What if you were losing millions before even getting started?
For many Services organizations, this isn’t just a hypothetical. It’s reality.
Sixty-two percent of Services teams “fly blind” when quoting, relying on disparate spreadsheets, tribal knowledge, and siloed tools to scope complex work. The result? Serious downstream consequences like revenue leakage, delivery inefficiencies, forecast inaccuracy, and gross margin erosion.
Too often, quoting is viewed purely as a Sales activity. However, for Services organizations, quoting is much more than that. It sets the tone for the entire engagement as the earliest point in the customer journey where you can influence outcomes that add strength and visibility to all downstream processes — project timelines, margin realization, and revenue forecasting.
Yet, despite its ability to directly impact delivery, customer experience, and the bottom line, most Services organizations are losing from the start. On average, Services companies lose 6 to 9% of margin due to poor quoting practices. For a $1B enterprise, that’s tens of millions of dollars in preventable losses before an invoice is sent or a single deliverable even goes out the door. That margin loss can spell the difference between hitting profitability goals and reporting a positive earnings hit or disappointing miss to the board, or worse, the Street.
Why Misquoting Happens
If Services quoting is so crucial, why is the process so broken?
When quoting complex services, most Services organizations still live in outdated tools and disconnected systems. Project scoping is often done in Excel and based on tribal knowledge, best guesses, or salesperson preferences. The siloed approach leads to quotes that vary by region or rep. Sales, Services, and Finance are rarely aligned.
Misquoting is a material problem. The crucial alignment between financial forecast, revenue forecast, and delivered actuals is disrupted, forcing midstream adjustments that lead to costly ripple effects across the organization.
Here are the four most common causes of misquoting in Services:
- Outdated pricing data stored and stuck in Excel spreadsheets
- Disconnected systems (Salesforce, Netsuite, Certinia, and finance tools) that do not speak to each other
- Lack of historical quoting, pricing intelligence, or customer pricing context
- No collaboration across Sales, Services, and Finance
This fragmented approach to quoting leads to misaligned expectations and a poor customer experience. For instance, if the availability of highly skilled resources is not accurately accounted for, it hinders the services team’s ability to meet deadlines. A project quoted for 10 phases suddenly doubles to 20 mid-flight, significantly increasing the likelihood of adding resources, missing deadlines, and extending delivery dates.
5 Serious Consequences of Services Misquoting
The consequences of misquoting are significant. Here are the most common — and costly — outcomes:
- Gross Margin Erosion Before Work Begins. Misquoted deals shrink profit before a project even kicks off. Teams start behind target, scrambling to make up lost ground and creating pressure to cut corners or overwork teams just to break even.
- Revenue Unpredictability. Inconsistent quoting makes it impossible to predict revenue. If each deal is scoped and priced differently based on the individual rep or region, how can you expect to forecast with confidence?
- Sales Slowdowns. Manual reviews, inconsistent pricing rules, and disconnected systems cause approval bottlenecks, delaying approvals and introducing unnecessary friction in the sales cycle.
- Delivery Inefficiency. Without centralized templates or scoped bundles, delivery inherits vague or inaccurate assumptions, leading to rework, change orders, and delays.
- Forecast Inaccuracy. Quoting tools do not show projected margins or link to ERP/PSA systems, so Sales flies blind while Finance is out of sync. When booked margins do not match delivered margins, Finance must reconcile gaps that should have been prevented upstream.
When Services quoting fails, the consequences are amplified across the entire enterprise and hundreds of customer projects. What starts as a small error in scope or pricing can snowball into a canyon-sized chasm between expectation and reality.
The good news? This is all preventable.
The Case for Modernizing Services Quoting
Unfortunately, quoting doesn’t live in one tool. Today’s CRM, PSA, and ERP systems are not designed to quote complex services. They have other core strengths. Services, Sales, and Finance need a unified system of record to automate services, pricing, and scope.
That’s why Services leaders are turning to AI-powered platforms built specifically for Services quoting. No more spreadsheets. No more knowledge gaps. No more silos. Instead, you deliver a Services quoting experience that includes better visibility and control over risk, margins, and deals.
Profitability does not begin with delivery. It starts with the quote.
See Provus in action and discover how to accelerate sales cycles, increase win rates and unlock more revenue from your services portfolio.
