A heads up to manufacturers: your sales reps are spending too much time building quotes. And it is hurting your bottom line.
For many manufacturing teams, building a proposal is a complex, manual process. It involves juggling overhead, consumables, installer fees, and custom adjustments, while waiting on approvals from estimating, engineering, or legal. Much of this still happens through email threads, PDF attachments, and Excel files.
Here is the issue: every hour a sales rep spends chasing internal approvals is an hour not spent with a customer.
Why Manual Quoting Hurts Sales
When sales teams are buried in spreadsheets and emails, efficiency suffers. Deals slow down, customer experience declines, and revenue opportunities are missed. Manual quoting creates:
- Longer turnaround times on proposals
- Higher risk of errors in pricing or approvals
- Frustrated sales reps who cannot focus on selling
- Inconsistent presentation of quotes and contracts
For growing manufacturers and distributors, manual quoting simply does not scale.
How Automation Fixes the Problem
The solution is to automate quoting through a modern CRM system like SalesNOW. By moving quoting into the CRM, manufacturers eliminate wasted time and create consistency across the sales pipeline.
Automate Job Costing
Quoting should pull from predefined templates and pricing logic, not manual calculations. With SalesNOW’s sales database, sales teams can access accurate cost breakdowns—including shipping, installation, and overhead—without reinventing the wheel every time.
Automate Internal Approvals
If engineering, finance, or legal needs to sign off, approvals can be built into an automated CRM workflow. With workflow automation, notifications are sent instantly, and the system will not advance until approvals are complete. No more chasing signatures.
Automate Quote Generation
Proposals should be professional, accurate, and consistent. With SalesNOW, sales reps can generate proposals at the click of a button. Standardized templates ensure every quote reflects company policies, legal terms, and brand standards.
Why This Matters
Your best salespeople are not order takers. They are relationship builders. Their value comes from understanding customer needs, presenting solutions, and building trust—not from being stuck in admin work that technology can handle.
By automating quoting processes in SalesNOW:
- Sales reps spend more time in front of customers
- Deals move faster through the sales funnel
- Errors and inconsistencies are reduced
- Customer experience improves with quicker, more professional proposals
The Bottom Line
Sales reps should not be wasting hours creating quotes, chasing approvals, and reformatting spreadsheets. With SalesNOW’s CRM software, manufacturers and distributors can automate job costing, streamline approvals, and generate proposals instantly.
The result is simple: more selling time, faster deals, and healthier margins.
Are your sales reps spending too much time building quotes instead of closing deals? Connect with the SalesNOW team today to see how our best CRM software can automate quoting and free your sales team to do what they do best—sell.