Quoting Happily with HubSpot: Your Ultimate Guide to Closing Deals Faster

Struggling to create professional quotes quickly in HubSpot and looking for ways to make your sales process smoother and more efficient? You’re in the right spot! For many sales teams, juggling different documents, getting approvals, and chasing signatures can feel like a never-ending task. But what if you could streamline that entire process, make your quotes look sharp and on-brand, and even automate the tricky parts? That’s exactly what HubSpot’s quoting tool helps you do. It’s an incredibly powerful feature that lives right inside your CRM, designed to simplify things, speed up your sales cycle, and ultimately help you close more deals.

Whether you’re just starting out with HubSpot’s native quoting capabilities or looking to supercharge them with advanced solutions like quote•hapily, this guide will walk you through everything you need to know. We’ll cover setting up your quotes, making them look exactly how you want, using automation to cut down on manual work, tracking their performance, and even exploring how integrations can take your quoting to the next level. By the time we’re done, you’ll have a clear roadmap to quoting happier and smarter, turning those proposals into closed-won deals without the usual headaches.

Why Your Sales Team Needs a Smarter Quoting Process

Let’s be real, the old ways of creating sales quotes can be a major pain. I remember my first time trying to cobble together a Word document, manually calculating everything in a spreadsheet, and then waiting days for a client to print, sign, and scan a PDF back to me. It was inefficient, error-prone, and definitely slowed things down. It turns out, this isn’t just my experience. studies show that roughly 44% of deals face delays because of bottlenecks in the quoting process, and one in four sales reps even report losing deals due to issues with proposal formatting. That’s a huge chunk of lost opportunities, right?

That’s why having an integrated quoting system, like the one HubSpot offers, isn’t just a nice-to-have. it’s a must. It pulls together all your client data, product details, and pricing into one neat package, directly within your CRM. This approach comes with some serious benefits:

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• Efficiency and Time Savings: Imagine not having to manually enter contact details or product pricing. HubSpot automatically pulls all that info from your CRM, which means less time spent on admin and more time selling. This can drastically reduce the time it takes to create a quote, so you can focus on other important aspects of your business.
• Accuracy and Professionalism: When all your data lives in one place, the chances of making a pricing mistake or missing a crucial detail go way down. Plus, with customizable templates, every quote looks professional and on-brand, building trust with your prospects.
• Improved Collaboration: Ever had a colleague or manager need to review a quote? With HubSpot, multiple team members can easily access, review, and collaborate on quotes, making sure everyone’s on the same page about pricing and terms.
• Enhanced Customer Experience: A smooth, quick quoting process makes a great impression. Customers can easily review, sign, and even pay directly from the quote, which is super convenient for them and gets you paid faster.
• Better Insights and Forecasting: Because everything is linked to your CRM, you get real-time visibility into how your quotes are performing. You can track views, signatures, and payments, which helps you refine your sales strategy and forecast deals more accurately.

In essence, using HubSpot for your quotes means less chaos and more control, allowing your team to work smarter, not just harder.

Getting Started: Setting Up Your HubSpot Quote Foundations

Ready to dive in and create some quotes that truly impress? Let’s get your HubSpot environment ready. Becoming the HubSpot Partner of the Year: Your Ultimate Guide

Before You Build: Products and Deals Are Your Friends

Think of HubSpot quotes as the final presentation of a carefully prepared plan. For that plan to come together quickly and accurately, you need to have a couple of foundational pieces in place.

• Your Products and Services Library: This is your digital catalog of everything you sell. Setting this up properly in HubSpot is super important for quick, accurate quotes. You can define products with their names, descriptions, prices, and even whether they’re a one-time charge or a recurring subscription. Once your products are in the library, you can just click and add them to a quote, saving you a ton of manual entry and ensuring consistent pricing. To set this up, go to Settings > Objects > Products & Quotes in your HubSpot account.
• The Deal’s the Hub: Here’s a key thing to remember: every quote in HubSpot needs to be tied to a deal. It’s not optional, but it’s actually a huge advantage. Why? Because the deal record already holds all the crucial information about your sales opportunity – the associated contacts, the company, the deal amount, and its stage in your pipeline. When you create a quote from a deal, HubSpot automatically pulls in all this information, saving you precious time and ensuring everything is connected. This way, you can easily track who got what, when they signed it, and how much it was for, all from your deal pipeline view.

So, before you jump into making a quote, make sure you’ve got your products listed, and you’ve got a deal created and associated with the right contact and company.

Creating Your First Quote in HubSpot

Now that your foundations are solid, let’s walk through creating a quote. It’s pretty straightforward, and HubSpot gives you a couple of ways to kick things off.

You can create a quote from a deal, contact, or company record, or directly from the quotes index page.

Here’s how to do it step-by-step: Making HubSpot Work for Your Projects

1. Navigate to the Quotes Section: In your HubSpot account, go to Commerce > Quotes. Then, just hit the “Create quote” button. Alternatively, if you’re already on a deal, contact, or company record, look for the “Quotes” section in the right sidebar and click “+ Add” or “Create quote”.
2. Associate a Deal: HubSpot will prompt you to select an existing deal or create a new one to link your quote to. This is where that pre-work pays off!
3. Choose a Quote Template: You’ll see a selection of templates. You can pick one of HubSpot’s default options or choose a custom one if you’ve already set those up. Don’t worry, we’ll talk about customizing these soon!
4. Fill in Quote Details: This is where you give your quote a name, set an expiration date which can create a nice sense of urgency for your client!, choose the quote language, and specify your locale for date and address formats. You can also add any initial comments for the buyer or specific purchase terms.
5. Add Buyer & Company Information: HubSpot usually auto-populates this from the associated deal, contact, and company records. Just double-check that everything looks correct, like job titles and company addresses. If you need to make quick edits, you can do it right there.
6. Enter Your Information: This section will display details about you, the sender, and your company. Make sure your name, title, and company info are accurate and professional, as this will appear on the quote.
7. Add Line Items Products/Services: This is the core of your quote! You can select products directly from your HubSpot product library, or if it’s a one-off service, you can create custom line items on the fly. Specify quantities, unit prices, and apply any discounts. HubSpot automatically calculates the totals for you.
8. Set Signature and Payment Options: This is where HubSpot really shines. You can enable e-signatures for your clients available with Sales Hub Starter, Professional, or Enterprise plans and even integrate with payment processors like Stripe or HubSpot Payments to collect payments directly from the quote. This makes it super easy for your clients to accept and pay, speeding up the whole process.
9. Review and Publish: Before hitting send, always give your quote a thorough review to catch any last-minute errors. Once you’re happy, you can choose to send it directly via email from HubSpot, generate a shareable link, or download it as a PDF.

And just like that, you’ve created a professional sales quote in HubSpot!

Customizing Your Quotes to Stand Out

Creating quotes is one thing, but making them truly yours and on-brand is another. You want every interaction with your prospect to reflect your company’s professionalism and identity, and your quotes are a massive part of that.

Branding is Key

Think about it: a proposal that looks generic or disjointed from your other marketing materials might make a client pause. But a polished, branded quote reinforces your identity, builds trust, and shows you pay attention to detail. It’s like dressing sharply for a meeting. it just makes a better impression.

HubSpot Quote Templates: Your Blank Canvas

HubSpot gives you some default templates to start with, which are totally functional. But if you’re like me, you’ll want to take them to the next level. Customized quote templates let you truly tailor the design and content to match your business needs. Sales Playbooks in HubSpot: Your Ultimate Guide to Consistent Wins

Here’s how you can make your quotes uniquely yours:

• Accessing the Customization Options: To dive into template customization, you’ll generally need a Sales Hub Professional or Enterprise plan. If you have the right permissions like Super Admin, head over to Settings > Objects > Quotes, and then click on the “Customized quote templates” tab.
• Editing Elements: From there, you can choose a template to customize. HubSpot’s visual editor lets you tweak a lot of things:
  • Logo, Colors, and Fonts: Easily upload your company logo and adjust the color palette and fonts to match your brand guidelines. This ensures consistency across all your sales documents.
  • Layout and Structure: You can modify the overall layout, add or remove sections, and arrange modules to present your information in the most effective way. This means you can go beyond the standard look and create something that truly resonates.
  • Custom Modules: For more advanced users, you can even add custom modules to display specific information relevant to your offerings, going beyond the default fields.
  • Dynamic Terms and Conditions: This is a big one! Instead of copy-pasting legal jargon every time, you can set up dynamic terms and conditions that automatically adjust based on the products or services included in the quote. This saves a ton of time and ensures legal compliance.

Once you’ve poured your creativity into a custom template, it can be used by your entire sales team, ensuring consistency and professionalism across the board.

Supercharging Your Quoting with Automation and Approvals

Building beautiful, accurate quotes is great, but what about making the entire quoting process lightning fast and hassle-free? This is where HubSpot’s automation capabilities, especially with workflows and advanced approvals, come into play.

The Power of HubSpot Workflows for Quotes

One of my favorite things about HubSpot is how it lets you automate the repetitive stuff, and quoting is no exception. With quote-based workflows, you can set up actions that trigger automatically based on what’s happening with your quotes. What Exactly is HubSpot Pipeline Management?

Here are a few ways workflows can make your life easier:

• Automated Follow-ups: Ever send a quote and then forget to follow up? HubSpot can fix that. You can set up workflows to send automated email reminders to prospects who’ve viewed a quote but haven’t signed it within a certain timeframe. This helps nudge deals forward without you having to manually remember.
• Deal Stage Updates: Once a quote is accepted or signed, you can configure a workflow to automatically update the associated deal stage in your pipeline. No more manually dragging deals from “Proposal Sent” to “Closed-Won”! This keeps your pipeline accurate and up-to-date in real-time.
• Internal Notifications: Want to know immediately when a high-value quote is viewed or signed? Workflows can send instant internal notifications to sales reps, managers, or even the operations team, keeping everyone informed.

These automations aren’t just about saving time. they’re about preventing missed opportunities and ensuring a consistent, professional follow-up strategy.

Streamlining Quote Approvals

Now, let’s talk about quote approvals. For many teams, especially those with larger deal sizes or specific discount rules, getting a quote approved before sending it out can be a major bottleneck.

• Native Limitations: Out of the box, HubSpot’s native quote approval system is pretty basic. It often has a one-size-fits-all rule: every quote needs approval, and it has to come from a single, predefined person. While this works for very small teams, it can quickly become a bottleneck for growing organizations that need more nuance, like approvals based on deal amount, product type, or specific discount tiers.
• Advanced Approval Workflows: The Real Game-Changer: This is where you can truly streamline things. Imagine building logic-based approval workflows directly into HubSpot that mirror how your business actually operates. This is possible with Sales Hub Professional or Enterprise, and can be significantly enhanced by solutions like quote•hapily.
  • Logic-Based Approvals: Instead of a blanket rule, you can set up conditions. For example: “If a quote is under $10,000, the Sales Manager approves. If it’s over $10,000, then Finance approves first, then the Sales Manager.” This ensures the right people are reviewing the right quotes.
  • Multi-Step Approvals: You’re not limited to a single approver. You can chain approvals together, reflecting complex internal processes, and ensuring all necessary stakeholders sign off before a quote goes out.
  • Using quote•hapily: This third-party solution, built natively within the HubSpot ecosystem, addresses those native limitations directly. It allows for highly flexible and robust approval processes with features like:
    • Calculated pricing and customizable price books.
    • Conditional logic for line items.
    • Dynamic approval routing based on deal value, product, or customer type.
    • Clear communication for approvers and requesters, including comments for changes, which is a big upgrade from just a task in HubSpot.

By leveraging these advanced approval workflows, especially with tools like quote•hapily, you can:

• Eliminate unnecessary delays: Quotes get routed to the right people automatically.
• Prevent discounting errors and rogue pricing: Rules ensure that quotes adhere to company policies.
• Keep your process lean, fast, and audit-proof: Everything is documented and follows a defined path.

Setting these up often involves creating a quote-based workflow in HubSpot, then using specific actions like quote•hapily‘s “Request Quote Approval” action to assign and notify approvers. Once all approvals are collected, the quote can even be published automatically, removing any final manual steps. This kind of automation is a true sales operations upgrade, enabling your team to move faster and smarter. Pipedrive vs hubspot vs zoho

Tracking and Analytics: Knowing Where You Stand

You’ve put in all the effort to create and send a brilliant quote – now what? The beauty of HubSpot’s integrated system is that it doesn’t stop once the quote is sent. It gives you incredible visibility into what happens next, helping you understand your buyer’s journey and refine your sales strategy.

Real-time Visibility

One of the most valuable aspects of using HubSpot for quotes is the ability to see real-time buyer activity. You’re not left guessing if your prospect has even opened your email. HubSpot tracks:

• Quote Views: How many times your quote has been viewed.
• Last Interaction: When the buyer last engaged with the quote.
• Signatures: When the e-signature is complete.
• Payments: If and when a payment has been made.

This information is usually available right within the quote’s activity timeline, offering a complete picture of engagement. Knowing this helps you decide when to follow up and what to say, making your outreach much more targeted and effective.

Quote Statuses

HubSpot uses different statuses to help you keep tabs on where each quote stands in its lifecycle: Pipedrive vs HubSpot CRM: Which One Powers Your Business Better?

• Draft: You’re still working on it.
• Pending Approval: Waiting for internal sign-off.
• Published: Sent out to the client.
• Accepted: The client has agreed to the terms and potentially signed.
• Rejected/Changes Requested: The client or an internal approver has declined or asked for revisions.
• Recalled: You’ve pulled the quote back.

Keeping an eye on these statuses through the Commerce > Quotes index page helps you manage your pipeline efficiently and prioritize your follow-ups.

Reporting on Quotes

To truly understand what’s working and what isn’t, you need to look at the bigger picture. HubSpot’s reporting tools let you track your quote performance over time.

• Custom Report Builder: You can create custom reports by selecting “Quotes” as a data source. This allows you to track metrics like the total number of quotes created, their status, and conversion rates.
• Quote Pipeline Overview: Many dashboards offer an overview of your quotes in different stages, similar to your deal pipeline. This gives you a quick snapshot of your quoting activity and potential revenue.
• Revenue Insights: By linking quotes to deals, you can easily see the revenue generated by approved quotes and gain insights into what types of quotes lead to closed-won deals.

Refining Your Strategy: This data isn’t just for looking pretty on a dashboard. It helps you identify patterns. Are certain quote templates performing better? Do quotes with specific discounts close faster? Are there common reasons for rejections? By analyzing these insights, you can continuously refine your quoting strategies, optimize your sales process, and ultimately increase your conversion rates.

Expanding Capabilities with HubSpot Integrations

While HubSpot’s native quoting tool is fantastic for many businesses, there might come a time when your needs grow more complex. If you’re dealing with intricate product configurations, interactive pricing models, or highly advanced approval matrices, you might find yourself needing a bit more firepower. That’s where HubSpot’s rich App Marketplace comes in. Pipedrive vs HubSpot vs Salesforce: Picking Your CRM Champion

These integrations are designed to complement and extend HubSpot’s core functionality, providing specialized tools that integrate seamlessly with your CRM data.

• When the Native Tool Isn’t Enough: HubSpot’s built-in tool is great for straightforward quotes, issuing invoices, and collecting payments, especially for smaller shops. But for larger organizations or those needing a more sophisticated proposal software, the native design features can be somewhat limited, lacking interactive elements like embedded videos or ROI calculators. This is when looking into integrations becomes smart.
• Examples of Powerful Quoting Integrations:
  • PandaDoc: This is a popular one for its customizable templates, robust e-signatures, and document tracking features. It also offers advanced pricing and approval workflows, which can be a real step up if your pricing is complex.
  • Proposify: If you’re all about creating compelling sales proposals alongside your quotes, Proposify combines quote generation with powerful proposal tracking. It lets sales teams monitor how prospects engage with their documents—when they open it, how long they view each section, and so on.
  • Quoter: Built for speed and automation, Quoter helps sales teams generate accurate quotes quickly. Its HubSpot integration keeps quotes synced with deals and contacts and offers analytics to track quote performance.
  • Qwilr: For those who want interactive and rich content in their proposals, Qwilr is an excellent choice. It allows for things like embedding videos, interactive pricing, or even Calendly links directly within the proposal, turning a static document into an engaging experience.
  • LinePilot: This tool takes the manual work out of creating line items on your deals. It automates product data and pricing calculations, meaning your sales team can generate quotes without needing to manually input every detail, leading to faster quote creation.
  • AutoQuote: Another comprehensive automation tool, AutoQuote by Dean Infotech, helps generate quotes within HubSpot, focusing on streamlining workflows, boosting productivity, and minimizing errors.

The main benefit of these advanced integrations is that they often provide Configured, Price, Quote CPQ capabilities that go beyond basic quoting. This means you get features like interactive pricing, more complex automated workflows, and deeper analytics that can make a significant difference in closing those challenging deals. They help you compete with larger players and scale your business with modern tools.

So, if you find yourself hitting the limits of HubSpot’s native quote tool, remember that the ecosystem is rich with powerful integrations ready to take your quoting process to the next level.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I create a new quote in HubSpot?

Creating a new quote in HubSpot is pretty straightforward! You can do it directly from the Commerce > Quotes section by clicking “Create quote,” or you can initiate it from an existing deal, contact, or company record. Just look for the “Quotes” section in the right sidebar and click “+ Add” or “Create quote.” You’ll then follow the prompts to choose a template, add details, line items, and set up signatures and payments.

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Can I customize my quote templates in HubSpot?

Absolutely! HubSpot lets you customize your quote templates to match your brand’s look and feel. You can add your logo, adjust colors and fonts, modify the layout, and include dynamic terms and conditions. For full customization options, you’ll generally need a Sales Hub Professional or Enterprise plan, which you can access via Settings > Objects > Quotes > Customized quote templates.

What is quote•hapily and how does it relate to HubSpot quotes?

quote•hapily is a third-party solution designed to enhance HubSpot’s native quote approval process. While HubSpot has basic approval features, quote•hapily extends this with more flexible, logic-based, and multi-step approval workflows. It allows you to set up rules based on deal size, product type, or discounts, ensuring that quotes get routed to the right people for approval automatically, saving time and preventing errors.

Can I collect e-signatures and payments with HubSpot quotes?

Yes, you can! HubSpot’s quoting tool supports e-signatures, which is a fantastic feature for speeding up the deal closure process available with Sales Hub Starter, Professional, or Enterprise. You can also integrate HubSpot with payment processors like Stripe or use HubSpot Payments to collect payments directly from your published quotes, making it incredibly convenient for your clients.

How can I track the performance of my quotes?

HubSpot provides excellent tools for tracking your quotes. You get real-time visibility into buyer activity, such as when a quote has been viewed or signed. You can also monitor quote statuses Draft, Pending Approval, Published, Accepted, etc. from the Commerce > Quotes index page. For deeper analysis, you can use the custom report builder in HubSpot to create reports on quote metrics, helping you understand conversion rates and identify areas for improvement. Pipedrive vs. HubSpot: Real Talk from G2 Users

Do I need a specific HubSpot plan to use quote features?

HubSpot’s core CRM Free offers some basic quoting capabilities, but to unlock more advanced features like e-signatures, custom quote templates, advanced approval workflows, and payment collection, you’ll typically need a Sales Hub Starter, Professional, or Enterprise plan. The higher tiers offer more flexibility and automation options for your quoting process.