Quote Management
Summarize
Summary of Quote Management
Quote Management is an application designed to create and manage formal product and service quotes, either as a standalone tool or integrated within the Sales Customer Relationship Management (Sales CRM) suite. It streamlines the sales process by enabling sales agents to build, revise, and convert quotes into customer orders, supporting pricing, product configuration, and sales agreements.
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Key Features
- User Interface Tabs: Includes Details, Catalog, Line Items, Revisions, Customer Orders, and Pricing Adjustment tabs, facilitating comprehensive quote management from basic info to pricing and order conversion.
- Integration with Product Catalog and Configurator: Agents can browse product offerings, configure products with options and relationships, and add these configured products directly to quotes, improving accuracy and efficiency.
- Pricing Adjustments: Supports automatic pricing from pricing engines and manual adjustments such as markups, markdowns, and price overrides at the line item level, ensuring flexible and precise pricing strategies.
- Cost Books: Units costs are maintained in cost books to enable profit margin calculations, discount management, and negotiation support, enhancing pricing transparency and profitability control.
- Sales Agreement Integration: When enabled or applied, sales agreements influence the quote workflow, enforcing catalog, pricing, and customer controls specified in the agreement. Agents can add simple or configurable products, including bundles, with category and offer-level discounting.
- Location Management: Supports setting product inventory locations to streamline product selection and copying products/services between locations within quotes.
- Quote PDF Generation: Allows creation of branded PDF quote documents for customer review and electronic signature integration (e.g., DocuSign), facilitating faster approvals and professional communication.
Practical Benefits for ServiceNow Customers
- Empowers sales agents to efficiently generate accurate and configurable quotes aligned with pricing and sales agreements.
- Enhances collaboration between sales, pricing, and product teams through integrated catalogs, pricing engines, and cost management.
- Supports complex pricing strategies with manual and automatic adjustments, improving profitability and competitive offers.
- Enables streamlined transition from quotes to customer orders and sales agreements, ensuring consistent sales processes.
- Facilitates professional customer engagement through customizable PDF quotes and electronic signature capabilities.
Next Steps
To implement Quote Management, ServiceNow customers should refer to installation and configuration guides, ensuring integration with existing Sales CRM and pricing management setups for optimal use.
Quote Management is an application used to create and manage product and service quotes. Quote Management can be a separate application or part of the Sales Customer Relationship Management (Sales CRM) application.
A quote is a formal offer for products and services, proposed at specific prices and related payment terms, which is sent to a prospective customer or consumer. In the context of Sales Customer Relationship Management, quotes can be created from the Opportunity Management application or quotes can be created separately, depending on your configuration.
Quote Management user interface
The Quote Management application is integrated with the product offering catalog and product configurator to help sales agents build quotes easily and conveniently. The Quote Management interface contains the following tabs:
| Quote window tabs or options | Description |
|---|---|
| Details tab | Add basic information for the quote. |
| Catalog tab | Search for and add products to your quote using the product configurator. Pricing is also managed through the product offering catalogs. |
| Line Items tab | Add different line items to a quote. In each quote line item, you can update product characteristics and add pricing adjustments. |
| Revisions tab | Create multiple versions of a quote. |
| Customer Orders tab | Turn your quote into a customer order. |
| Pricing Adjustment tab | View and update pricing adjustments. |
| Using quotes to generate sales agreements | When the sales agreement is enabled or an existing sales agreement is selected, the quote workflow changes and enables agents to add products and services according to the sales agreement. |
| Create a quote PDF document | Sales agents can create a PDF document from a quote to send to customers for review and signatures. |
Integrate Quote Management with product offering catalogs
Quote Management is integrated with the product catalog and pricing to make adding products to your quote easier and convenient. Agents use the catalog to browse product offerings and the product configurator to add options and pricing to your products. Then they simply add them to the quote. Pricing adjustments that are fetched based on pricing matrices rules are automatically added and presented in the quote.
Use the product configurator
- Browse and add configurable product offerings from the catalog to create quote lines.
- Select product options and view product relationships.
Configure and create quote line items
From the product catalog, browse and add product offers to create quote lines and characteristics.
With the product configurator, characteristics options and relationships can be changed and updated in the Catalog tab for Quote Management. The product configurator uses Quote Management primitives to create and update quote lines and characteristics.
Add pricing adjustments to quotes
Quote Management integrates with the pricing engine to get the list price and price adjustments for the product offers in your quote.
Auto-pricing adjustments are fetched from the pricing engine. Manual pricing adjustments are added by the agent.
Pricing adjustments include markups, markdowns, and price overrides. Total Adjustments are applied to each line item with the cumulative total from each line rolled up to total.
- Markup amount - add a markup amount to a product.
- Markdown amount - add a markdown amount to a product.
- Markup % - add a markup percentage to a product.
- Markdown % - add a markdown percentage to a product.
- Price override - override a price and set a new price.
Add cost books in Quote Management
- Profit margin calculation: Ability to calculate the profit margin by subtracting the cost price from the quoted selling price, helping your sales team verify that their pricing strategy aligns with desired profit margins,
- Discount management: Apply discounts to quotes based on cost prices to incentivize bulk purchases or long-term commitments for flexible pricing strategies while maintaining profitability and competitive incentives to your customers.
- Negotiation support: Use cost prices as a reference during negotiations with your customers or suppliers. It provides a transparent basis for discussions, helping you build trust and facilitating fair and mutually beneficial agreements.
To learn more about cost books and their configuration, see Pricing Management, Create and publish a cost book, Create a cost book line, and Install and configure Quote Management.
Enable a sales agreement in Quote Management
- Configurable bundles with the ability to choose from all available child offers and optional products.
- Category level discounting
- Offer level discounting.
Add a sales agreement to a quote in Quote Management
- Catalogs specified within the sales agreement
- Pricing controls stipulated in the sales agreements
- Customer information in the sales agreement
The system defaults sales agreement on the quote to the latest active sales agreement available for the customer. If no active agreement is found, the field is left blank. If the quote is for generating a new sales agreement, the user can check Enable sales agreement quote the sales agreement reference should be deleted and the field should be locked If the user unchecks the Enable sales agreement quote, the sales agreement reference field is unlocked and the user can select any available agreement.
To learn more about creating sales agreements, see Create a sales agreement.
See Apply a sales agreement to a quote in Quote Management to learn more about adding a sales agreement to a quote in Quote Management.
Set a location for product inventories
- Select a location to add products and services to the quote line.
- Copy all products and services from one location to another.
Create PDF documents for a quote
- Quote PDF documents can be linked to electronic signature apps like Docusign that enable customers to sign quotes electronically.
- Quote PDF document templates can be created that reflect customer branding and logos.
- Quotes PDF documents that can be sent to customers for review and approvals.
See Configuring quote PDF documents and Create a quote PDF document for more information about creating PDF documents for quotes.
What to do next
To learn about setting up Quote Management, see Install and configure Quote Management.