Understanding Quoting Challenges
There are a number of reasons why quoting complex products is challenging, from the intricate web of product configurations and dependencies, to fluctuating material costs, varying customer requirements, and the need to maintain competitive pricing while ensuring profitability.
Product Factors
Complex products often have numerous interrelated components and options that affect each other. For example, in manufacturing equipment, choosing one component might restrict or require certain other components, creating a web of dependencies that sales teams must navigate with skill and carefully.
Pricing Factors
The pricing structure itself often involves multiple dynamic elements:
- Raw material costs that fluctuate with market conditions
- Labor costs that vary by region and level of skill
- Volume-based discounts that change based on order size and SKU
- Custom engineering or modification requirements
- Shipping and logistics costs that depend on product configuration
Customer Factors
Customer requirements and buying dynamics add significant complexity to quoting. Each customer needs unique specifications, modifications, compliance requirements, and integration considerations.
This complexity multiplies when dealing with large buying committees, where multiple stakeholders bring different priorities and requirements (in a firm with 100-500 employees, seven people on average are involved in most buying decisions). Long sales cycles often lead to changing requirements and last-minute revisions, requiring quotes to be reworked and new approvals secured.
Market Factors
Quoting effectively requires careful consideration of competitive positioning, regional variations, and economic conditions. Pricing strategies must adapt to different market segments while accounting for competitor offerings and local regulations. For international sales, currency fluctuations and regional market dynamics add another layer of complexity that must be constantly monitored and adjusted.
Staffing Factors
The human element presents major quoting challenges across both sales and internal operations. Finding and retaining salespeople with deep product knowledge and technical expertise is increasingly difficult in today’s market.
This challenge is compounded by the need to coordinate across multiple departments––from engineering to finance––each with their own priorities, constraints, and tech stacks. Getting timely input from all teams often leads to bottlenecks..
How Quote Automation Solves These Challenges
Quote automation and CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) systems provide highly effective solutions to streamline and optimize the quoting process. Let’s examine how these systems address each of the key challenge areas I identified in the previous section.
Product Factors
Modern CPQ platforms transform how companies handle complex product configurations through intelligent rules engines that automatically validate combinations and dependencies. The system maintains a comprehensive, up-to-date database of all possible configurations, making it simple for sales teams to build accurate quotations without deep technical knowledge.
3D and AR (augmented reality) visual configurators improve the quoting experience by providing real-time visualization of product options and changes. This dramatically reduces errors while improving customer understanding of their choices.
Key takeaways:
- Automated validation of product configurations eliminates errors and impossible combinations
- 3D and AR visual configurators provide real-time feedback on product choices
- Rules engines capture and enforce complex product dependencies
Pricing Factors
Quote automation brings unprecedented control and consistency to pricing challenges through machine learning algorithms and real-time updates. The system automatically adjusts quotes based on current material costs, ensuring pricing remains accurate even in volatile markets.
Complex calculations and approval workflows for volume discounts, custom engineering requirements, regional differences, and shipping costs are handled automatically, maintaining consistency across all quotes while protecting margins.
Key takeaways:
- Real-time cost updates maintain pricing accuracy in volatile markets
- Automated calculations ensure consistent application of discounts and special pricing
- Built-in margin protection safeguards profitability
Customer Factors
CPQ systems adapt to different customer segments through customizable templates and automated compliance checking, ensuring every sales quote meets specific industry and regulatory requirements.
Version control capabilities track all changes throughout the sales cycle, maintaining a clear history of requirement evolution and quote revisions. The integration with CRM systems creates a seamless flow of customer information, enabling sales teams to leverage historical data and preferences for more personalized quotes.
This systematic approach particularly shines in complex deals with multiple stakeholders, as collaborative tools facilitate efficient review and approval processes. Companies using Epicior CPQ have 40% shorter sales cycles on average.
Key takeaways:
- Customizable templates and automated compliance checking meet diverse customer needs
- Version control tracks all changes and maintains clear audit trails
- CRM integration enables data-driven, personalized quoting
Market Factors
Automation empowers organizations to respond dynamically to market conditions through sophisticated pricing and analysis tools. The system automatically applies regional pricing rules and handles currency conversions, ensuring consistency across international markets.
Real-time competitive analysis tools help maintain optimal market positioning, while built-in analytics track sales quote performance and market trends. This market intelligence allows organizations to quickly adapt their pricing strategies to changing conditions while maintaining profitability across different regions and market segments.
Key takeaways:
- Regional pricing rules ensure market-appropriate pricing globally
- Real-time competitive analysis maintains optimal market positioning
- Built-in analytics provide actionable market intelligence
Staffing Factors
Quote automation fundamentally changes how organizations manage their sales teams, especially critical given today’s staffing challenges.
With traditional sales processes, it takes an average of nine months for new sales professionals to be ready for customer engagement, and a full year before they can competently handle their complete quota. However, CPQ systems with guided selling features dramatically accelerate this timeline by reducing the need for extensive product training.
With CPQ, new staff can become productive more quickly by following system-guided workflows that embed best practices and product knowledge. Moreover, by capturing tribal knowledge in configurable rules and automated processes, organizations protect themselves from knowledge loss when experienced staff leave – a crucial advantage in today’s challenging job market.
Key takeaways:
- Guided selling features accelerate new staff onboarding
- Automated workflows eliminate cross-departmental bottlenecks
- Captured tribal knowledge reduces dependency on individual experts
Mini Case Study: Quoting Automation In Action at FHC
Let’s take a quick look at how FHC, a manufacturer of custom glass and glazing products, implemented quote automation to good effect. (For a more detailed case study, click here.)
FHC was a rapidly growing company with an inefficient quoting process for their highly customizable product line. Their manual, spreadsheet-based approach meant processing large quotes could take up to two hours, with constant risk of pricing errors and outdated information.
“All that quoting was previously done through Excel. But the problem was the prices were never up-to-date from the manufacturing side,” explained Christian Rodriguez, President and CEO of the company.
FHC implemented Epicor CPQ to automate their entire quote-to-order workflow. The results were tangible: quote processing time dropped from 1-2 hours to just 10-15 minutes. “Using CPQ, we can now complete the same task in just 10-15 minutes at most…it automatically connects to our systems—no manual input,” says Jesse Dorado from Technical Sales.
Beyond time savings, the new system eliminated manual data entry errors and democratized the quoting process. Team members could now generate accurate quotes without specialized expertise, allowing the sales team to focus more on revenue-generating activities and customer relationships.
Are You Ready to Automate Your Quoting Process?
Implementing quote automation represents a significant step forward for many businesses. With the right software partner, you can modernize your quoting process while maintaining business continuity and seeing benefits within a month.
If you recognize these common challenges, your organization could benefit from a CPQ solution:
✓ Time Management and Efficiency
- Manual quote creation takes hours rather than minutes
- Approval bottlenecks delay sales progress
- Sales team spends more time on paperwork than customer relationships
✓ Pricing Accuracy and Consistency
- Maintaining current pricing across all channels is challenging
- Different regions or salespeople quote inconsistent prices
- Manual errors impact profitability and customer trust
✓ Product Configuration Management
- Products have multiple options and customization requirements
- Configuration mistakes lead to production issues
- Technical knowledge is concentrated among a few team members
✓ Growth Indicators
- Current processes don’t scale with business growth
- Teams struggle to maintain quality with increasing quote volume
- Need for better data and analytics to inform decisions
Many organizations begin their automation journey with just a few of these challenges and build their capabilities over time. Modern CPQ systems are designed to adapt to your current processes while providing a pathway to more advanced automation as your needs evolve. The key is to start with your most pressing challenges and expand from there.
Final thoughts
What excites me most about quote automation isn’t just the efficiency gains––it’s how it fundamentally transforms the relationship between sales teams and their customers. When we remove the friction from quoting, we create space for what really matters: understanding customer needs, building trust, and delivering genuine solutions. That’s where real value creation happens.
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