If quoting slows you down today, you’ll fall behind tomorrow.
In Services, the quoting process is the starting line for revenue generation. But all too often, Services organizations lose millions before even getting started.
While quoting might seem tactical, it has a direct line to delivery speed, customer experience, and profitability. Yet many teams still rely on manual and outdated methods that can’t keep pace with the complexity and speed of modern business.
When project scoping is done in Excel and based on tribal knowledge, best guesses, or salesperson preferences, misquoting becomes the norm. The consequences of misquoting are significant, gross margin erosion, revenue unpredictability, sales slowdowns, delivery inefficiency, and forecast inaccuracy.
The Services Quoting Bottleneck: Where Things Break Down
Quoting is central to the success of Services organizations, but it’s rarely treated as a strategic priority. Many still rely on three legacy approaches for scoping and quoting projects:
- Manually building and managing spreadsheets hosted on individual hard drives
- Using tools designed to configure, price, and quote (CPQ) product orders
- Cobbling in-house solutions with additional services technology
Manual spreadsheets and product CPQ solutions do not map to the unique needs of Services organizations. They cause friction across the deal lifecycle, from sales to delivery to invoicing, leading to inconsistent pricing and scope across teams, slow response times that frustrate prospects, and approval bottlenecks that delay deals.
Slow quotes lead to slow deals. Messy quotes lead to messy delivery. Both negatively impact the customer experience and increase the chances of leaving money on the table.
Manual Processes Don’t Scale. Complexity Does.
As Services organizations grow, so does the complexity of their offerings. More SKUs, more customizations, more geographies, more approval layers. Keeping track on manual spreadsheets and across individual emails or chats only leads to chaos and version control issues. Human error becomes inevitable.
And the consequences are material. Costly errors erode margins. Misaligned expectations lead to delivery risk. Services organizations lose 6 to 9% of margin on average due to poor quoting practices. Multiply that by hundreds, even thousands, of projects and that’s millions of dollars in preventable losses before a project even begins.
These factors undermine the profitability and sustainability of services portfolios and highlight the urgent need for a strategic, integrated approach to services quoting.
How AI Transforms Services Quoting From Guesswork to Precision
Here’s the good news. It doesn’t have to be this way.
AI-assisted quoting is transforming how Services teams operate. Rather than relying on guesswork and outdated processes, AI-driven platforms can streamline pricing and approvals, leading to smoother deliveries and satisfied customers.
AI-powered quoting systems built for Services can:
- Quickly create services quotes that meet customer needs and comply with corporate policy.
- Negotiate deals for multi-year, multi-services, and complex global services with advanced pricing capabilities and accurate pricing insights.
- Reduce deal cycle time and negotiate profitable deals by comparing the impact on margins for multiple scenarios.
- Bring sales and services delivery together to accurately scope projects for your clients and approve the best deals for your organization.
- Seamlessly generate documents that pull in project scope, effort, resources, and schedule information.
When an AI-powered quoting system is plugged into the services project lifecycle, Services organizations can quickly identify promising opportunities early in the sales cycle and make data-driven decisions that optimize margins and maximize revenue.
Making the Shift to AI-Powered Services Quoting
It doesn’t take a massive overhaul to improve the quoting process. It starts by recognizing that the way most teams quote today just doesn’t work anymore. Once realized, the road to an optimized quoting process is straightforward.
First, assess the current quoting process. Map where delays, errors, inconsistencies, and gaps occur most often. Second, connect quoting with current and past delivery data. Make sure quoting reflects real delivery capacity and lessons learned from previous projects. And third, look for tools that are purpose-built for Services organizations. These tools learn from historical data and embed intelligence into quoting, pricing, scoping, and approvals.
Leaders across the organization can eliminate problematic gaps and reflect actual service costs and anticipated outcomes. By harnessing real-time data and analytics, Services leaders can create precise service quotes that integrate data on past performance, resource availability, and customer requirements.
The Path Forward: Automate or Fall Behind
It’s time for Services organizations to say goodbye to antiquated spreadsheets and inefficient quoting processes. Great delivery cannot be captured on a spreadsheet.
Speed and accuracy at the quoting stage don’t just win deals. They provide the competitive advantage that protects delivery timelines and margins, enhances the quoting experience, improves delivery, and guarantees customer satisfaction.
Manual quoting is archaic. Its familiarity is stagnating. The organizations that embrace AI-assisted quoting today will be the ones that move faster, operate smarter, and scale with confidence tomorrow.
While Services teams are responsible for driving this growth, the CXO shares this accountability and truly influences its outcomes.
Download the CXO’s Role in Helping Companies Win in the Services Economy to learn how CXOs are helping organizations control risk and maximize the return on Services portfolios.
