How a growing sales organization replaced manual, error-prone quote building with an automated, Salesforce-connected estimator
The client came to Selectiva with a familiar problem: their sales quoting process had outgrown the tools built to support it. As the product catalog expanded to include bundled products with interdependent sub-products, reps were stuck stitching together spreadsheets, memory, and a fair amount of guesswork to put together an accurate quote. Nothing lived in one place, nothing synced with Salesforce automatically, and small configuration mistakes were becoming an everyday cost rather than an occasional one.
We partnered with the client to design and build a Quote Estimation Configuration (QEC) application from the ground up – a tool that could handle bundle logic, automate pricing, and talk to Salesforce directly instead of around it.
Where the process was breaking down
Each estimate combined multiple product bundles, and within those bundles, choosing one sub-product often ruled out or required others. Handling that logic by hand introduced a lot of room for error. Beyond the pricing risk, a few structural gaps kept slowing the team down:
- No home base for estimates: Reps had no single workspace to build, revisit, or track quotes – work was scattered across files and email threads.
- Hard to find anything: Without search, filtering, or a way to flag priority deals, locating a specific estimate later meant scrolling and guessing.
- Salesforce lived elsewhere: Account, opportunity, and quote data had to be typed in twice – once wherever the estimate was built, and again in Salesforce.
- No path into a real quote: Finished estimates couldn’t be pushed into Salesforce, so every product line and price had to be re-entered by hand.
- Every export looked different: There was no consistent, professional format for sharing an estimate as a PDF or spreadsheet, which showed in customer-facing documents.
These weren’t isolated annoyances — together, they added up to slower quotes, inconsistent pricing, and a process that depended too heavily on individual reps getting it right by hand.
What was built
The QEC application was designed around the actual shape of the problem — bundles, dependencies, and Salesforce — rather than as a generic form builder. The delivered solution included:
- An estimate listing view: One place to see every estimate created, with search, sort, and filter built in so reps can get to the right record quickly.
- Pinning for priority work: Users can pin the estimates that matter most so they sit at the top of the list instead of getting buried.
- Two-way Salesforce sync: The application connects directly to Salesforce, keeping account, opportunity, and quote data aligned without duplicate entry.
- A real bundle-based builder: Creating an estimate means selecting product bundles, and the system handles dependency logic and pricing automatically as selections are made.
- Export straight into a new quote: A finished estimate can be pushed into a brand-new Salesforce quote, carrying every product and price with it.
- Or into an existing one: Estimates can also be merged into a quote that already exists, so updates don’t mean starting over.
- Clean PDF output: A built-in generator turns estimate details into a polished, shareable PDF on demand.
- Excel output too: The same data can be exported to .xlsx for teams who need to analyze or reshape it further.
Put together, these pieces turned a fragmented, manual workflow into something closer to a single, connected system.
What changed after launch
Since rolling out the QEC application, the client has seen concrete improvements across the quoting lifecycle:
- One system, not several: Estimates are now created, managed, and tracked in a single platform instead of scattered tools.
- Fewer invalid configurations: Bundle dependencies are enforced automatically, so only valid product combinations can be selected in the first place.
- Pricing that doesn’t need double-checking: Automated calculations have cut down both manual effort and the errors that came with it.
- Faster access to the right estimate: Search, filtering, and pinning make it noticeably quicker to locate and act on priority quotes.
- Salesforce data that actually matches: Accounts, opportunities, and quotes stay in sync between the two systems.
- No more re-typing the same quote twice: Estimates export directly into new or existing Salesforce quotes, removing duplicate data entry entirely.
- Documents that look the same every time: Standardized PDF and Excel outputs have made reporting and customer-facing communication more consistent.
- A shorter path from estimate to signed quote: Overall, the client has seen faster turnaround and more reliable pricing across the quoting process.
This project is a good example of taking a genuinely messy operational process and rebuilding it around how the business actually works — not around a generic template. If your team is dealing with a similar quoting bottleneck, Selectiva’s Salesforce and application development specialists can help you design a solution that fits.
