Quoting best practices for new quoters

Assemble quotes from an approved catalog, central pricing rules, and templates — not from a blank page.

Written By Mike Forte

Last updated About 1 hour ago

New quoters should assemble a quote from approved building blocks, not invent products, prices, or layouts on each deal.

The building blocks are:

A listed, categorized catalog of the products and bundles your team is allowed to sell
Margins and pricing rules set once for the tenant and per category
Quote templates for the deal types you sell every week

When those three are in place, a new quote is: pick a template, add catalog items, check the margin, send. The quote editor is designed for that loop — press Q, choose a template, add products, send.

If you start from a blank page instead, every deal encodes a one-off decision. Pricing drifts, names collide, and the next hire has to reverse-engineer last month's quotes.

Do this in order

Do the setup before new quoters send live proposals. Each step depends on the one before it.

Clean the catalog — if two products share a name or manufacturer part number (MPN), the picker will offer both and someone will pick the wrong one.
Set pricing in one place — a clean catalog with no markup defaults still lets a line go out under cost.
Build templates for common deal types — a priced catalog with no template still leaves every rep rebuilding the proposal from scratch.
Then quote — new quoters only assemble what you already approved.

1. Clean and standardize the catalog before anyone quotes

The catalog is the only source of products a quote should use. A product that is unlisted cannot be added to a quote. A product with no category is also blocked — category is what Salesbuildr uses to apply markup, tax, discount-group rules, and which product table the line lands in.

Open Products and treat the catalog as a portfolio, not a dump of everything that ever synced from a Professional Services Automation (PSA) system.

After an acquisition (or any merged catalog)

Acquired MSPs almost always bring a second product list. After you map those PSA categories and run import, Salesbuildr will contain duplicates: the same laptop or backup service under two names, two prices, or two missing MPNs. Quoting from that mix is how underpricing and wrong SKUs reach the customer.

Work through the merged catalog in this order:

Search by MPN, then by name. On Search & Filters, type the manufacturer part number first. That is the field Salesbuildr uses to match distributor feeds and to detect "this product already exists." When an MPN is missing or typed differently, search the product name and manufacturer.
Keep one listed product per sellable item. Open the record you want the team to use. On Product Detail → General Info, leave Listed on. Turn Listed off on the extras. Unlisted products stay in history and in your PSA link, but they will not appear in everyday catalog search and cannot be added to a new quote.
Give every keeper a category. Assign a Salesbuildr category (and a primary category if you use more than one). Map both acquired PSA category trees into one Salesbuildr tree under Importing Products — do not import two parallel "Hardware / Hardware" structures and leave quoters to guess.
Standardize the name and descriptions. Use the name, short description, and quote description you want on every proposal. Fetch marketing copy from the catalog sources if you need images and specs; do not copy a second sell price from the acquired list onto the keeper.
Bulk-edit the rest. On Bulk edit products, select the acquired extras and change listing status and categories in one pass.

If you re-import a spreadsheet of the acquired catalog, turn on Overwrite data based on MPN field so matching MPNs update the existing product instead of creating another copy. Rows without a matching MPN still create new products — that is how "almost the same" SKUs become duplicates.

Unlisted categories are the staging area: turn Listed off on a category while you tidy its products. Quote managers will not see that category in pickers until you list it.

What an approved catalog item looks like

Before a product is fair game for new quoters, it should have:

Listed on, and Can be sold on (Pricing)
A category, so markup, tax, and grouping resolve
A consistent name and quote description
An MPN on anything that comes from a distributor or a vendor price list
Cost and sell price coming from your rules (next section), not from a leftover acquired price unless you intentionally locked it

Use Labels on the product Admin tab if you want a temporary "acquired — review" or "canonical" tag while you work. Labels help you filter; they do not hide the product from the quote picker. Listed is the control that hides it.

Sell packages, not loose parts

The other catalog building blocks new quoters should use instead of assembling from scratch:

Bundles — your standard managed-services stack, a typical workstation kit, a project labour package. The quoter adds one bundle and sets a quantity. Child prices and quantities are already decided.
Add-ons on the product or category — suggested extras that appear when the main item is added, so upsell is a click, not a hunt.

Build those bundles in the catalog, not as one-off groups inside a single quote. A bundle created only on a quote is harder to reuse and can fail when someone later tries to save it as a widget.

What new quoters should not do in the picker

The quote editor can Create new product, Create bundle, Import products, and Add from marketplace. Those exist for product editors and exceptional deals. They are not the path for a new quoter on a standard deal.

If the item is not in the listed catalog, stop and ask the person who owns the portfolio. Creating a product on the fly is how the next duplicate — and the next underpriced line — gets in.

For visibility issues after cleanup, see Products & Catalog.

2. Set margins and pricing rules in one place

Pricing belongs in Settings → Financial → Pricing Rules and on categories, not in a spreadsheet on someone's desktop and not typed onto each quote line.

A sell price is copied onto a quote line when the product is added. Changing the tenant strategy later does not rewrite lines that are already on a draft or a sent quote. Get the rules right, then add products.

Tenant defaults, then category defaults

On Financial → Pricing Rules:

Choose Use markup or margin so everyone reads profit the same way. Markup is profit relative to cost; margin is profit relative to sell price. Salesbuildr still calculates sell price as cost plus markup; a margin you type is converted first.
Set Default markup/margin for categories and Default RRP discount for categories. These are the catch-all for products that have no percentage of their own.
Choose a Pricing strategy preference. See Pricing strategy for what each option does.

Then override the families that are not the catch-all. Hardware, professional services, and cloud licenses rarely share one percentage. Put those on the category, not on every product.

Do not type a sell price on each product "just in case." An explicit sell price turns the strategy off for that item until you clear it. Use an explicit price only to lock a special bid, a service you always sell at a round number, or a PSA price you do not want recalculated.

For hardware with an MPN, dynamic pricing is the usual setup: cost follows the distributor feed, sell price follows your markup. The dashboard even labels that choice best practice. Clear leftover acquired costs and sell prices so the feed and your rules can take over.

Stop underpricing at the rule, not at the quote

If sales is allowed to talk in "percent off list" but finance needs a floor, use RRP discount with minimum markup floor. The discounted list price is used only when it still clears your markup-based price; otherwise the markup price wins.

If you price from cost but must not quote above the vendor's recommended retail after discount, use Markup/margin with maximum RRP discount ceiling.

Either option is stronger than hoping a new quoter notices a thin margin on the line. The line still shows markup / margin to quote managers so they can see the result; they should not be inventing a new percentage on every deal.

Customer exceptions belong in books and groups

When one customer has a negotiated rate, do not teach quoters to override the line.

Pricing books — a named list of product prices attached to a company or a classification. The override applies when the line is added.
Discount groups — a percentage rule by product category, assigned to companies or classifications.

Both are set by someone with pricing permission. The new quoter just creates the quote for that company; the exception is already on the line.

Approval rules catch what still slips through

Central rules prevent most underpricing. Approval Rules are the safety net for the rest.

Under Settings → Quotes → Approval Rules you can require internal approval when:

The quote total is above a value
The discount is above a percentage
(Advanced) The markup is below a percentage

That last one is the underpricing tripwire. A new quoter can still edit a line's sell price on a draft — that change stays on the quote only — but a quote that drops under the floor should not reach the customer without a manager.

3. Use templates for common deal types

A template is the third building block: layout, styling, default settings, and the product tables you always need for that kind of deal.

Do not start from an empty quote and rebuild the sections. On New Quote, pick a template. It pre-loads widgets, styling, payment terms, and the other defaults you configured. You can set a default quote template on the company so the right one is already selected for that customer.

Keep the library small

The pattern that scales is templates for the 90% and widgets for the 10%. Full detail is in Quote Templates.

Typical starter set:

Deal type	Template	What the quoter changes
Transactional hardware	Short quote	Products and quantities
Managed services / MSA	Recurring services proposal	Seat counts, optional add-ons
Project work	Project proposal	The project widget for that job type
Renewal	Renewal proposal	Term and any upgrades

You need very few templates. Variation lives in reusable widgets (swap EDR for MDR; drop in a Microsoft migration block). Lock widgets that must never come off — terms, legal, mandatory attachments — so an account manager cannot delete them on a live quote.

Create templates at Quotes → Templates, or open a quote you already like and use Create template from this quote. Import a starting point from the template marketplace if that feature is on for your account. A new tenant also receives starter templates; treat those as a draft, then replace the sample products with your listed catalog items.

Review templates when the catalog changes. A template is only as current as the products sitting in it. See About Salesbuildr for the ongoing housekeeping (end-of-life items, stale products, widgets that still point at retired SKUs).

What a new quoter does on each deal

Once the three building blocks are in place, the job on a live deal is narrow:

Start from an opportunity or press Q.
Pick the template for that deal type (or accept the company's default). Do not create a blank quote.
Add listed catalog products or bundles. Search by name or MPN. Use add-ons the catalog already attached. Do not create a product, do not import a one-off CSV, and do not pull a marketplace item unless a product editor asked you to.
Set quantities. Leave cost and sell price alone unless a manager has already put the exception in a pricing book or told you to use a specific override.
Glance at markup / margin on the lines. If a line looks thin, stop — do not "make it work" by typing a lower sell price. That is what approval rules and pricing books are for.
Personalize the intro if the template has a content block, preview presentation view, and send.

That is assembling from approved blocks. Building from scratch is everything this article tells you not to do: a blank layout, a product created in the editor, a price typed from memory, a second copy of a laptop that survived an acquisition.