotes is to make it so that the people creating quotes spend as little time as possible creating the quote with the maximum amount of configuration being done automatically by rules/settings/templates set up by admins. 

 

Thanks for the prism!

MMT
Contributor

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

SOLVE

Hey HubSpot, product managers, community moderators, any update on all of below here? 

 

The community has been begging for improvements, critical and "essential" features that most businesses and users need Hubspot to implement as priority including:

 

1. Default taxes settings for quotes - %, or specific tax amounts for specific products, regions, countries.  This is glaring oversight of Hubspot, that it should implement immediately.  

2. Default company terms and conditions for all quotes - not relying on users to have to manually add snippets or terms and conditions

3. Allowing users to create quotes on behalf of others users - this is a critical feature when there are sales teams/admins helping each other. 

4. Company details (VAT, GST, ABN, banking details etc) fields to be able to be added automatically for customers to easily set up companies in their vendor systems. If HubSpot are expecting users to manually input above every time a quote needs to be created, then you're only exposing users to make mistakes with customers, ruining reputation, due to manual inputting by users, and restricting Hubspot's users from giving the best experience they can and doing business with their customers, and adding manual work and costs to us users. 

5. Quote contact details - when creating Quotes, it seems impossible to be able to add custom contact details (or our company contact details on the quote, and insteead only allows the person who created the deal's contact details to be added to quote.  in many cases, we do not want the quote creaters contact details on the quote.  Can you fix and address this too?  

 

For example, with primary contact details:

 

Company name

Company address

Company website

Company ph

 

Optional - and provide an option for person creating a quote to also add these details (or not)

 

Contact name

Contact title

Contact email

Contact phone

MMT
Contributor

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

SOLVE

Hey HubSpot, product managers, community moderators, any update on all of below here? 

 

The community has been begging for improvements, critical and "essential" features that most businesses and users need Hubspot to implement as priority including:

 

1. Default taxes settings for quotes - %, or specific tax amounts for specific products, regions, countries.  This is glaring oversight of Hubspot, that it should implement immediately.  

2. Default company terms and conditions for all quotes - not relying on users to have to manually add snippets or terms and conditions

3. Allowing users to create quotes on behalf of others users - this is a critical feature when there are sales teams/admins helping each other. 

4. Company details (VAT, GST, ABN, banking details etc) fields to be able to be added automatically for customers to easily set up companies in their vendor systems

 

If HubSpot are expecting users to manually input above every time a quote needs to be created, then you're only exposing users to make mistakes with customers, ruining reputation, due to manual inputting by users, and restricting Hubspot's users from giving the best experience they can and doing business with their customers, and adding manual work and costs to us users. 

MMT
Contributor

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

SOLVE

5. Quote contact details - when creating Quotes, it seems impossible to be able to add custom contact details (or our company contact details on the quote, and insteead only allows the person who created the deal's contact details to be added to quote.  in many cases, we do not want the quote creaters contact details on the quote.  Can you fix and address this too?  

 

For example, with primary contact details:

 

Company name

Company address

Company website

Company ph

 

Optional - and provide an option for person creating a quote to also add these details (or not)

 

Contact name

Contact title

Contact email

Contact phone

0 Upvotes
MMT
Contributor

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

SOLVE

Hi @ethankopit that's great, thanks, its really helpful to get more frequent updates and responses such as these to the community and all the Hubspot lovers, especially when Hubspot community take time out of their day to help Hubspot improve and grow too - keep the updates coming!

 

Importantly, can you provide an ETA (timing) when these product/quote updates will be available? 

 

Cheers again

0 Upvotes
JBarton74
Participant

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

SOLVE

I do not see where we can tell date and time signed and can there be a repository for completed, viewed, pending sig, not opened, and additional criteria. I can see that if I log into Hello sign but how do I see what the reps have sold? Notifications as well? Can I use workflows to be notified and or use to motivate reps to follow up?

0 Upvotes
BGrennan
Contributor

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

SOLVE

Seems good so far. It's a relatively natural extension to developing for the CMS.

 

Previewing print versions seems to be a bit tedious at the moment but perhaps there's a quicker way than how I've been doing it:

1. Make html/module changes in Design Tools

2. Create/Resave Quote template in /sales/products/quote-templates

3. Create/Recall & edit a sample quote

4. Download the pdf (which can take a few tries, seemingly the pdf takes a little time to generate)

 

It doesn't sound like a lot but it s when you consider that you have to do it to test every change you make.

 

Some alternatives that help but don't render exactly the same as the downloaded pdf:

- Right click>Print

- Emulate CSS Print with Chrome Dev Tools

 

Again, neither perfectly replicate the final pdf but are helpful

0 Upvotes
arlogilbert
Contributor

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

SOLVE

I would love the ability to control the slug prefix... Right now it is mydomain.com/{{random-string}} as generated by hubspot but for the purposes of conversation bots, exit intents, and for tracking goals & funnels it would be great to force the prefix to be mydomain.com/quote/{{random-string}} so that we could utilize the /quote/

 

Right now we have a workaround where the template adds ?quote=true to the query string using javascript before the hubspot tags run.... it works but it's not elegant 🙂

0 Upvotes
ethankopit
HubSpot Product Team
HubSpot Product Team

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

SOLVE

Control over discounting, fees, etc. will be addressed in two future releases, one focused on Line Item field-level-permissions and the other focused on a quote validation rules engine. Exciting stuff we hope to work on this year!

ethankopit
HubSpot Product Team
HubSpot Product Team

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

SOLVE

Hey team - in the future, we'll be eliminating comments to buyer and purchase terms since both could be represented as modules in your template (and you would be able to customize them) and you will have control over whether or not they are editable. They're only available today because we haven't completed the feature that will allow you to mark a module on the template as editable/not editable.

jon_d
Participant | Diamond Partner
Participant | Diamond Partner

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

SOLVE

@ethan - Does this mean that the custom modules that we create in the custom template will be available for the person creating the quote to fill out if we set those fields to 'editable'?

 

Quick vidyard to explain my thinking: https://share.vidyard.com/watch/cNXzdskgJYE8fYUrKUL5Uy

 

MontserratAlbar
Member | Elite Partner
Member | Elite Partner

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

SOLVE

Hi Jon, I’ve been using the Custom Quote Template Beta for a few weeks now and I have some questions:

  1. I would like to set a fixed tax whenever I’m using a specific template, is that possible? I haven’t been able to find how to do it.
  2. Also, I would like to include the Deal Owner’s name, is there a way to pull the name of the user who is assigned to that specific deal?

Thanks in advance.

Leigh_Simpson
Contributor | Platinum Partner
Contributor | Platinum Partner

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

SOLVE
Setting a standard tax rate, either universally or at Company level would be a good idea for businesses supplying one market, which I guess is most.
MissTipsi
Top Contributor

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

SOLVE

Apologies, if this is deemed more applicable to Products than Quotes, but given their relatedness to one another, for me there are two major issues:

i) Ability to bundle products into a Package. We sell HW and SW and sometimes offer a combination. Any package would need to respect the payment terms of the individual components in order for MRR, ACV etc to be correctly maintained in reporting. I

Additonally if the Package is at a discount to the sum of the individual component pricing, should be able to specify how that discount applies to the individual componentes. In our case for example we never discount HW as it is not our core business, so any discount should be applied to SW resulting in reduced MRR

ii) Should be able to have different "price tariffs". We sell direct and through 3rd parties and want ability to have different prices for certain products depending on the sales channel. With a long sales catalogue, it isn't realistic to ask Sales to manually adjust everything correctly, so we have ended up duplicating products which is far from ideal.