Configure Quotes for Your Customers and Track Contracts
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Explain how quote templates help sales reps efficiently prepare quotes for customers.
- Set up quote templates.
- Create contracts.
Accessibility
This unit requires some additional instructions for screen reader users. To access a detailed screen reader version of this unit, click the link below:
Customer Quotes in Salesforce
As your sales reps work their deals, they prepare quotes for customers. Quotes show your customers the prices of the products and services your company offers.
Your reps have the flexibility to create a set of quotes that show different combinations of products, discounts, and quantities. That way, your customers can compare prices.
First things first, though. Our Salesforce admin, Maria, enables Quotes. Here’s how.
Enable Quotes
- From Setup, Maria enters Quote in the Quick Find box, then selects Quotes Settings.
- She then selects Enable Quotes, leaving Create Quotes Without a Related Opportunity unchecked.
- Maria selects the page layout on which she wants the Quotes related list to appear, and then saves her work.
Our sales rep, Lance, continues to work an opportunity. He set the opportunity’s stage to Proposal/Price Quote. So now he’s ready to get a quote to his customer at Dickenson PLC. Let’s look at how he prepares the quote.
Create a Quote
Lance is at the proposal stage in his opportunity, from which he creates his quote.
- From the opportunity, he starts a new quote.
- He enters specifics for the quote.
- Lance saves his work, and then the new quote appears.
At this point, he selects the quote, and he sees that the product from the opportunity appears as a line item. Lance can add other products as line items if he wants to.
He’s done for now, but he can later choose to add more line items to the quote.
- Lance plans to send multiple quotes to his customer. After he and his customer agree on a specific quote, Lance is ready to sync the quote. When he syncs the quote, its line items appear as the opportunity’s products. That way, Lance isn’t at risk of having discrepancies between the line items in his quote and the products in his opportunity.
Prepare Quotes for Delivery to Customers
You learned how sales reps create quotes. Now it’s time to see what happens with those quotes afterward. It involves you, so read on!
Your sales reps generate PDF files for the quotes they send to their customers. Salesforce includes a standard template, but sometimes your reps want to generate quote PDF files with different details.
Take, for example, the reps at Ursa Major. They want to include tax in the Grand Total but exclude the Tax line item when they provide quotes to customers for service plans. So their admin, Maria, creates a template for them. Here’s how.
Create a Quote Template
- From Setup, Maria enters Templates in the Quick Find box, then selects Quote Templates.
- Maria creates a template. Then, she gives it a name and saves it.
- Maria then scrolls to the Totals section and removes the Tax field.
- Then she saves her work. Maria’s ready to release the template to her reps, so she activates it.
How Sales Reps Generate PDFs from Quotes
- From a quote, Maria’s reps click Create PDF.
- Then, her reps select the template of their choice.
- Reps then click Create PDF.
- Then, reps save the PDF files to their quote records, where they can access the PDF files and send them to their customers.
Customer Contracts in Salesforce
When a customer decides which products or services to buy, your rep delivers a contract that documents the prices and terms both parties agree to. Lots of companies use contracts to set the terms for doing business with other companies.
Salesforce helps your reps create, track, and manage the contracts they deliver for their accounts and opportunities. Reps track contracts through your company’s approval process. And they can use workflow alerts to remind them about contract renewals.
Set Up Contracts to Appear on Opportunities
Maria’s sales reps want to see contracts on their opportunities. So she uses field-level security and field accessibility—not page layouts—to include a contract on opportunity details.
- From Setup, Maria clicks Object Manager at the top of the page. She selects the Opportunity object, and clicks Contract in the fields area. Then, she clicks Set Field-Level Security.
- She selects Visible for each profile that she wants the Contracts related list to appear on, and then saves her changes.
- Maria clicks View Field Accessibility.
- For one of the profiles that Maria wants contracts available, she clicks Hidden.
- Maria selects Visible under Page Layout.
- Then she saves her changes. Profiles are now marked Editable.
- To verify that her changes took effect, Maria creates an opportunity and adds a contract to it.
After she saves the new opportunity, she sees the contract related to it in opportunity details.
How Sales Reps Create Contracts and Relate Them to Opportunities
Now that Maria set up contracts to appear in opportunity details, let’s see how her sales rep, Lance, creates contracts and relates them to his opportunities.
Create a Contract in Salesforce
- From the App Launcher, Lance searches for Contracts, and selects it from the Items list.
- Then, he clicks New.
- Lance enters details specific to this contract. Then, he saves his work.
Lance sees the new contract.
And to show the new contract automatically on the account, Maria can add the Contracts related list to the Account page layout.
Relate a Contract to an Opportunity
- Lance opens an opportunity for Dickenson PLC that he wants to relate to a contract.
- He clicks Details.
- Then, Lance selects a contract from a list that’s specific to the Dickenson PLC account.
- He saves his work, and he sees the contract on his opportunity.
Maria got her sales reps on track to selling products from a price book she created. Remember how those prices were lower than the standard list values?
Then, Maria enabled Quotes, so that her reps can provide quotes to their customers. After her reps and their customers agree on specific quotes, her reps can then sync the quote line items with the opportunity’s products.
And finally, she set up contracts to appear on opportunity details and in a related list on accounts—handy for letting reps quickly access their contracts.
Resources
Use these resources to learn more about quotes, quote templates, and contracts.
- Salesforce Help: Quotes
- Salesforce Help: Set Up Quote Templates
- Salesforce Help: Contracts