Why You Should Be Using Salesforce Quotes with Opportunities

How often do sales people give more than one quote to the customer to clinch a deal?

Always? Sometimes? Hardly ever?

Often customers ask for more than one quote. They want the price with and without various optional products. Or they need quotes based on different quantity discounts.

Other times the sales person will deliberately offer more than one quote. That’s giving the prospect a choice. It’s an intelligent approach if you’re not sure about the customer’s budget.

In either situation we need to keep a record of what has been quoted. Chances are, we’ll need to refer back to these previous quotes at some point in the sales process.

But how can we best manage this in salesforce? And how do we avoid over-inflating the sales pipeline?

The answer is to use salesforce quotes.

With salesforce quotes sales people can record and track the various product and price combinations given to the customer. The sales person can decide which quote is most likely to be accepted by the customer. It’s that quote which becomes the value of the opportunity for pipeline reporting purposes. Synchronizing that quote to the opportunity avoids double-counting opportunities.

So, back to our question. How often is the customer given more than one quote during the sales process? If the answer is always or sometimes, and you’re wondering how to keep track of it all, then salesforce quotes is the solution you’re looking for.

 

Quotes in salesforce explained

A quote is a specific combination of Products, Quantities and Pricing. It’s the specific group of products and their associated prices that you’ve quoted to a customer.

Here’s an example of a quote. We can see there are three products, including the Bronze Service Contract.

The total value of the quote is £83,700. Incidentally to see how to make it easy for sales people to add multiple products to an opportunity or quote, check out our product selection wizard.

Let’s look at another quote. Two of the products are the same, but this quote has the Silver Service Contract.

With the Silver Support Contract the value of the quote has increased to £94,700.

And now here’s a third quote. This one has the Gold Service Contact, a bigger discount on the Generator and an additional product.

So all three quotes represent proposals that the customer might agree to purchase.

Let’s see how that looks on the Opportunity.

We now have a single opportunity with three individual quotes. The sales person can go back to any quote during the sales lifecycle and examine the specific combination of products and prices that were proposed to the customer.

Pipeline forecasts with quotes

Each of the three quotes has a different value. So what’s the value of this opportunity in the sales pipeline? It’s certainly not the value of all three quotes added together.

Fortunately there’s a standard salesforce mechanism on the quote that helps us. It’s the sync button.

The sync button means that we can synchronise one of the quotes (and only one) to the opportunity.

Clicking the Start Sync button does two things.

First, the products that are on the quote are automatically created as Line Items on the Opportunity. Second, the value of the quote that has been sync’d becomes the value of the opportunity.

In other words, the sales person is effectively saying, “I don’t know for sure which quote the customer is going to go with. I think #2 is the most likely. That’s the one I want to include for pipeline forecasting purposes”.

Here’s the Opportunity with Quote #2 synced.

The Opportunity Products reflect the products that had been added to Quote #2. And the value of the opportunity is the same as the value of Quote #2. It’s this value that will be reflected in the sales pipeline but we’ve still got a record of the other two quotes that have been given to the customer.

What happens as we move through the sales cycle? Let’s say that after further discussions with the customer, the sales person decides that Quote 3 is now the most likely outcome. No problem. Syncing that quote replaces the opportunity product line items and changes the Amount to match opportunity #3.

Now we have a full audit trail of all the product price combinations. This means if the customer comes back with a query, or decides to go with a previous product price combination, you’ve got that covered.

How often do your sales people give more than one quote to the customer to clinch a deal? If it’s sometimes or often, then let salesforce quotes be your friend!

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