How do you make a sales quote (also called an “estimate”) in Quickbooks? It’s a relatively simple process. Problem is that it also delivers a relatively simple result, and in today’s ultra-competitive market, a simplistic sales quote rarely lands a new customer. But we digress…
There are four steps:
Navigate to Estimate (under the New tab, Customers column)
Create your estimate, adding a Customer Name, Estimate Date, Expiration Date, Products/Services, Quantities
Preview Estimate
Send Estimate
Easy, right? You know where to find the lists of products and services, right? And you’re 100% certain it’s the most recent list, right? You know where to select a proposal template for your estimate, yes? How to set pricing and/or add discounts, right?!? And you also know to track a sales quote after you send it and ensure it was received, RIGHT?!?!?
What we’re saying — in no uncertain terms — is that, for most sales people, it is NOT actually easy to create a sales quote in Quickbooks.
And no matter who you are, it is generally impossible to create a sales quote in Quickbooks that will stand out in a crowd, an RFP response that POPS louder than the competition’s.
But you know what is easy and makes creating professional looking sales proposals — with centrally managed and optimal product and pricing configurations — into a “drag and drop” task done in a few minutes? Adding configure, price, quote (CPQ) to Quickbooks.
Play to your strengths: Quickbooks at the backend, CPQ at the front
Quickbooks is one of the easiest to use bookkeeping solutions on the market, but let’s be honest: it’s not really a sales or marketing tool. You wouldn’t use it as your CRM or as your ESP, so why attempt to use it as your CPQ? There’s a maxim that applies, “if every task were a nail, the only tool we’d need is a hammer.” But accounting and bookkeeping are radically different tasks from selling and closing, which means we require radically different solutions for the back-end (accounting) and front (selling).
Take the simple task of creating an estimate/quote. In Quickbooks, you have essentially one path: using the interface. It’s not a proposal template, per se, and you must manually add most every product or service.
With a CPQ solution (which, by the way, can be integrated with Quickbooks), you can have multiple, industry-specific sales proposal templates. Perhaps more importantly, as mentioned above, with a CPQ solution, product and pricing configurations (as well as discounting structures) are centrally managed, which means every representative is working off the same “script.”
Additionally, a CPQ system can be prepopulated with product images and bundles, ensuring that every quote you send is leveraging the fact that “a picture is worth a thousand words.” (Images must be individually and manually added with Quickbooks.)
Finally (for now, anyway… we believe there’s a lot more to say on this topic, but we’ll save it for future articles), a CPQ solution enables granular tracking of every proposal sent. You can track every task, every customer contact, every quote revision, every step. Closing a sale is perhaps the most important phase in every customer relationship, and every step you take getting there should be duly noted, and learned from.
We love Quickbooks, and use it regularly for almost every accounting need. But for driving the sales that keep your accounting plate full…? We’ll use the right tool every time, CPQ.
