Table of Content
- Quoting Software Comparison: What to Evaluate First?
- Choosing a Quoting Tool: Must-Have Capabilities
- Industry-Specific Quoting Solutions
- Your Quoting Software Comparison Checklist
- Common Mistakes B2B Sales Leaders Make When Choosing Quoting Software
- Quoting Software ROI: How to Measure Success?
- Conclusion
- FAQs
In the modern B2B landscape, speed and accuracy aren’t just advantages; they’re expectations. Your buyers expect a seamless, low-effort experience, and the sales quote is often where the deal is won or lost. It’s an important touchpoint where your pricing, terms, and trustworthiness converge.
With 72% of the B2B sellers’ time going into non-sales activities (sellerscommerce), we need to focus on critical activities where time and revenue are lost.
Selecting the best quoting software for your business is a high-stakes decision that directly impacts your revenue, sales cycle length, and customer satisfaction.
This guide provides a practical framework to help you perform a thorough quoting software comparison, ensuring you empower your sales team, delight your customers, and protect your margins.
Key Takeaways:
- Selecting quoting software requires evaluating how well the platform automates pricing, approvals, and configuration rules.
- Tools with CRM and ERP integrations support seamless sales operations and reduce data fragmentation.
- Real-time distributor feeds improve accuracy by ensuring quotes reflect current price and stock levels.
- Reporting and analytics capabilitiesdeterminehow effectively leaders can optimize quoting performance.
- Scalability and customizationimpactthe tool’s ability to support complex deal structures over time.
With 72% of the B2B sellers’ time going into non-sales activities (sellerscommerce), we need to focus on critical activities where time and revenue are lost.
Selecting the best quoting software for your business is a high-stakes decision that directly impacts your revenue, sales cycle length, and customer satisfaction.
This guide provides a practical framework to help you perform a thorough quoting software comparison, ensuring you empower your sales team, delight your customers, and protect your margins.
Quoting Software Comparison: What to Evaluate First?
Before diving into a sea of features, take a step back and map your internal processes and goals. The right software should adapt to your business, not the other way around.
Map Your Unique Selling Motions
First, understand the DNA of your sales process. A solution that’s perfect for a simple SaaS sale might fail a complex manufacturing distributor.
- What you sell: Do you offer standard SKUs, configurable bundles, professional services with Statements of Work (SOWs), or recurring subscriptions?
- How you sell: Is your team primarily inside sales, field sales, or do you rely on partners and channels? Do you need a self-serve portal for quote requests?
- Where you’re going: Consider your future needs. Are you planning global expansion with multi-currency requirements? Are you shifting to usage-based pricing models?
Prioritize the Buyer Experience & Speed
The modern buyer has little patience for slow, confusing, or error-prone quotes. According to a McKinsey report, B2B buyers now use ten or more channels to interact with suppliers, and they expect a consistent, high-quality experience across all of them. Your quoting process is a major part of that experience.
Aim for a system that offers a low-friction journey for your customers. This means interactive web quotes they can review on any device, clear terms, and automated reminders that don’t require your reps to chase them manually. The goal is to reduce the time-to-first-quote from hours or days to mere minutes.
Ensure Data Quality & Governance
Pricing errors are silent killers of profit and trust. Your quoting software must be the single source of truth for pricing, preventing reps from using outdated spreadsheets or inaccurate data. Key elements include:
- Centralized Pricing: Control list prices, contract-specific pricing, and customer-specific discounts with effective-date controls.
- Complete Auditability: Maintain a clear record of who changed what, when, and why for every quote.
- Robust Version Control: Easily track revisions and manage quote templates without losing historical data.
Define Your Integration Strategy
A quoting tool that doesn’t communicate with your other systems creates more work, not less. Seamless integration is non-negotiable. Your platform must connect with your core business applications, including:
- CRM: For pulling account, contact, and opportunity data.
- ERP/Tax/Payments: For streamlined order creation, invoicing, tax calculations, and payment processing.
- Product Catalogs/Feeds: For real-time cost and availability, especially crucial for industries like IT distribution.
Pro Tips:
• Prioritize platforms that offer flexible APIs to future-proof integrations as your system landscape evolves.
Read the blog—Evaluation Questions to Ask Before Selecting a Quoting Solution
Choosing a Quoting Tool: Must-Have Capabilities
Once you’ve mapped your strategic needs, you can assess specific features. When choosing a quoting tool, these are the core capabilities that deliver the most significant impact on efficiency and revenue.
Quote Creation and Sales Productivity
The software should make it incredibly simple for reps to build complex quotes quickly and accurately.
- Guided Selling: Rules-based item entry that prevents incompatible product combinations.
- Bulk Actions: The ability to apply discounts, terms, or shipping rules across multiple line items at once.
- Content Library: Pre-approved snippets for SOWs, service descriptions, and legal terms that reps can pull in instantly.
- Branded Templates: A library of professional, brand-locked templates that ensure consistency.
Pricing, Margin, and Approval Workflows
This is where you balance speed with control. The right system empowers reps to move fast while protecting your profitability. Look for rule-driven pricing for volume or customer tiers, clear margin visibility at both the line-item and overall quote level, and automated approval workflows that route deals to the right people based on predefined rules (e.g., discount percentage, deal size, or product family).
Collaboration and E-Signature
Modern deals involve multiple stakeholders on both sides. Your quoting platform should be a collaborative hub. Features like in-quote commenting, @mentions, and a full version history keep internal teams aligned. For the customer, interactive web quotes combined with secure e-signature and acceptance capture accelerate the closing process dramatically.
Industry-Specific Quoting Solutions
While the core needs are similar, certain industries have unique challenges that require specialized quoting solutions.
- For VARs & IT Resellers: The absolute must-have is distributor connectivity. Real-time cost and availability feeds from multiple suppliers are essential to protect razor-thin margins and ensure you’re quoting products you can actually deliver. The system should also intelligently suggest compatible accessories and warranties to increase the average deal size.
Pro Tips:
• Test quoting engines using multi-vendor bundle scenarios to evaluate rule-handling reliability.
- For Manufacturing & Distribution: Look for capabilities to manage complex kits and bundles, customer-specific contracts, and real-time inventory levels. The software should reflect warehouse realities, including shipping and potential split deliveries.
- For Enterprise Software/SaaS: The focus is on managing different editions, add-ons, and usage-based pricing. The platform must also support complex renewal and expansion motions and be able to attach security and legal documentation seamlessly.
Mobile Accessibility
- Mobile quoting apps for field sales: Mobile quoting apps empower sales reps to generate, customize, and send quotes directly from their smartphones or tablets. This ensures faster responses during client meetings and improves overall customer engagement.
- Offline quoting capabilities: Offline quoting allows sales teams to create and edit quotes even without internet connectivity. Once back online, the system syncs automatically, ensuring no delays or missed opportunities in areas with poor connectivity.
Analytics & Reporting
- KPIs: Quoting software provides sales leaders with visibility into key performance indicators (KPIs) such as how many quotes convert to deals, how long approvals take, and the overall duration of the quote-to-cash cycle. These metrics help identify bottlenecks and measure sales efficiency.
- Forecasting insights: By analyzing historical quoting data, sales leaders can forecast future revenue, anticipate demand, and make data-driven decisions. This enables better resource allocation, pricing strategies, and sales planning.
Read the blog—Quoting Software: Driving Efficiency and Profitability for VARs
Your Quoting Software Comparison Checklist
Use this list of questions during demos and trials to cut through the sales pitch and find the right partner.
- Can you show me, live, how long it takes a new rep to create a typical quote for my business?
- How much control do we have over templates? What can be locked versus what can be edited by a sales rep?
- How does the system determine the source of truth for pricing (list vs. contract vs. customer-specific)?
- What kind of margin and discount guardrails can we build, and how are approvals routed?
- What does the buyer’s experience look like with an interactive web quote?
- How deep are your native integrations with our CRM and ERP systems?
- What out-of-the-box analytics do you provide for tracking conversion rates, cycle times, and approval bottlenecks?
- How easy is it for an admin to update pricing rules or templates without needing IT support?
- What does your typical implementation and onboarding process look like?
- What is on your product roadmap for the next 6-12 months?
- Can it handle your growing catalog size and team size? How does it perform with thousands of SKUs or multiple distributors?
Common Mistakes B2B Sales Leaders Make When Choosing Quoting Software
Choosing based only on price
Many sales leaders focus solely on upfront licensing costs instead of evaluating the long-term value the solution delivers. A cheaper tool may lack critical features like automation or integrations, which can cost more in lost efficiency.
Ignoring integration capabilities
Quoting software that doesn’t integrate with CRM, ERP, or eCommerce platforms often creates data silos and workflow disruptions. This forces sales reps to duplicate data entry, increasing errors and slowing down the process.
Not involving sales reps in the decision-making
Sales leaders sometimes make purchasing decisions without gathering input from frontline users. Since reps are the ones creating and sending quotes daily, their feedback on usability and efficiency is critical.
Underestimating scalability requirements
Businesses often choose quoting software that meets immediate needs but fails as the team or catalog grows. Limited scalability leads to performance bottlenecks, slower quote generation, and higher costs for switching tools later.
Overlooking vendor support quality
Even the best quoting software can fall short without reliable vendor support during onboarding, troubleshooting, or upgrades. Poor support leads to downtime, frustrated users, and slower adoption.
Quoting Software ROI: How to Measure Success?
Time to Quote
Quoting software significantly cuts down the time needed to prepare, customize, and send quotes. Instead of hours or days, quotes can be generated in minutes with automated product catalogs and pricing rules. This agility helps sales teams respond faster and stay ahead of competitors.
Impact on deal conversions
Accurate, professional, and timely quotes increase buyer confidence and improve conversion rates. With features like real-time pricing and automated approvals, sales teams can avoid delays that often cause customers to switch vendors.
Revenue Acceleration
By automating approvals, integrating with billing, and enabling eSignatures, quoting software reduces bottlenecks in the sales cycle. This means deals close faster, payments are received sooner, and cash flow improves.
Profit Margins
Quoting tools enforce pre-set pricing rules, margin protection, and discount thresholds to prevent revenue leakage. Sales reps get visibility into profit margins in real-time, ensuring every deal stays profitable. This disciplined approach balances competitive pricing with long-term profitability.
Feedback on professional quotes
Customers value speed, accuracy, and transparency in B2B buying. Branded, clear, and well-structured quotes not only leave a professional impression but also simplify decision-making. Faster responses enhance trust, leading to better customer experiences and stronger relationships.
Operational Efficiency
Manual quote creation often leads to mistakes in pricing, product availability, or terms. Quoting software eliminates these risks by automating data entry and syncing with ERP/CRM systems. As a result, teams spend less time fixing errors and more time selling.
Conclusion
Choosing the right quoting software is not just about features, it’s about finding a solution that fits your sales process, supports your team, and makes life easier for your customers. The right tool will save time, reduce errors, and give you better control over pricing and margins, while also improving the buyer’s experience. By carefully comparing your options and keeping long-term goals in mind, you can pick a quoting solution that drives efficiency, boosts sales, and builds stronger customer relationships.
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FAQs
How will quoting software impact my sales team's productivity?
By automating manual tasks, reducing errors, and providing pre-approved templates, quoting software can save sales reps several hours per week. This frees them up from administrative work to focus on what they do best: selling.
What's the typical ROI I can expect from quoting software?
The ROI comes from multiple sources: time saved per quote, increased conversion rates due to a faster and more professional process, reduced revenue loss from pricing errors, and higher average deal sizes from guided upselling. Most companies see a positive ROI within 6-12 months.
Is it difficult to integrate quoting software with my existing CRM?
Most modern quoting platforms offer native, pre-built integrations with major CRMs like Salesforce, HubSpot, and others. This typically involves a straightforward setup process that can be completed without extensive IT resources.
How can I ensure my sales team will actually adopt the new software?
Choose a platform with an intuitive, user-friendly interface. A phased rollout, starting with a pilot team, can also help. Most importantly, demonstrate the value by showing reps how it directly helps them close deals faster and earn more commission.
Can this software handle complex quotes with multiple currencies or languages?
Yes, enterprise-grade quoting software is designed for global sales. Look for platforms that explicitly support multi-entity, multi-currency, and multi-language capabilities to manage your international operations from a single system.
What kind of security measures should I look for in a quoting platform?
Ensure the platform offers robust security features, including SSO (Single Sign-On), role-based permissions, data encryption both at rest and in transit, and compliance with standards like SOC 2 and GDPR.
How does quoting software prevent pricing errors and protect my margins?
It centralizes all pricing information and uses rules-based logic to apply the correct discounts. Margin guardrails provide visual alerts or require mandatory approval if a deal falls below a certain profitability threshold, giving you complete control.
How does this improve my customer's buying experience?
It provides customers with fast, accurate, and professional-looking interactive quotes they can review and approve on any device. This transparency and ease of doing business build trust and shorten the sales cycle.
How much should I budget for quoting software?
Pricing typically depends on the number of users, the feature set required, and the complexity of integrations. Most vendors offer tiered pricing (e.g., Core, Growth, Enterprise) so you can choose a plan that fits your current needs and budget.
Can I start small and scale up as my business grows?
Absolutely. A key benefit of SaaS quoting solutions is their scalability. You can start with a core package for a single team and add more advanced features, integrations, and users as your company expands.
What's the main difference between a basic quoting tool and a full CPQ platform?
A basic quoting tool automates quote generation. A CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) platform is more advanced, handling complex product configurations and sophisticated pricing rules, making it ideal for businesses with highly customizable products or services.
How long does a typical implementation take?
A basic implementation can be completed in 30 days or less (Foundation Phase). A more comprehensive rollout with complex integrations and workflows might take 60-90 days to fully scale and optimize.
