The proposal process is a friction point that most sales teams underinvestigate. Reps spend hours assembling PDFs from templates, then email them as attachments with no visibility into whether the prospect opened them, which pages they spent the most time on, or whether they forwarded it to a stakeholder. The buyer has no easy way to ask a question or accept. The rep has no way to follow up with context.
HubSpot Quotes moves the proposal process into the CRM. A quote is created directly from the deal record, pulls products from a predefined library, generates a shareable web-based proposal page, notifies the rep when it is viewed, and closes the loop on signature and payment without leaving HubSpot. For many B2B companies, the resulting time saving and conversion improvement is the clearest ROI from Sales Hub Professional.
Setting Up the Products Library
Before building any quotes, the Products library needs to be structured correctly. In HubSpot, go to Sales > Products. Each product is a SKU with a name, description, unit price, and billing frequency (one-time or recurring). A clean products library for a B2B services company might contain: a monthly retainer tier at each price point, a one-time setup or onboarding fee, a project-based SKU with a variable price (use $0 and let reps adjust when quoting), and any add-on services sold separately. The goal is that every combination a rep might quote already exists in the library so they are assembling, not creating.
Product library best practices
- Use clear, client-facing names — the product name appears on the quote the buyer sees
- Set unit prices to your standard list price; reps apply discounts at the quote level
- For variable-scope projects, create a SKU at $0 and train reps to add the agreed price
- Archive discontinued SKUs rather than deleting them, so historical quotes retain their line items
- Add SKUs for discounts as negative-price line items if you need to show explicit discount amounts
Building a Quote in HubSpot
A HubSpot Quote is created from the deal record under the Quotes section in the right sidebar. The process: select the contact and company the quote is addressed to, give the quote a title (visible to the buyer), set an expiration date, add products from the library, apply any line-item discounts, add a comment or personalized message, and configure the acceptance method (e-signature, payment, or view-only). The generated quote is a branded web page at a unique URL. The rep sends the link by email or includes it in a follow-up template.
| Quote feature | Starter | Professional | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic quote creation | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Custom branding | Limited | Yes | Yes |
| E-signature collection | No | Yes | Yes |
| Payment collection | No | Yes (Stripe / HubSpot Payments) | Yes |
| Quote viewed notification | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Workflow triggers on quote status | No | Yes | Yes |
Quotes + CPQ
Want to set up HubSpot Quotes, your Products library, and post-signature automation?
We structure your Products library, build quote templates, configure e-signature and payment collection, and wire up the post-signature workflows that automatically close deals and trigger onboarding when a contract is signed. Book a call.
Book a Free CallPost-Signature Automation
The highest-value configuration in HubSpot Quotes is what happens after a buyer signs. On Sales Hub Professional, you can build workflows that trigger on quote status changes. A practical post-signature sequence for a B2B services company:
- Quote signed: workflow fires, updates deal stage to Closed Won, sets Close Date to today
- Deal closed won: second workflow fires, creates an onboarding task assigned to the account manager, sends the client a welcome email with a kickoff scheduling link, notifies the delivery team in Slack
- 24 hours after quote signed: sends the client a receipt or summary email with their signed quote attached
Without this automation, a signed contract requires a rep to manually close the deal, notify the delivery team, and send the welcome email — three steps that are often delayed and occasionally forgotten. The automation eliminates the delay and the dependency on a human remembering what to do at the moment of close.
Tracking Quote Performance
HubSpot's deal-level reporting lets you track: time from deal created to quote sent (a measure of proposal efficiency), time from quote sent to quote accepted (a measure of proposal quality and buyer intent), quote acceptance rate (percentage of sent quotes that are accepted vs. expired), and revenue by product SKU (which products appear in closed-won deals most often). These metrics tell you where the proposal process is working and where it is creating unnecessary friction.