HubSpot Quotes provides a useful starting point for companies looking for a basic quote software tool. But is it your best option?
Every sales cycle is different, but one thing is common across all: it’s a process of enabling open communication between you and your potential customer. Relationships must be cultivated, needs must be understood, and your product’s value proposition must be clearly communicated. At some point in this process, your potential customer will ask for a proposal—a document encapsulating your discussions, what your product has to offer, your unique value as it pertains to the customer’s use case, and how much it costs. A sales proposal can come later in the sales cycle or early on, depending on how your organization structures your sales process and the buyer’s stage of the purchasing process.
Regardless of the “when” to send a proposal question, it’s almost always a “how fast” answer. The ability of a sales team to quickly and efficiently put together a sales quote can mean the difference between closing the deal and losing a sale through unnecessary delays and complexity.
Obviously, it can be labor-intensive to create original quotes every time a new prospect emerges. Proposal software can help. HubSpot Quotes is one example, but is it your best option?
HubSpot Quotes - Pros
HubSpot recently unveiled its new Quotes tool, offered as part of the HubSpot Sales Software package. The intent of Quotes is to allow vendors to quickly and efficiently generate quotes “at the push of a button.” And for smaller companies with very basic proposal needs, the tool may suffice— think of it as one-stop convenience shopping at Walmart. For larger organizations or those seeking a more sophisticated proposal software tool, HubSpot Quotes may not fit the bill.
Let’s first take a look at what HubSpot Quotes has to offer.
Templates
HubSpot’s proposal software offers base templates with standardized inputs along with the ability for vendors to customize quotes to match their branding by adding vendor logos and brand colors.
E-signatures and Payments
Like many proposal software tools, HubSpot Quotes provides e-signature (available with Professional and Enterprise plans) and payment collection capabilities. HubSpot Quotes software can also be integrated with Stripe to accept customer payments, streamlining the quote-to-cash process.
Customer Data Integration
Because HubSpot Quotes is part of the HubSpot Sales Software, CRM data can easily be merged into your quote, pre-populating contact, and company information.
Basic Quote Functionality
Overall, HubSpot Quotes is a basic quote software tool, and if you’re a small shop or single proprietor, HubSpot Quotes could be a solid solution for issuing quotes, invoices, and collecting payments.
Beyond the elementary functionality, the capabilities of HubSpot Quotes are quite limited and can cause frustration for users. Now, let’s take a deeper look at the gaps of HubSpot Quotes.
HubSpot Quotes - Cons
Despite some useful HubSpot Quote features, there are plenty of gaps that can be frustrating to sales teams and reduce the quality of your proposal output. Some of the major shortfalls of HubSpot Quotes include:
Cumbersome User Interface
The user interface of HubSpot Quotes is not intuitive, even for experienced users. For those seeking a drag-and-drop design experience, HubSpot Quotes falls miserably short. A more thoughtful design interface could save time and lend itself to an overall more pleasurable user experience, particularly essential for companies with a high volume of proposals. What may seem like a minor inconvenience in putting together a single quote can turn into a major constraint and inefficiency when preparing dozens or even hundreds of quotes.
Limited Design Features
We mentioned the ability to customize HubSpot Quotes with the vendor’s logo and brand colors. Unfortunately, the design features of this quote software don’t extend much beyond these very basic elements and end up looking disjointed and somewhat amateur. As an example:
No Interactive Features
As mentioned earlier, HubSpot Quotes is a basic quoting tool. Interactive options are not available, like inserting a video into your sales proposal, demonstrating value with an ROI calculator, interactive pricing, or even embedding features such as a Calendly link for buyers to book time with you. HubSpot Quotes is more of a 1-way communication tool vs. empowering and engaging your buyer in the process, which other proposal software tools like Qwilr, are designed to do.
Lack of Viewer Insight
While HubSpot touts claims of analytics, buyers beware. Sales automation, predictive lead scoring, and reporting are not part of HubSpot Quotes, but rather are functions of HubSpot CRM and the HubSpot marketing automation platform. If you purchase all the tools, you will have some insight into your quotes, such as when a buyer opens your email, clicks on a link, or downloads an attachment. But if you’re seeking more advanced insight into how your proposal is being viewed along with alerts of when it’s accessed, you’ll be sorely disappointed with HubSpot Quotes, as deeper proposal-specific analytics are not available.
Integrating Qwilr with HubSpot
While the biggest perceived advantage of HubSpot Quotes seems to be that it’s seamlessly integrated with its CRM, guess what— that’s what other proposal software does as well. As an example, Qwilr is a highly-rated HubSpot application because of its proven integration with HubSpot and high customer satisfaction ratings. Additionally, the HubSpot-Qwilr integration allows users to automate proposal creation and pull in CRM data into sales proposals while also providing more robust design and content capabilities.
In fact, Qwilr is the only proposal software that offers beautiful design without needing HTML or design skills, an interactive ROI calculator, web page functionality, and an array of embeddable content options, not to mention e-signature, on-page payments, and configurable pricing.
Closing the Deal
Closing the deal starts with your proposal and ends with capturing the legally-binding signature on your offer. Companies that can impress buyers plus deliver quotes quickly and efficiently have an advantage over competitors that can’t move as quickly.
Proposal software streamlines, organizes, and automates that process, but not all options are created equally.
HubSpot Quotes provide a useful starting point for companies looking for a basic quote software tool. For those seeking more visually impressive documents, an enhanced buyer experience, and more overall content flexibility, Qwilr is a far superior choice.
Qwilr’s ability to integrate with HubSpot, create personalized proposals in minutes, and gain insight on buyer viewing and proposal interaction not only help sales teams to scale, but win more deals. Let us demonstrate the differences between HubSpot Quotes and Qwilr— book time with us now.
About the author
Tania Clarke|Head of Product Marketing
Tania heads up product marketing at Qwilr – looking after positioning, sales enablement, competitor intelligence and more. Tania brings experience from former roles at high growth startups like Atlassian and Safety Culture.
