How to track quotes and estimates

A common business sends a number of quotes to their customers week by week, but how can they follow up on these proposals in an efficient manner?

3 tips to keep track of your quotes

One of the most important moments during the negotiation and sale process is sending quotations and proposals, however, this is barely the beginning if your ultimate goal is to close the sale. When you only send a couple of quotes it’s easy to follow up, but when you have to handle a larger volume this process can become chaotic, which leads to many businesses losing potential sales. What we suggest you do in these cases is:

1. Organize your quotes by status or situation (pending, sent, received, contracted, canceled, etc.). It will be much easier to manage your list of quotes if you manage to filter them according to their current status or situation.
2. Update the statuses. Each time a customer confirms, cancels or gives you information about their purchase decision, update the status of the quote to keep it up to date.
3. Follow-up on acceptances, cancellations or comments. When a client communicates their desire to hire or buy your services, you must respond and contact them immediately. Time is a key element, if you take too long to close the sale, be sure that the client will go for the second option without hesitation. In the event that the customer cancels it’s also important to know why, because many times the sale can be rescued before it’s too late. Finally, it’s advisable to answer the comments or make the changes requested in the quote immediately.

What tools can you use to automate budget tracking?

As we mentioned earlier, following up on your proposals is a vital issue for the sales process. Today there are tools called CRMs, but these serve to follow up on potential clients or prospects and isn’t necessarily a practical tool for quotation tracking, or it isn’t in most CRMs. If your SME sends quotes to customers we recommend the tool offered by Osmos Cloud. This is a hybrid between a CRM and sales management software, where you can use either the CRM to track prospects or the quote module to create, send and track your proposals in an automated way.

Some of the features that make Osmos Cloud interesting are:

1. When the customer receives a quote from your business, at the top of it gives you the options to accept, reject, add comments or even place an electronic signature with your finger or mouse. All this from the same quote and with a single click.
2. From your system you can consult all notifications of acceptance, cancellation, comments and electronic signatures to give a correct follow-up.
3. You’ll be able to filter your quotes by dates, quotation status and assigned seller which will allow you to evaluate the “performance” of your seller.
4. You can see in calendar view all your contracts, quotes and list of products and/or services already contracted or purchased.
5. Send quotes with a single click.
6. Keep your entire receivables up to date. The system notifies you of any late payments with the option of sending reminders by mail.
7. Customize your quote template with the option to add photos of your products and services.
8. Accept credit card payments from your quote thanks to the integration between Osmos Cloud and Stripe.

If you want to keep track of your proposals more effectively, we recommend you to follow some simple tips:

• Depending on the type of business, it’s always convenient to create reminders in your electronic calendar. For example, if your job is organizing events, it’s convenient to create an alarm 5 or 10 days before each event to follow up the quote.
• Use your phone or email to track your sent quotes. Be careful not to overwhelm your customers, simply verify that they have received the quote correctly and/or help them with any other questions they have about the products or services.
• We suggest you don’t ask for their opinion once you have sent a proposal. Instead of asking your client what they thought of your quote, try, in a disguised way, to make them understand that the sale has already been made by asking things like: “So, how do you want to make the payment?” or “What color do you prefer? ” This will help you close more sales.

Now a days there are tools like Osmos Cloud that will help you in the management and automation of budgets, so, what tool works for your business?