How to create a quote in Salesforce Lightning

If tasked with creating an educational course on online sales, learning how to create a quote in Salesforce Lightning is bound to be close to the top of your priority list.

The reason?

Well, not only are quotes an essential part of the sales process, but Salesforce Lightning is an especially popular Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution for businesses to scale and maintain relationships with their many customers.

Quotes are an important skill to master in the world of sales, but it doesn’t have to be difficult.

We’ll guide you through the process of Salesforce quoting, explaining how to create and manage quotes, and capitalize on customer opportunities.

Understanding quotes in Salesforce Lightning

Quotes in Salesforce represent proposed prices for your company’s products and services.

You can create a set of quotes to show different combinations of products, discounts, and quantities so customers can easily compare prices.

This is particularly useful when you want to sell a product for less than MRP (Maximum Retail Price), as is often the case with B2B bulk orders.

Visualizing who your customers are and what they want is easy in Salesforce Lightning—with customers being represented as “Opportunities”.

You can create quotes under these opportunities and have multiple associated quotes per customer if you wish.

To keep things simple, you may choose to sync your quotes to an opportunity.

Quote syncing lets you link a quote to the opportunity that it was created from and synchronize all updates between the two records. 

So, any change to line items in the quote syncs with products on the opportunity, and vice versa.

Note that an opportunity can have multiple quotes, but it can sync with only one quote at a time.

For CRM housekeeping, you can get an overview of all your quotes on the Quotes tab.

And if you’re using Salesforce Lightning Experience, you can track sales activity in Path and stages in Kanban.

How to set up Salesforce quote templates 

Before you can make a start, you need to enable Salesforce quotes from within the Settings page. To do this, you will need to:

1. Open Salesforce and navigate to Setup at the top of the homepage (represented by a cog icon).

2. In the Quick Find search bar, type “Quote Settings”.

3. Under Quote Settings, press the “Enable” button.

4. You’ll be presented with some optional settings for Quote Layouts, such as a standard, marketing, sales, or customer support layout. Select whichever applies to your business.

Next, you can start creating your Salesforce quote templates. Simply:

1. Use the Quick Find search bar to locate “Quote Templates”.

2. Create a new quote template by clicking the “New” button. You may use the default Standard Template as a base to start with.

3. Customize your template by giving it a name, and using the drag-and-drop feature to remove or add fields as needed.

4. Press “Save and Preview”.

5. Navigate back to Quote Templates, and press “Activate” next to your new design.

Now, quotes will be enabled for your organization, and your users will be able to create quotes from pre-set templates (as well as generate a PDF of the quote). 

The next step is to train your sales reps on the most effective process for Salesforce quoting, which we’ll cover in the following sections.

How to create a quote in Salesforce Lightning

Quotes in Salesforce Lightning are created by using the Quote Object function.

Once enabled in Quote Settings, you can create a quote directly through the Opportunities tab.

The PandaDoc to Salesforce integration also allows you to use PandaDoc quotes within the Salesforce CRM software. That gives you access to PandaDoc’s wide range of useful quoting functionality.

For instance, you can benefit from PandaDoc CPQ, meaning you can pre-configure quotations for specific product or service offerings.

Not to mention linking up Salesforce with PandaDoc’s other great features like eSignatures, contract workflow automation, and more. 

How to create a quote from an opportunity in Salesforce Lightning

The easiest way to create a new quote in Salesforce Lightning is through the Opportunities tab. 

Follow these steps to get started:

1. Open your chosen customer opportunity. Navigate to the Related section on the right of the screen, scroll down to Quotes, click on the dropdown and “New Quote”.

2. Enter the relevant details that will populate your quote template, including: Quote Name/Number, Opportunity Name, Expiration Date, Subtotal, Tax, and Discount, among others.

3. Navigate to the quote page by clicking on the quote number. Here, you can add the relevant product(s) to the quote by clicking the “Add Products” button.

4. Provide selling price, quantity, and discount percentages for your chosen products, and then press “Save”.

5. If you wish to sync the quote and opportunity, navigate to the dropdown menu to the right of New Case, and select “Start Sync”.

Now, your quote details can be easily viewed and turned into a PDF document, ready to send to your customers.

Faster quote creation with the PandaDoc Salesforce integration

PandaDoc customers may prefer to use their pre-created PandaDoc quotes instead of the Salesforce quotes system. You’ll want to follow these steps to make sure you are properly connected:

1. Connect PandaDoc and Salesforce

2. Install PandaDoc package on AppExchange

3. Configure PandaDoc for a Salesforce object

4. Pass data from Salesforce into PandaDoc.

No longer will you need to learn how to create a proposal quote in Salesforce, when you can create a beautiful, bespoke template design in PandaDoc.

Get started on the PandaDoc to Salesforce Lightning integration today!